Why investing in an OpenShift container platform is a smart business choice

In a fast-moving, competitive market, your business needs a tech stack that's flexible, built to scale, and helps you develop applications both on-premise and in the cloud — like Red Hat's OpenShift, for example.

Long story short: investing in this product doesn't just keep your development teams happy, it's also a smart business decision. In this insight, we're deep-diving into the incredible business benefits of the OpenShift Container Platform and why we at TRIGO believe that it's key to transforming the digital future.

In a nutshell, OpenShift is a modern container-based hosting platform that brings all the benefits of Kubernetes — and goes beyond them. Rather than having to put together your own open source tech stack, OpenShift integrates these services on one platform, where you can:

• monitor and manage your entire hosting environment
• build and scale your applications within it

Major tech players and businesses are increasingly switching to container systems — which makes standardizing their use a matter of “sooner” rather than “later”. But what's driving their decision? Short answer: container platforms bring a ton of business value to companies — and here's how:

Investing in a container platform like OpenShift is your key to building a modern, flexible, scalable development environment for your business. This helps you keep up with the latest technological innovations, like cloud native software and microservices. We've even got the numbers to prove it — a study by the International Data Corporation (IDC) found that integrating OpenShift:

• led to a projected 636% return on investment over a five-year period
• sped up application development life cycles by 29%
• empowered development and DevOps teams to achieve business goals
• streamlined and optimized tech environments

Companies who aren't choosing to invest in OpenShift are missing out; it's probably the biggest shift in operations and technology since switching from bare metal to virtual hardware. In our experience, OpenShift is a smart alternative to building your own complex Kubernetes system to run your business software. Not only because it's an all-in-one packaged software that comes with prepared enterprise-grade security but also because it significantly speeds up your setup time.

OpenShift also enables you to develop your private cloud of services and applications; developers build and scale applications while automatically installing, upgrading, and managing them throughout their life cycle in a container stack. It's the go-to choice for:

• Developers who are already working with Linux containers using Docker will enjoy the flexibility they provide
• CEOs and CTOs who prefer container technology because it's both cost-effective and enables a quicker time to market

At TRIGO, we've seen the incredible market value of OpenShift technologies first-hand. We'll share how we've developed custom-built OpenShift software for our clients and sped up their time to market.

All OpenShift application components run inside Linux containers. Here are the main benefits we see in using container platforms for your business:

• Accessibility: container platforms can be installed on 99% of devices
• Simplicity: they make it easy to transfer workloads across hardware
• Security: because of fewer attack surfaces, container platforms are better-protected against cybersecurity threats

When it comes to container management, RedHat's OpenShift container platform is about to become the new standard; it lets you run and manage containers on any type of infrastructure you use and brings you all these benefits in one single package for a full-featured hosting and development environment by leveraging agile DevOps methodologies. Some of these include:

• GitOps - infrastructure as code
• OpenShift Pipelines - full integrated CI/CD pipelines
• higher security and monitoring features
• support for a variety of programming languages and services, including Java, JavaScript/Typescript, Kotlin, Python, PostgreSQL, Hasura, and more
• enabling both cloud native stateless applications along with traditional stateful applications

OpenShift is also easy to get started with; it includes customizable pre-made templates that let you interact with the application interface with just a simple click. In just a few seconds, you can set up a database and server where you can deploy your applications to a testing environment and achieve a faster time to market.

OpenShift keeps your business web environment efficient, smooth, and easy to run by automating much of the manual click work in a development workflow. This means more productive teams and greater inter-team collaboration — especially across Development and Operations teams (or what you might know as the DevOps approach).

Here are some extra benefits that an OpenShift tech stack brings that developers especially value.

OpenShift is quicker, more convenient, and easier to operate and scale than Kubernetes, which comes with a variety of tools but may be more difficult to properly integrate and manage. Instead, OpenShift adapts to any system, whether a traditional, modernized, or cloud-based application. You can also securely deploy it across any cloud platform — including bare metal, OpenStack, AWS, Azure, and more.

Depending on your goals, OpenShift also lets you scale your entire development infrastructure either up or down by:

• dynamically provision/deprovision cluster nodes
• simplifying CI/CD processes for your development team
• reducing time spent working on microservices
• streamlining platform management

OpenShift is built on Linux container technology, which your development team likely trusts for ensuring efficiency, speed, and reduced system security threats. With this foundation in mind, OpenShift lets you get more done by handling more container nodes at scale.

OpenShift, on the other hand, comes with enterprise-level security which frees up time for your DevOps team from having to maintain security and compliance standards, since they're now working with:

• validated application content from Red Hat Application Services and certified ISV partners
• integrations with standard CI/CD tools like Tekton to secure application builds directly on the platform

Our work at TRIGO involves assessing clients' software for inefficiencies and data security concerns. For example, we developed a new tech stack for our client 3-S-IT built on OpenShift that supported their long-term scalability goals and streamlined their application publication schedule while maintaining OpenShift data security standards.

Additonal to the web console, OpenShift also provides a management console that streamlines multiple cluster management. This centralizes data and lets you keep things consistent across your platform since administrators have a single place where they can implement and enforce policies and keep multiple teams in the loop.

We've seen how workloads across multiple platforms take up time, resources, and energy — and also increase the risk of human error. You can read the full story of how we centralized BFI Burgenland's software functions by developing a custom software solution that lets them enjoy a more streamlined, consistent, and efficient workflow.

At TRIGO, we're all about continually improving our skills (and stacks) to meet the needs of an ever-changing tech landscape. Here's why we think OpenShift platforms are going to pave the way for a brighter digital future:

• It's fundamentally designed to let businesses scale and achieve a faster time to market by keeping development workflows efficient through well-timed automation, monitoring, data security, easy setup, and centralized policy management features.
• It multiplies the benefits of systems like Kubernetes and keeps your business on top of the latest technological innovations.
• OpenShift systems can also positively influence your organization's culture. They can help mainstream a collaborative DevOps approach, which enables your teams to both stay in the loop and cooperate better and more productively.

Curious about what developing custom software using an OpenShift tech stack looks like in practice? At TRIGO, we offer our clients the expertise and problem-solving skills to learn and grow — both with and without our support. If you'd like to learn more, we would love to hear from you. Feel free to book a call with me, Christian — Head of Cloud Native, to get the conversation started.