Managed OpenShift

Managed OpenShift provides a dedicated and Project Syn enabled Kubernetes cluster, available with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Engine, on several clouds. VSHN provisions and maintains the OpenShift cluster throughout its lifetime and makes sure the Project Syn provided tools are running and available to the user of the platform. VSHN Managed OpenShift clusters provide a production ready OpenShift environment to host the users applications.

Included Services and Features

Platform features

Cluster provisioning

Provisioning of OpenShift cluster on supported clouds.

Cluster maintenance

The cluster components (control plane and worker nodes) are regularly maintained and updated with the latest patches and releases.

Backup

A backup of etcd (the storage used to store Kubernetes objects) data is done regularly. A second backup, stores the raw Kubernetes objects.

These backups serve a very limited purpose. They can only be used to deal with data corruption within etcd.

Those backups can not be used as a means for disaster recovery purposes (like for instance to recover from a failed infrastructure). If you need this ability, please talk to us.

Most importantly, those backups do NOT cover data in persistent volumes. Users are responsible to have backups of their application data. For this, K8up is deployed on the cluster to help with that task.
Monitoring and Alerting

Monitoring of cluster and system services functionality and alert handling according to Service Levels. Alert rules and thresholds are continuously assessed and regularly maintained.

This includes the OpenShift cluster itself (control-plane and worker nodes) and the Project Syn provided tooling, no customer specific application and services running on the cluster. The Project Syn provided monitoring solution can be used by the user of the platform to integrate their own alerting and metrics collection.

VSHN provides additional services to also monitor customer applications running on the cluster.
Metrics

Metrics emitted by all system services and the Kubernetes cluster components are continuously collected and presented in a graphical way.

System Services

A variety of system services are included, pre-configured, ready to be used. A non-exhaustive selection:

  • cert-manager: Automated certificate management, supports Let’s Encrypt

Persistent Storage

Persistent storage is available out of the box with Kubernetes CSI (Container Storage Interface) when supported by the infrastructure provider. Additional persistent storage options are available on request.

VSHN added features

GitOps

Every cluster has Argo CD deployed which is managed by VSHN with Project Syn.

Each cluster has its own configuration Git repository managed either by Project Syn Lieutenant or by the customer itself. This repository stores the whole configuration of the cluster for all Project Syn tools.

Argo CD can also be used by the customer to deploy applications using GitOps.

VSHN Application Marketplace

For deploying services like databases, caches or others, the VSHN Application Catalog is available on each cluster.

K8up for Backup

The backup Operator K8up is preinstalled and configured, ready to be used by the user of the platform. Taking care and managing the backups is offered in AppOps - Cloud Native Application Operations.

Secret Management with Vault

No secrets are stored in plaintext, they all live in protected key stores. By applying best-practices configuration we ensure secure configuration by default of all components. Only TLS secured connections are used.

Tools Maintenance with Renovate

Tools and system services managed with Project Syn are automatically maintained with Renovate and deployed/updated with GitOps mechanisms.

Inventory

Keeping an overview of all the OpenShift clusters, their versions, locations and other important information is provided by Project Syn Lieutenant and available in the VSHN Portal.

VSHN Support and Services

Best-Practices Configuration

VSHN makes use of best-practices configuration, learned from running OpenShift and applications on top of it in production since many years, and applies them continuously. As the best-practices evolve over time, they are integrated as they are learned.

Expert Pool

The OpenShift experts at VSHN are available to help the user of the platform. In addition, VSHN has access to the OpenShift distribution supplier support organizations with very direct channels. By taking part in the Open Source community of the key software used by VSHN, communication with the upstream developers happens daily.

Fun fact: VSHN is Switzerlands first official Kubernetes Certified Service (KCSP) provider, and therefore we’re listed on the official Kubernetes Partners page.

VSHN Portal

The VSHN Portal provides access to many self-service capabilities like:

  • Ticket management

  • Reporting functionality

  • Kubernetes cluster insights

  • User account management

  • Billing information

Our detailed VSHN Portal help system provides a glance at what the VSHN portal can offer and how it looks like.

OpenShift Editions

The following table lists the similarities and differences between Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Engine and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform:

Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Engine Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Fully Automated Installers

Yes

Yes

Over the Air Smart Upgrades

Yes

Yes

Enterprise Secured Kubernetes

Yes

Yes

Kubectl and oc automated command line

Yes

Yes

Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM)

Yes

Yes

Administrator Web console

Yes

Yes

OpenShift Virtualization

Yes

Yes

User Workload Monitoring

Yes

Cluster Monitoring

Yes

Yes

Cost Management SaaS Service

Yes

Yes

Platform Logging

Yes

Developer Web Console

Yes

Developer Application Catalog

Yes

Source to Image and Builder Automation (Tekton)

Yes

OpenShift Service Mesh (Maistra, Kiali, and Jaeger)

Yes

OpenShift distributed tracing (Jaeger)

Yes

OpenShift Serverless (Knative)

Yes

OpenShift Pipelines (Jenkins and Tekton)

Yes

OpenShift sandboxed containers

Yes

A more detailed break-down on features is available on docs.openshift.com.

openshift editions

About OpenShift Kubernetes Engine

We currently offer this product only on request. If you’re interested, please contact us at sales@vshn.ch.

Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Engine provides you with the basic functionality of Red Hat OpenShift. It offers a subset of the features that Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform offers, like full access to an enterprise-ready Kubernetes environment and an extensive compatibility test matrix with many of the software elements that you might use in your datacenter.

— Red Hat Website

Managed service comparison

Most of our services outlined in this page are applicable to Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Engine as well, as do the differences of the OpenShift editions.

The main difference is the workload architecture: We don’t deploy any infrastructure nodes, only control-plane and worker nodes. Any infrastructure workload is running on the worker nodes, except the control-plane components (API Server, Scheduler, Controller Managed and a few other components).