Red Hat fiddles with OpenShift Dedicated and lures customers with price cuts

The team at Red Hat has continued its toiling in the Big Blue shadow of IBM, and has churned out some tweaks to its OpenShift Dedicated platform and also sliced a few prices for the Kubernetes service.

Red Hat's OpenShift Container Platform is an on-premises Platform as a Service (PaaS) product, which customers manage themselves. Orchestration is handled by Kubernetes, and the whole thing runs on Red Hat's Enterprise Linux.

Of course, Red Hat would really prefer you to run on its OpenShift Dedicated service, where it handles the management for you (for a fee) and slings the whole shebang onto Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company says it is in the process of "revamping" its support for Google Cloud (due for completion in early 2019).

As ever, you can use whatever cloud you like (assuming Red Hat runs on it) for the OpenShift Container Platform. It is just the Dedicated product that is a bit more restrictive.

If AWS is your thing and you want the Dedicated service, then Red Hat has good news for you. Rather than settle for whatever deal Red Hat has in place, existing AWS customers can bring their own cloud accounts and their own pricing to the table, which the company reckons will "reduce friction" in the adoption of its OpenShift Dedicated service on AWS. Existing, validated security profiles can also be brought along for the ride, easing the worries of corporate compliance officers.

Red Hat is also punting Multi-AZ stretched clusters, allowing customers to sling customers over multiple AWS Availability Zones (AZ), which will should keep things available when things in the cloud go wobbly.

To be fair, you could do this already using the OpenShift Container Platform, but you'd obviously be rolling your own. Going Dedicated means Red Hat will take care of all that grungy stuff for you.

Red Hat is also adding additional EC2 instance types for Dedicated customers, moving to model where the service can be sized to fit the needs of whatever workload the customer wants to fling at the thing.

Other tweaks to the Dedicated service include encrypted persistent volumes, a cluster console focused on admin-level cluster status and events, and improvements to the dedicated-admin role.

All of this goodness comes at, er, a reduced price. In what must be one of the last hurrahs before IBM's beancounters get in on the action, Red Hat has taken an axe to pricing. From 12 December, the cost of an OpenShift Dedicated Cluster (currently starting at $36,000 per year) will drop by 25 per cent. Red Hat is also slicing the cost of adding an additional node in half. The pricing is, of course, for AWS.

If you want OpenShift on Azure, you'll have to wait until 2019 for satisfaction. Although if you ask your friendly neighbourhood Red Hat nicely, they might let you into a world where Red Hat will take care of business, Azure-style. ®