OpenShift & Use case of OpenShift in Industries
OpenShift:
OpenShift is a family of containerization software products developed by Red Hat. Its flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform — an on-premises platform as a service built around Docker containers orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The family’s other products provide this platform through different environments: OKD serves as the community-driven upstream (akin to the way that Fedora is upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux), OpenShift Online is the platform offered as software as a service, and Openshift Dedicated is the platform offered as a managed service.
The OpenShift Console has developer and administrator oriented views. Administrator views allow one to monitor container resources and container health, manage users, work with operators, etc. Developer views are oriented around working with application resources within a namespace. OpenShift also provides a CLI that supports a superset of the actions that the Kubernetes CLI provides.
History:
OpenShift originally came from Red Hat’s acquisition of Makara, a company with a proprietary PaaS solution based on Linux containers. Even though OpenShift was announced in May 2011, it was proprietary technology and did not become open-source until May of 2012. Up until v3, the container technology and container orchestration technology used custom developed technologies. This changed in v3 with the adoption of Docker as the container technology, and Kubernetes as the container orchestration technology. The v4 product has many other architectural changes, a prominent one being a shift to using CRI-O as the container runtime (and Podman for interacting with pods and containers), and Buildah as the container build tool, thus breaking the exclusive dependency on Docker.
Products:
OpenShift Container Platform
OpenShift Container Platform (formerly known as OpenShift Enterprise) is Red Hat’s on-premises private platform as a service product, built around a core of application containers powered by Docker, with orchestration and management provided by Kubernetes, on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS).
OKD
OKD, known until August 2018 as OpenShift Origin (Origin Community Distribution) is the upstream community project used in OpenShift Online, OpenShift Dedicated, and OpenShift Container Platform. Built around a core of Docker container packaging and Kubernetes container cluster management, OKD is augmented by application lifecycle management functionality and DevOps tooling. OKD provides an open source application container platform. All source code for the OKD project is available under the Apache License (Version 2.0) on GitHub.
Red Hat OpenShift Online
Red Hat OpenShift Online (RHOO) is Red Hat’s public cloud application development and hosting service which runs on AWS and IBM Cloud.
Online offered version 2 of the OKD project source code, which is also available under the Apache License Version 2.0.This version supported a variety of languages, frameworks, and databases via pre-built “cartridges” running under resource-quota “gears”. Developers could add other languages, databases, or components via the OpenShift Cartridge application programming interface.This was deprecated in favour of OpenShift 3 and was withdrawn on 30 September 2017 for non-paying customers and 31 December 2017 for paying customers.
OpenShift 3 is built around Kubernetes. It can run any Docker-based container, but Openshift Online is limited to running containers that do not require root.
OpenShift Dedicated
OpenShift Dedicated is Red Hat’s managed private cluster offering, built around a core of application containers powered by Docker, with orchestration and management provided by Kubernetes, on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM Cloud, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure marketplaces since December 2016.
Use case of Openshift in Industries:
How Boston Children’s Hospital Augments Doctors Cognition with Red Hat OpenShift
Software can be an enabler for healers. At Red Hat, we’ve seen this first hand from customers like Boston Children’s Hospital. That venerable infirmary is using Red Hat OpenShift and Linux containers to enhance their medical capabilities, and to augment their doctors cognitive capacity.
When Dr. Director of an innovative research team at Boston Children’s Hospital took the stage at Red Hat Summit in Boston earlier this year, she was able to show the incredible power computing can unleash when it is coupled with human knowledge and human cooperation.
ChRis, AKA the Research Integration Service, was created by a collaboration between the Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston University, and Red Hat. The system uses the scalability and flexibility of Red Hat OpenShift to provide an infrastructure of storing, analyzing and sharing patient data between doctors across a number of hospitals.
Dr. Grant explained how the system helps her diagnose a patient. Without ChRis, if a new patient presenting unexplained seizures showed up in her office, she’d spend 15 to 20 minutes looking through around 5,000 images of the child’s brain generated by an MRI. After that, she’d forward the patient to other doctors for extensive tests and medication, none of which are guaranteed to fix the problem.
With ChRis, Dr. Grant would instead first process those 5,000 images at scale across the compute cluster. The resulting data would add information to those images, such as coloring the various regions of the brain, and highlighting areas where the brain structure has more than a standard deviation from the normal.
Dr. Grant can then compare these MRIs to those of other patients with similar symptoms, even though that data has been anonymized to protect the patients’ identities. The information on those patients is not confined to simply those who’ve attended Boston Children’s Hospital, either: many hospitals can share ChRis, and share their data with other facilities. They call these other hospital datacenters “Enclaves.”
This is tremendously important, said Dr. Grant, as children’s hospitals often see extremely rare diseases and afflictions, making data on those cases scarce. It’s almost incumbent upon these hospitals to share their patient information safely, as the sample pool for some medical issues is far below the needed threshold for proper statistical analysis.
Dr. Grant laid out a hypothetical scenario around this fictional seizure patient, and she intimated that without ChRis, the child could be in for a lifetime of seizures and ineffective medical treatments, all because the initial examination would be from a doctor who had only 15 to 20 minutes to find a defect in the child’s brain MRIs
“Now this is the future of precision medicine: this is what we want to do and this is not possible without the Red Hat infrastructure and ChRis to bridge those two worlds together. Our lead engineer is working hand-in-hand with the Red Hat engineers so there’s no black boxes, and that’s another critical point in medicine: I need to know what happens to my data. I need to trace it through so that I understand the analysis that I get. Working together in open source, yet encrypted environments has now helped us share our collective knowledge to better serve and save while protecting individual identity. Together we are changing how healthcare works and it’s about time,” said Dr. Grant.
Red Hat is enabling the Boston Children’s Hospital to have the tools they need to save lives and innovate in medicine. That’s their business, after all. We’re here to provide the infrastructure to allow them to do their work in a better, more productive and more impactful manner. But the innovation they’ve unlocked has been thanks to their skilled technical and medical teams.
While SRI has since moved on to a much wider range or research than took place in Engelbart’s time, we see our work on open source, Linux, Kubernetes and OpenShift as an extension of that 50 year old dream. We’re here to help augment the capabilities of humans around the world, and in doing so, enable those humans to cure many medical diseases and save lives.
Thank you for reading… ✨ 🎇
