DESCRIPTION 
This
  cheatsheet describes aspects and benefits of OpenShift Dedicated (OSD) and activities that customers are 
pursuing that would be a good fit for this product. For many such efforts an enterprise container platform is 
imperative to success particularly as the number of containers and infrastructure increase. An Enterprise 
Container Platform “provide[s] a container-based development environment with container execution, 
orchestration, integration, security, and management capabilities designed to provision and control container 
1
clusters across multiple on-premises and cloud infrastructure platforms”, according to Forrester.  
Red Hat has a few offerings in this space. OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) is the leading Enterprise 
Container Orchestration platform according to Forrester. OCP is self-managed and installed on-prem. OSD 
offers OpenShift clusters as a hosted service on AWS, Azure and Google. OSD offers an opinionated, 
standardized implementation of OpenShift Container Platform running on RHEL, including additional 
infrastructure services and operational processes that are provided and managed by Red Hat. Furthermore, 
OSD comes with award-winning 24x7 Red Hat Premium Support. Azure Red Hat OpenShift is a jointly-offered 
managed OpenShift service available from both Red Hat and Microsoft. 

BENEFITS 
● Get a full OpenShift cluster running quickly   
 
● Rapidly create and run applications   
 
● Free up operations resources for other tasks 
as Red Hat manages and operates the cluster 
for you   
 
● No need for highly trained Kubernetes admin   
 
● Always up to date with security fixes and 
access to latest features   
 
● Red Hat guaranteed SLA   
 
MARKET OVERVIEW 
Application Container technology is highly demanded in many organizations for enhancing the enterprise’s 
ability to innovate with new solutions. This innovation is achieved by increasing productivity and reducing the 
time it takes to bring applications to market. This further enables the organization to maximize use of their 
application infrastructure that facilitates maintenance and ultimately minimizes costs for the organization. 
According to MRFR the global Application Container market is expected to grow to $4.42B by 2023 from just 
2
$0.89B in 2017 , while the global cloud managed services market is expected to grow to $53.78B by 2022 from 
3
$27.15B in 2017. This combined with the prediction by Gartner that "by 2020, more than 50% of global 
4
organizations will be running containerized applications in production" makes a ripe market for opportunity 
that will experience significant growth. 

1
The Forrester New Wave™: Enterprise Container Platform Software Suites, Q4 2018 
2
“Application Container Market Is Expected to Reach Staggering Market Value by 2023 :” Action Camera Market Research Report - 
Global Forecast to 2023 | MRFR, MarketResearchFuture, Oct. 2018, 
www.marketresearchfuture.com/press-release/application-container-market. 
3
Cloud Managed Services Market. MarketsandMarkets, May 2017, 
www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/cloud-managed-service-market-195317068.html. 
4
Gartner, Inc., Smarter with Gartner, “6 Best Practices for Creating a Container Platform Strategy,” Contributor: Christy Pettey, Oct. 31, 
2017. 

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QUALIFICATION USE CASES 

Identify accounts based on the below pain points and one or more of the following use cases to target for 
OpenShift in general: 
● Modernizing Infrastructure 
○ Are they looking to update their infrastructure in order to handle newer application paradigms? 
(ie: Containers, Kubernetes, Microservices, API’s) 
● Modernizing Applications 
○ Are they refactoring their applications to make use of modern architectures? 
○ Are they looking to make their applications easier to maintain and operate? 
● New Architectures 
○ Are they aiming to run their workloads across multiple clouds? 
○ Are different parts of their applications located on-prem and on a public cloud? 
○ Are they looking to make use of the API economy? 
○ Are they using the public cloud? 
● Business Innovation 
○ Are they developing new (greenfield) applications? 
 
Once it is understood that the customer wants to use OpenShift, you may want to use the following questions 
and look for the below pain points, to ascertain if OSD would be a good fit. 
● Are they planning to run the service on a public cloud? 
● Are they looking for a managed/hosted solution? 
● Is AWS their choice of cloud provider? (Though Google and Azure are forthcoming) 
● Are they short of resources that understand Kubernetes? 
 
