Anthos vs OpenShift

Fully automated provisioning of clusters

Fully automated provisioning of clusters

• The default HAProxy load balancer can be used to create a multi-master and multi-etcd cluster environment – with etcd nodes either forming their own cluster or deployed on the same node as the master

• Leverages native Kubernetes features to deliver HA and healing
• Supports a variety of resilient load balancer options
• Supports multi-master deployments

• Public cloud (OpenShift Online)
• SaaS-managed (OpenShift Dedicated)
• Hybrid cloud (OpenShift Container Platform)

• Can manage Kubernetes clusters running on-premises and in Google Cloud and AWS (Azure support is in preview mode)
• However, clusters must be managed through GKE

Works only with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (a RHEL subscription is required and bundled into OpenShift)

• Supports all popular enterprise Linux distributions –
  • Red Hat,
  • CentOS,
  • Ubuntu

• Diagnostic tools via command line for health statistics
• Prometheus and Grafana for environment health monitoring and visualization

• Uses Google Cloud’s Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring platforms by default to monitor clusters
• Prometheus and Grafana may also be used
• However, Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring are required if customers seek official support

• Can be automated with Ansible playbooks, or performed manually

• Clusters can be upgraded manually or automatically using methods supported by GKE

• A typical deployment creates a single Kubernetes cluster that is designed to scale up to 2000 nodes and 120,000 pods
• All users of that deployment are expected to share that single cluster and achieve isolation via a combination of Kubernetes namespaces, and OpenShift multi-tenancy
• Starting with OpenShift 4, multiple clusters can be managed through Red Hat’s hybrid cloud console

• Supports multi-cluster management and configuration
• Clusters can span a range of on-premises or multi-cloud infrastructure

• Delivers multi-tenancy through projects, called Kubernetes namespaces
• Kubernetes RBAC is utilized to define granular access policies for users
• There is no cross cluster multi-tenancy

• Uses native Kubernetes RBAC
• RBAC settings can be managed centrally through Anthos Config Management
• Full support for multi-tenant clusters

• Relies primarily on built-in OpenShift registry. Can be used with third-party registries such as Docker Hub, but images must be imported manually on the command line

• No built-in registry service
• Compatible with all standard Docker registries

• OpenShift Container Platform supports deployment on hybrid and multi-cloud environment. However, all infrastructure must be provisioned with RHEL

• Supports hybrid infrastructure built using a range of public clouds, private data centers and operating systems
• However, requires use of Google Cloud services (GKE) for infrastructure management (even if clusters are deployed on other clouds or on-premises)

• Provides a native UI that enables management of your Kubernetes resources and the catalog

• Provides a management dashboard as part of Google Cloud Console

• Application lifecycles can be managed through either OpenShift Ansible Broker or application templates (the latter support Rails, Django, Node.js, CakePHP, and Dancer)

• Applications can be deployed from Google Cloud Platform Marketplace
• Applications can also be deployed using Helm charts or similar techniques using Anthos Config Management repos; however, this requires some manual setup

• 99.5% uptime for fully-managed clusters (OpenShift Dedicated)
• Troubleshooting is handled via support tickets
• Customers drive manual upgrades and any issues require support team engagement

• No advertised SLA for Anthos service
• GKE clusters have 99.5% uptime guarantee

• Installing and configuring OpenShift is a manual process that is Ansible-based
• Several Ansible playbooks are required during the installation

• Requires setup of multiple tools. Manual setup and configuration process.
• However, the Migrate for Anthos tool is available to simplify migration of existing containerized applications into Anthos-managed clusters

• OpenShift provides CNI support and can integrate with any CNI based SDN
• By default OpenShift SDN is deployed, which configures an overlay network using Open vSwitch (OVS)
• Out-of-the-box third-party CNI plugins supported: Flannel, Nuage and Kuryr

• Works with networking options supported by GKE (Flannel, Calico)
• Requires Cloud VPN or Interconnect on Google Cloud if connecting on-premises clusters to Anthos

• Supports integration with network-based persistent storage using the Kubernetes persistent volume framework
• Supports a wide variety of persistent storage endpoints such as NFS, GlusterFS, OpenStack Cinder, FlexVolume, VMware vSphere etc.

• Compatible with GKE-supported storage solutions (standard Kubernetes volumes and certain GCP storage services)
• Storage add-ons can be deployed through Google Cloud Platform Marketplace

• Provides a self-service UI (OpenShift Web Console) that is separate from the default Kubernetes dashboard UI to enable self-service for developers and administrators

• Basic self-service options are available through the Anthos dashboard in Google Cloud Console

• Pipelines and build strategies simplify the creation and automation of dev/test and production pipelines
• Ships out-of-the-box with a Jenkins build strategy and client plugin to create a Jenkins pipeline. However, the setup to create and configure production pipelines is manual and time-consuming
• The pipeline build configuration creates a Jenkins master pod (if one doesn’t exist) and then automatically creates slave pods to scale jobs & assign different pods for jobs with different runtimes

• Any CI/CD tools that are compatible with GKE can deploy to clusters managed via Anthos
• Cloud Build is Google Cloud’s native CI/CD solution, but most major third-party tools are supported as well