RedHat OpenShift and Kubernetes are containerization tools that many businesses use to become more effective, agile, and scalable. Containerization is a word for a single software package containing an application code and the configuration files, libraries, and dependencies necessary to run it. Having everything bundled together in one “container” allows the software to run without issues on any system platform or cloud.

Aside from this beneficial portability, containerization enables you to avoid the errors and bugs that occur when you transfer code developed in one computing environment to another. You can also create and deploy the software applications faster.

What is Red Hat OpenShift?

Red Hat OpenShift is an open source containerization software product from the Red Hat software company that runs on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and Kubernetes. It is a cloud-based platform that operates as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) on public and private clouds and works on hybrid cloud and multiple cloud deployments. You can choose between managed and self-managed options and get various services with OpenShift for your enterprise business. These include the Kubernetes platform, Docker container images, and many exclusive OpenShift enterprise features.

Cloud platforms like OpenShift can help developers to create, innovate, and deliver software applications faster. They also enable operational consistency and efficiency since you can operate clusters and automate the software life-cycle management across architectures and frameworks. Additionally, with Red Hat OpenShift, you can get increased security.

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open source containers-as-a-service (CaaS) platform that Google designed and developed. It enables developers to automate containers and use container-based virtualization to upload, run, organize, scale, and manage applications. It uses nodes—real or virtual machines— and a collection of processes known as a control plane to form clusters that work together as a single server. The control plane decides which applications to run and container images to use and assigns the tasks of running the applications and workloads to the nodes. Each node operates in its own Linux environment and runs pods that contain several containers.

The pod clusters—a pod is a group of containers assigned to one node— of Kubernetes have the same number of resources, perform in the same network, and are replicable. That gives them powerful processing capabilities. You can replicate any container in a pod to make it work like another, and that lets the containers produce simultaneous updates and support load balancing for applications. With Kubernetes, you can also get more space, consistent and faster processing speeds, and application isolation.

What are the differences between RedHat OpenShift and Kubernetes?

Some of the main differences between the RedHat OpenShift and Kubernetes tools are as follows:

• OpenShift is a containerization software product that offers a paid platform service. Kubernetes is a containerization project, and you can download its open source code for free from GitHub.

• The OpenShift platform contains the Kubernetes platform and features. Kubernetes is a stand-alone service and does not contain OpenShift services.

• OpenShift is a paid platform service and comes with a subscription that you have to renew periodically for your cluster. The price goes up as the cluster expands. Kubernetes is a free service that you can download from GitHub.

• You can install OpenShift only on select operating system platforms, such as the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, Red Hat CoreOS, and CentOS. On the other hand, it is possible to install Kubernetes on almost any Linux distribution operating system such as Ubuntu, Debian, and others since it is an open source framework.

• OpenShift updates pods with DeploymentConfig, which does not allow concurrent updates. It is possible to make concurrent updates with deployment objects in Kubernetes.

• You can use router objects for external access to OpenShift. For external access to Kubernetes, you can use ingress objects.

• OpenShift has stronger and stricter security policies than Kubernetes. You cannot run a container as a root and also many simple container images in OpenShift. The security level is easier to maintain with Kubernetes.

• OpenShift has fewer software releases every year than Kubernetes, which can generally have around four releases per year.

• You can use native networking solutions in OpenShift. For Kubernetes, you may find it necessary to use third-party plug-ins for networking.