Why Organizations are embracing OpenShift ?
2 min readMar 26, 2021
Understanding the key differences between K8s 🐙 and OpenShift
When it comes to managing scalable architecture and enabling rapid large-scale application development, deployment and management two names are out there: Kubernetes and OpenShift
- K8s is an open source project while OpenShift is a RedHat product that comes in many variants .
- From a historical perspective OpenShift originally came from Red Hat’s acquisition of Makara (a company with a proprietary PaaS solution based on Linux containers) where K8s was originally designed by Google (influenced by Borg cluster management system) and is now maintained by the CNCF .
- OpenShift has stricter security policies (e.g. it’s forbidden to run a container as root) and it also offers a secure-by-default option to enhance security. Kubernetes doesn’t come with built-in authentication or authorization capabilities out of the box .
- Kubernetes offers more flexibility in terms of installation on the other hand OpenShift requires RHEL /Red Hat Atomic on OpenShift 3, Red Hat CoreOS (required by control plane: master and infra server, default for compute nodes) and RHEL or CentOS for OKD .
- Kubernetes offers namespaces (mechanism to divide cluster resources) and OpenShift offers projects which are essentially the same as a namespace but with the additional administrative controls like RBAC (Role Based Access-Control) .
- OpenShift lets you use Image Streams to manage container images (upload a container image once and then you manage it’s tags internally in OpenShift) while Kubernetes doesn’t offer container image management features and you need to configure your own container registry and updating accordingly the Deployment in order to promote the image .
Kubernetes helps you automate application deployment, scaling and operations but OpenShift is the container platform that works with Kubernetes to help applications run more efficiently.