 
 
PAIN/SOLUTION SUMMARY 
Key pain point  Description 

As organizations are more readily accepting the cloud to host their 

workloads some are beginning to decommission their current data 
centers. As they would need a new place to host these workloads, 
Data center decommissioning 
OpenShift dedicated is poised to be a perfect fit. Furthermore, if an 
or migration 
organization is migrating data centers, OpenShift dedicated can be 
positioned as a location for some of their workloads so that the new 
data center can be smaller and thus reducing their capital outlay. 

As more applications are being containerized the ability to handle 

Difficulty in managing 
them as singleton containers is diminished and the need for a 
container sprawl 
container orchestration platform is evident.   

As containers/Kubernetes is an emerging technology that is changing 

rapidly, the technical expertise to manage a cluster is more difficult to 
Lack of technical experience  keep up-to-date on. An additional consideration is the variety of 
additional tools that a container orchestration platform provides such 
as for logging, metrics, alerting, monitoring, etc. 

Since containerization/cloud native/microservices are still emerging 

Lack of resources to administer 
technologies the technical expertise to manage a container 
a Kubernetes cluster 
orchestration platform is difficult to find and retain. 

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As applications are migrated onto a container orchestration platform, 

Many applications to manage in 
each one with its own requirements, the platform becomes 
Kubernetes 
increasingly challenging to administer. 

Many organizations would rather restructure their costs to have more 

operational expenditures rather than capital expenditures. Purchasing 
High CapEx costs; looking to 
hardware to run a container orchestration platform themselves would 
shift to OpEx 
be a significant capital expenditure, while using a service such as 
OpenShift Dedicated would shift those to operational expenditures. 

In many cases the time from when an innovative idea is presented 

until they can get “hands on keyboard” is too long and can give 
Too much time to obtain 
competitors a leg up. This can be due to lengthy internal processes to 
infrastructure 
obtain compute resources, such as tickets, bids and approvals. Using a 
service like OpenShift Dedicated can significantly shorten this time. 

Obtaining compute resources internally is sometimes impossible or 

very difficult. In many organizations groups seldom release unused 
Inability to get infrastructure 
compute which causes high inefficiencies and inability to get the 
internally 
compute resources for running their own container orchestration 
platform. 

If an organization is in the process of migrating workloads to the 

Migration of workloads to a  public cloud then they would be more open to a hosted managed 
public cloud  solution. Also, the team at OpenShift Dedicated can assist in this 
process. 

Looking to improve  If an organization feels that it takes “too long” to get from ideation to 
time-to-market of new  finished product, getting the infrastructure and platform they need 
workloads  set up quickly is key to shortening this process. 

 
 
   

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OBJECTION HANDLING 

Objection  Responses 

“We already have an Openshift  Remind them that although what they currently have might work, as 
resource who can handle our  the number of applications grow, and grow in complexity, it will be 
cluster”   increasingly more challenging to administer the cluster. Furthermore, 
they should keep in mind that the dedicated offering comes with 
more than just a Kubernetes cluster, but things like EFK for logging, 
Grafana and Prometheus that need to be maintained separately. Each 
of them has its own release cadence. Also remind them of the soft 
costs involved in maintaining a resource to be an OpenShift Admin. 
Some of these are: 
● Compensation 
● Benefits 
● Desk space 

“We are concerned about  OSD is NOT a multi-tenant cluster. Each cluster is single tenant 
security on a multi-tenant  dedicated to a single customer though it does run on shared 
cluster”  hardware on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Each OSD account is 
actually operated in a separate AWS account with its own VPC.  

“I won’t have access to my AWS  In lieu of the customer not being able to access the AWS account for 
account”  this cluster, Red Hat takes responsibility of installation and ongoing 
management of each OSD cluster. In addition, Red Hat is able to offer 
an uptime SLA. 

“I can’t customize my cluster as  Though the service is more opinionated than an on-prem cluster, 
I see fit.”  prior to provisioning, Red Hat offers several options for customizing 
the cluster to fit the customer’s needs. Customizations can be applied 
to: 
● Size and type of nodes 
● Number of nodes 
● Deployment Region 
● Availability Zones 
● Networking 
● Persistent volume storage quantity 
● Authentication integration 

“I like that I can backup our  Although OpenShift Dedicated cannot offer the ability to customize 
on-prem cluster as often as I’d  your backups, they are assured the we back up their data according 
like”  to the following (which should be more than adequate): 
● We keep hourly snapshots (Master and etcd) one an hour for 
24 hours, one a day for a week, and one a week for a month 
● We keep daily snapshots (all persistent volumes) one a day 
for a week, and one a week for a month 
● See ​Service Overview​ for more details under “Snapshots” 

“I can do this myself on AWS”  Yes, they can. Though that is no different that using OpenShift 

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Container Platform on premises. The benefits of a managed offering 

(listed above) are completely lost. 

