Introduction
In the last five years, there has been a massive increase in the demand for containerization and microservices in enterprise application delivery. Containers have become a mainstream focus of many organizations that want to stay ahead in digital innovation and bring agility in new service launches. The majority of the companies today are racing towards achieving agility, reducing engineering costs, speeding deployments, developing and testing artificial intelligence (AI) models, and automating more. And containerization is just the key to achieving it. As a result, debates on the effectiveness of container tools continue to rage on! There are three choices for containerization: Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift.
The following discussion aims to outline different comparisons between OpenShift vs. Docker. The individual comparisons can shed further light on each tool's potential and the long-term prospects for their applications. But before that, we must understand what containerization is and its benefits.
About Containerization
Containerization is the most prominent trend in software and application development currently. It is generally assumed as a supporting element or alternative for virtualization. Containerization involves packaging software code and all related dependencies for running uniformly without any issues on any infrastructure. By containerizing, developers bundle a program's code, runtime engine, tools, libraries, and settings into one portable package. With the help of containers, developers could easily create and deploy applications with better security and speed. Traditional methods involved code development in a particular computing environment, and the transfer of code development to a new environment resulted in errors and bugs.
The industry is shifting towards containers because they are lightweight, which means they share the machine's OS kernel and don't require any overhead of associating an OS within each application – as in the case of virtualization. Hence, containers have an inherently smaller capacity than a virtual machine and require less startup time, allowing more containers to run on a single compute capacity as one VM.
OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift is a leading enterprise Kubernetes container orchestration platform that enables a cloud-like experience everywhere it's deployed. The platform offers everything a full-scale organization may require to containerize applications. This includes support for multiple programming languages such as Python, Java, Go, Perl, Node.js, PHP, and Ruby. OpenShift is compatible with container workloads that are built on different infrastructures. It provides:
- Built-in monitoring.
- Constant security.
- Third-party integration.
- Centralized policy management.
- A consistent experience across all infrastructures.
The OpenShift platform is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Docker and Kubernetes. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform comprises several core components, such as an authentication engine for APIs, a scheduler, a management platform, and data storage. All these components run on an RHEL operating system.
Docker
Docker allows you to package and deploy applications quickly on any platform by separating the application from the environment. So irrespective of where your pipeline workflow is housed, whether locally or in the cloud, you're good to go.
The underlying technology handling tasks and workflows is Docker Engine, which generates server-side daemons to host containers, images, storage volumes, and networks. The Docker daemon offers a command-line interface (CLI) that allows the client to interact with it through the Docker API. The containers created in Docker are known as Dockerfiles, while Docker Compose files determine the composition of the components in each container.
OpenShift Vs. Docker
Let us now compare the two bases on several factors that can help you choose the right technology suitable for your business.
Installation
OpenShift
When it comes to installation, OpenShift has limited options. It can only be installed on the following distributions: Red Hat CoreOS | Red Hat Enterprise Linux | CentOS | Red Hat Atomic or Red Hat Enterprise Linux for OpenShift 3.
OpenShift 3 can be complex, slow, and difficult to troubleshoot.
Docker
Docker Desktop is also compatible with Mac and Windows systems. All you have to do is download and install the appropriate version of the software on your device. Alternatively, you can use Docker Hub to find and distribute container images with members of your team or the larger Docker community. It's a cloud-based collaboration service for app development and registry.
Third-Party Integration
Openshift
You can install many other integrations on your OpenShift cluster through the Red Hat Marketplace and OpenShift catalog. However, you need to ensure that the apps or services you want to integrate are compatible with your Kubernetes version and OpenShift cluster. Otherwise, the installation may fail.
Docker
Docker is compatible with your favorite tech tools, including CircleCI, Bitbucket, MongoDB, Visual Studio Code, Nginx, Redis, JFrog, Gitlab, VMware Tanzu, etc. You can also integrate a vast range of third-party plugins and tools at any point in your software development cycle.
Container
OpenShift
OpenShift uses a runtime container with web interfaces, coordination, and application programming interfaces to manage and run independent containers. It also leverages kernel isolation features to separate tenant processes within runtime containers.
Docker
Unlike OpenShift, Docker only uses runtime containers for deploying applications. It also utilizes kernel isolation functions to separate tenant processes in runtime containers.
Support
OpenShift
OpenShift supports a variety of deployment environments, including cloud, desktop, Android, and on-premise Windows/Linux.
Docker
supports major public cloud platforms such as Azure ACI, Google GKS, AWS ECS, Synk, and more, and on-premises Kubernetes. Docker also supports all kinds of desktop and cloud-native environments for building, testing, and deployment.
Conclusion
OpenShift and Docker use different methods to create functional units and run containers and are independent technologies related to each other in many ways and complement each other.
They both have unique features and advantages that make them suitable choices depending on your requirements. Docker is the more robust option for building, managing, and deploying containerized apps, and it's a much easier tool to use, with faster and more consistent build processes. Whereas OpenShift seamlessly manages the Kubernetes cluster.
