The biggest advantage of OpenShift is the system’s range of functions. In addition to cluster management, technologies for the complete management of the application lifecycle are integrated, including development, rollout, operation, and maintenance. Furthermore, Red Hat provides its own container registries, as well as a catalog of operators.
The large feature set of OpenShift increases the complexity of the software. Installing and maintaining OpenShift requires a team of experts, or support as part of a managed solution. To make matters worse, OpenShift’s Kubernetes distribution differs significantly from the upstream version. Furthermore, OpenShift only runs on Red Hat’s own operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS).