Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift overview

Meet the speakers

Joachim Schrӧder (00:00):
Welcome to Microsoft Azure Red Hat® OpenShift® video series. Today we will give you a bit of an overview. I'm Joachim Schrӧder, leading the EMEA Black Belt Team at Red Hat.

Roy de Milde (00:13):
And I am Roy, part of the Global Black Belt Team, part of Microsoft and based out of the Netherlands. Today we're going to talk about an overview of Azure Red Hat OpenShift. So why don’t you enlighten me and the viewers with a little bit of an explanation of what Azure Red Hat OpenShift is?

What is Azure Red Hat OpenShift?

Joachim Schrӧder (00:30):
Sure. So Azure Red Hat OpenShift is a fully managed turnkey application development platform. It is based on Red Hat OpenShift, which is one of the leading solutions for application development and containerized production deployment. ARO is jointly built by Microsoft and Red Hat engineers, and is also managed and supported as a first-party native Azure service. ARO comes with a lot of certifications. For example, PCI DSS and ISO 27,001. It comes with an SLA of 99.95%. It comes with a lot of capabilities. For example, logging, serverless service mesh, DevOps, pipelines, GitOps, just to name a few. So ARO lets users focus on innovation within the core business, instead of managing software infrastructures. That means accelerated time to value within the hybrid and multi-cloud context. Roy, regarding managed, maybe not everyone understands what exactly “fully managed” means. Can you explain a little bit about that?

What does “fully managed” mean?

Roy de Milde (01:54):
Yeah, sure. But let me draw it as well. 

Joachim Schrӧder (01:57):
That would be cool.

Roy de Milde (01:59):
So when we think about what is “fully managed”, I like to do it with a layered approach. So let's start off with the first layer, and this is what I like to call the “compute layer”. So basically all the compute resources you need in an Azure Red Hat OpenShift cluster, provided by Azure. Now on top of that, we have the CoreOS layer. On top of that, you obviously have the OpenShift layer. On top of OpenShift, you have the Red Hat operators. And then on top of that you get the customer workloads and custom configuration.

(02:56)
Now if we're going to look at what is fully managed and what do we take care of, it's obviously the compute layer, right? If you need additional compute, everything that you need to have to run this OpenShift cluster, managed by rather Microsoft. But also CoreOS, right? The operating system designed to run OpenShift workloads, OpenShift itself, and then the supported Red Hat operators that you can include in the OpenShift cluster. And for me, this tells the story about what a fully managed OpenShift platform means and what you can expect with Azure Red Hat OpenShift. So I hope that explains it a little bit with the different layers and what we mean by fully managed OpenShift.

Are resources dedicated or shared in Azure Red Hat OpenShift?

Joachim Schrӧder (03:44):
Yeah, absolutely. That was cool. Thanks a lot. When we talk about the service, how about resources? Are they dedicated or shared?
 

Roy de Milde (03:52):
Sure, yeah, good question. I get that question a lot from customers. What we actually do with Azure Red Hat OpenShift is, we have dedicated resources in your own Azure environment. So you're not sharing any of those resources. You decide which compute you need for your cluster to function. The other cool thing, as well, is that you can think about a hub and spoke networking model. So we see a lot of customers, they have a hub, and within that hub they have maybe a VPN connection back to on-prem and etc. And what we do with Azure Red Hat OpenShift, you easily build out a spoke and you deploy the resources there. No noisy neighbors, and it's fully on your control and your governance, right? So I think that's very key for customers who are leveraging Azure Red Hat OpenShift, that they are in control of those resources and not sharing that with any of our other customers that are using an Azure Red Hat OpenShift environment as well. Now you said at the beginning that ARO is based on top of OpenShift, right? So what is the experience like? If I'm a regular OpenShift user on my own data center, on my own virtual machines, and now I'm gonna leverage Azure added OpenShift, how is that from an experience perspective?

What is the Azure Red Hat OpenShift experience like in a hybrid cloud approach?

Joachim Schrӧder (05:02):
Great question. And this is especially important in a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud context. So Arrow is based on OpenShift’s upstream code. So that means the experience of OpenShift and ARO is exactly the same. With that, ARO brings the OpenShift on-prem experience to the Azure cloud.

Roy de Milde (05:30):
Oh, that's really cool. So if I'm used to running OpenShift, I can run it everywhere in a fully managed Azure environment. That's very cool.

Joachim Schrӧder (05:39):
Absolutely cool. Maybe people think, well okay, if this is offered as a service, there is usually a very opinionated flavor of the software stack being offered, and you can’t change a lot. So what about customization of ARO?

How much customization can you do in Azure Red Hat OpenShift?

Roy de Milde (05:57):
Yeah, good question. I think with Azure Red Hat OpenShift, and especially if you look at the deployment options that you have, you can actually do a lot of customization. I just talked about the hub and spokes model, custom VNets and stuff like that from a networking perspective. But also think about custom domains or even choosing which type of worker nodes you want to use. Maybe you want to do CPU optimized or memory optimized, or maybe GPU nodes, etc.. So I think from a day-one and a deployment perspective, there are lots of different things that you can modify. And then from day-two, after the cluster has been built, and you do some custom configuration, you can modify that as well. And that's all supported and allowed so that we, together, can give the customers a custom fully managed cluster, enterprise-ready, backward DSLA, and all the great things that you talked about, but fitted for their specific needs. Now let's say that I'm a customer and I'm happily using Azure Red Hat OpenShift. Everything is going great, but at some point in time something is going on with the cluster. What do I do there?

How to get support for your Azure Red Hat OpenShift cluster

Joachim Schrӧder (06:58):
At your convenience, you can either contact Microsoft or open a request with Red Hat. We work crossover in the background to make sure that your experience is as seamless as possible and your blocker gets resolved as soon as possible. And remember, with our SRE teams, the Site Reliability Engineering Teams, we proactively monitor and manage your clusters. That means you are less likely to need reactive support anyway.

Roy de Milde (07:31):
Cool. Oh, that's really, really awesome. So we talked about Azure Red at OpenShift, and what does this mean, and how do all the things work? But how do I start?

How to get started with Azure Red Hat OpenShift

Joachim Schrӧder (07:41):
Absolutely start at Azure Portal and select the option ARO. Then, you can choose any kind of tool or language to deploy your first ARO cluster. This could be Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform, Terraform, Azure, CLI, for example. Then check out the documentation, which is linked in this video by Microsoft. And, finally, contact your Microsoft or Red Hat contact person if you have any questions. We are happy to help.

Roy de Milde (08:14):
And I think that's the end of this video. We've created many more videos in this ARO series. So if you are interested in technical capabilities, or cost management, or use cases, feel free to check them out. And for now, thank you for watching, and I hope to see you soon.