While many of our customers are still on OpenShift 3.X (mostly 3.11) we thought it would be important to know about some of the changes in 4.3 whether your on 4.x or not … we can get you there and we plan on another write-up on the benefits of 4.x vs 3.11 in a future post.
While all the new features of 4.3 are too numerous to list in a single post, we wanted to provide a brief overview of what 4.3 provides over previous versions.
- Fully Integrated and automated container platform (yes, most of us already knew this)
- Seamless Kubernetes Deployments (yup, OpenShift since day 1)
- Fully Automated Installations (Previously just Cloud, namely AWS)
- 1-Click Platform updates
- Autoscaling of cloud resources.
Most of this seems pretty straight forward and may even be somewhat familiar to our 3.11 clients. However there are some pretty significant changes in comparison. As you know, 4.x runs on CoreOS. Gone are the days of having to manage full linux Operating Systems or even Atomic hosts for that matter. The installer for one has completely changed in 4.x which we can get into detail later, but the gist is that gone are the days of the 1000 line YAML file to install OpenShift and praying the installer doesn’t fail 1 hour and 20 minutes (generally 1:30 total time) into the install and run into an issue. The 1-Click updates are a game changer / hands-off approach to keeping your systems secure while keeping all your container workloads running safely as the system is updated. All of these changes allow for the following capabilities. we can now deploy, and update, an OpenShift cluster just about anywhere, and in every environment.
The additional IPI (Installer Provisioned Infrastructure) options are a welcome improvement. When 4.0 (or 4.1, can’t remember) first came out AWS was the only supported IPI. Now Azure, Google Compute Platform (GCP) and bare-metal are supported.