“We have a pricing agreement  If they have their own agreements, pricing, and security protocols 
with AWS that I’d prefer to use  already set up with AWS they can use that with our OSD BYOC option. 
instead” 

“Your SLA uptime is not as good  Assure them that our SLA is among the best in the industry for this 
as our internal shared services  kind of service. Red Hat offers 99.5% uptime which is equivalent to 
organization”  GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine). Although your customer might 
mention >99.99% for AWS EKS or EC2 keep in mind that these are 
not a comparison of the same services. 

“Is this as secure as my on-prem  Mention that Azure Red Hat OpenShift (GA April 2019) will have the 
data center?”  following regulatory compliance: 
● SOC 
● ISO 
● PCI 
● DSS 
● HIPAA 

 
 
***Have you encountered an objection we didn’t cover? Please let us know ​here​.*** 
 

CUSTOMER REFERENCES 
● Amsterdam Airport Schiphol Builds Agile with Red Hat 
● Openshift Dedicated at Inmarsat 
● Example from TELUSDigital - Today they have an “average of 11 deploys per outcome team per day 
taking on average 7 minutes to test & deploy” from two weeks per release 6 months ago 
 

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FUTURE ROADMAP 
● Adjustable log retention and log storage volume size 
Purchase additional log storage and adjust log retention 
● Customer installable AWS Service Broker 
Allow users to easily deploy and bind AWS services, such as RDS databases, S3 storage, SNS 
notifications, and more. 
● Flexible, self-service deployment 
Create fully managed OpenShift clusters using the Red Hat Cloud portal and command line in 
minutes. 
● Log archival to Amazon S3 
Archive up to a year of log data in Amazon S3 with access to download your logs for analysis. 
● Log forwarding to Amazon Kinesis 
Send logs to AWS Kinesis Streams and AWS Kinesis Firehose for real-time processing. 
● Shared storage volumes (RWX) 
Support for dynamically provisioned AWS Elastic File System (EFS) shared storage volumes for 
persistent data. 
● Self-service cluster node scaling 
Add or remove compute nodes to match resource demand from the Red Hat Cloud portal or CLI.  
● Cluster autoscaling 
Compute nodes are automatically added and removed from the cluster to match resource demand. 
● Consumption-based pricing 
Hourly pricing and post-pay invoicing 
● Regulatory compliance 
Compliance with: 
○ SOC Type 1: Estimated October 2019 
○ ISO 27001: Estimated October 2019 
○ FedRamp: Estimated March 2020 
 

RESOURCES 
● The Forrester New Wave™: Enterprise Container Platform Software Suites, Q4 2018 study which lists Red 
Hat in the “Leaders” quadrant: 
https://www.redhat.com/cms/managed-files/cm-forrester-new-wave-enterprise-container-platform-soft
ware-suites-q42018-analyst-paper-f14768-201810-en.pdf  
● OpenShift Dedicated latest documentation: ​https://docs.openshift.com/dedicated/welcome/index.html 
● OpenShift Dedicated FAQ: ​https://pnt.redhat.com/pnt/p-7586453/OpenShift_Ded...ernal_FAQ.pdf 
● OpenShift Product Comparison: ​https://pnt.redhat.com/pnt/p-7586373/OpenShift_Pro...omparison.pdf 
● OpenShift Dedicated Service Overview: 
https://pnt.redhat.com/pnt/p-11014145/OpenShift_Ded...ew_-_3.11.pdf 
● OpenShift Dedicated PnT Portal: ​https://pnt.redhat.com/pnt/b-7773553/Red_Hat_OpenShift_Dedicated 
● Host a “Developer Day” - TBD 
● Contact ​openshift-dedicated@redhat.com​ with any further questions 
 
 

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