The popularity of cloud computing and microservices led to a container based approach undertaken by industries for various operations. 

This increase in the cloud and microservices-based work gave birth to manifold containers in use and led to the need for a container service that could offer to manage and automate all the containers in use. 

Since managing too many containers became an added task than reducing the execution work, it often demanded developers to work on the handling processes and extracted a major amount of time from them. Thus, the concept of microservices gave rise to the orchestration service providers. And the process of automation created a space for developers to work on other important things than manually doing the management. 

What’s OpenShift?

OpenShift is one such multifaceted, open source container application platform launched by Red Hat. With OpenShift, IT organizations can bridge legacy servers, promote continuous app development and facilitate DevOps efforts. Being a private PaaS, OpenShift can deploy and manage as an advanced Kubernetes distribution and bundle various software solutions for you. 

How does OpenShift work? 

Supported by Docker containers, the OpenShift works as a service orchestrating the when and how of the apps. It provisions a quick fixing, fine-tuning and scaling of the apps running. To ease the process of management, OpenShift enables developers to create their own containers and catalogue them. This orchestration of containers helps in leveraging the scalability and power of Drupal, where you can stay current with its new releases without compromising your site.

Features of OpenShift

Scroll through the features of OpenShift to get a better idea of how it can be of advantage to your organization:

Simplicity In the cloud

With automated installations, upgrades, and lifecycle management achieved throughout the container stack adds to the components that make OpenShift a clear choice for the Cloud. 

Faster build and shipping

OpenShift comes with speed, agility, confidence, and a choice to build your team. It permits you the time to focus on other significant tasks in the process. 

Build with Kubernetes

Security becomes a bigger concern for container stacks. With OpenShift the security throughout the application cycle is focused and maintained. 

Enterprise Solutions

A robust platform, OpenShift is tightly-integrated and includes hundreds of fixes to defect, security, and performance issues for upstream Kubernetes in every release. 

Developer workflows

Boosting of streamlined workflows, OpenShift improves productivity and production of the development. It includes built-in Jenkins pipelines and lets the source-to-image technology go straight from application code to container.  

Why should you run OpenShift?

Without a doubt, being open source is the first and foremost advantage of OpenShift. It provisions open standards to be applied and mitigates the fears of vendor lock-in situations. The platform does not limit you from running on any popular cloud provider that suits you the best.  

With the containers, you get to host all kinds of projects that can be efficiently optimized with the container management technology of OpenShift. 

What business value OpenShift provides?

Besides the technical aspects of the software, the business aspect with OpenShift gets affected in the following ways:

Optimizing Resources

The introduction of containers has allowed an optimal usage of the available resources. The allocation of the workforce becomes easier for the management of the platform without using any orchestration solution. The number of applications per unit of compute increases with the usage of containers and thus, the allocation is managed by the application as compared to the VM era. 

Uniform and modular code

Having an orchestrated container gives way to a uniform and modular infrastructure-as-code approach. The team of developers can experience the app setup code, Docker file specs, the Kubernetes workloads as part of your codebase for any developer in the team to consume.

Faster code 

The increased code frequency creates a faster feedback loop and thus, accelerated practices and continuous delivery of the development. This benefits the team to ship the code in an easier way and the enterprise on both financial and operational level. 

Scale Your business

Every business needs to scale up sooner than later. With Kubernetes, you can take a step further and roll out updates in batches, blue-green deployments and rolling back to older versions. 

How to Host Drupal on OpenShift?

Now, where does Drupal come into the picture here? 

Being an equally open source CMS, Drupal holds real compatibility with OpenShift. And as a good development ground, OpenShift can host Drupal projects in production.

The OpenShift API module can help you host your Drupal site on OpenShift which provides a basic API interface for Drupal modules to use the Red Hat OpenShift API Endpoint.

It allows contributions from third parties and lets developers create containers in categories like container management, mobile application development, operating systems, programming languages, logging and monitoring, and database management. Let’s see how! 

Use Case - Openshift used in Drupal development

Recently, Decoupled Drupal became a huge hit among the CMS and web development industry. For scaling Drupal to billions of annual page views, decoupled CMS architecture allows for the deployment of Docker, Kubernetes, & OpenStack solutions together in data centres. 

Michael Schmid gave a keynote address at the Decoupled Drupal Days Summit in New York.  The seminar was instructive for those looking for information on the industry-leading way to run Drupal at scale on AWS. 

Check out the session for a detailed outlook here!

Conclusion

As an open source platform, RedHat OpenShift is a huge plus for your open source aspirations of running containers and managing the development on a microservices-based application. Also, it aids your third party open source platforms like Drupal, the most preferred CMS.  

Want to know more? Drop us a line at [email protected].