As a principal engineer in Red Hat IT focused on container platforms, I know the benefits of using Red Hat OpenShift firsthand and the value it gives to our organization. Since our OpenShift services were first deployed in August 2016, we have seen many key improvements, such as shorter cycle time from code to production, higher density of applications, and better standardization of application architectures.

While these successes were important, we knew we had to face our next frontier. Other business drivers were pushing us to deploy OpenShift across a hybrid cloud environment. These factors included improved multi-site resiliency, the ability to support burst resources on public cloud, avoiding vendor lock-in, and being able to use the most cost-effective infrastructure possible. In addition, with OpenShift being the abstraction layer for public and private cloud, we also needed to offer our application teams an OpenShift interface to the entire hybrid cloud environment so that they could meet the evolving business requirements for their applications.

Before we began this transition, our application deployments on infrastructure were very specific to a particular cloud or datacenter. A deployment to Red Hat Virtualization VMs, for example, did not allow for the agility to move to our AWS EC2 environment.

Challenges and Benefits of OpenShift

But, once deployed in an OpenShift ecosystem, applications have improved cloud agility, meaning they can move across the hybrid cloud environment as needed, mostly without concern for the underlying infrastructure. This has increased efficiency on the part of our teams and their workloads, since it provides consistency across the hybrid cloud environment, easily allowing for triple-active application deployments. Other goals we established for this transition were:

• New patterns for application teams to deploy in a triple-active manner across three sites in the hybrid cloud environment.
• Removal of legacy environment patterns, so we could align to newer networking models for infrastructure.
• Drive cloud-native application design with a hybrid cloud architecture.

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