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Red Hat OpenShift or Red Hat

OpenStack Platform: When to
use What and Why?
November 4, 2019 | by Alex Handy

Our original article about the differences between Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack
Platform still gets a lot of Web traffic, despite it being seven years old. We thought it was time to
revisit the topic of differences between OpenShift and OpenStack. To start, let’s look at the
advantages that VMs offered over traditional, legacy hardware solutions.

The Virtualization Revolution

When virtualization came onto the scene, the ability to add new applications to existing hardware
took the familiar concept of an operating system running an application and made it more
manageable, more scalable and therefore more efficient. By deploying an IaaS platform, such as
Red Hat OpenStack Platform, VMs can be run natively, to meet the hyperscale-demands of massive
network providers, and can even provide Bare Metal as a Service for high performance applications
- without the usual management complexity. Natively, Red Hat OpenStack Platform runs VMs and
bare metal, but when paired with Red Hat OpenShift, it can also handle containers – more on that
later. Consider this platform the most prevalent model, powering the majority of workloads.

The Container Evolution

Containers are self “contained,” meaning they don’t each need their own operating system and
therefore are much more agile, easier to maintain and iterate upon and therefore, easier to bring-to-
market. Because of this simplicity, containers can be deployed almost anywhere – from low-
powered edge devices, to cloud service providers to core data centers. Because of this simplicity,
the underlying infrastructure is less relevant because containers are designed to be resilient at the
application layer instead of relying on infrastructure for high availability.

A container platform like Red Hat OpenShift, lets these containerized applications run on the
infrastructure they are best suited for while maintaining portability. If data locality or compliance are
important, containers can be run on-prem. If you don’t have a data center, you can run them in a
public cloud. Combined with their agility, the flexibility of containers opens many doors for IT. Red
Hat OpenShift offers a consistent user experience, regardless of the infrastructure, making it easier
to deploy containers anywhere natively.

What can Red Hat do to help?

 Red Hat OpenStack Platform can handle today’s virtual machines and bare metal systems at scale,
and with a single management interface. Red Hat OpenShift Platform offers container-based
systems management which can be layered on top of Red Hat OpenStack, VMware vSphere or your
cloud services provider’s infrastructure. This is the hybrid model to make the transition from VMs to
containers a reality – one that will be gradual as more applications arrive as containers . As more
layers of abstraction are added which grant greater flexibility and resilience, the importance of the
underlying infrastructure continues to decline, allowing IT to focus more on applications, updates
and driving business – not maintenance and management.

Where is Red Hat going?

Containers are the future. No more guest OSes, no more system configuration drift, no more
divergent environments – we are going where you are going. Back in 2012 when we first spoke of the
differences between OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack Platform, this transition was only just
beginning. Today, the migration from virtual machines to containers is a large part of the often
discussed Digital Transformation enterprises are so excited about. Using Red Hat OpenShift and
Red Hat OpenStack Platform together enables that transition to take place on your own schedule,
at your own pace. Red Hat is here to help you choose the right speed for that change - whether you
want to go full bore with a full stack, or focus on an application-based approach, making the move
one virtual machine at a time.

CATEGORIES

OpenShift Container Platform, OpenStack Platform

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