Red Hat Reduces Managed OpenShift Services Costs

Red Hat announced today it has dropped the price of its managed Red Hat OpenShift service by an average of 75% while at the same time guaranteeing a 99.95% service level agreement (SLA).

The price reductions are surfaced in two ways. A Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated with Customer Cloud Subscription (CCS) now allows organizations to pay a cloud provider directly for the infrastructure OpenShift runs on as part of a larger contract or they can bundle Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated bundled with infrastructure services managed by Red Hat on their behalf.

Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated with CCS now has a new three-year pricing option with a $263/year per-cluster fee, while worker node prices have been reduced by up to 79% per node, as long as customers have a least two nodes. The base cluster pricing for Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated with Infrastructure has not changed, but the cost of adding more worker nodes to a subscription has been reduced by half.

In addition, Microsoft and IBM are also announcing reduced prices for the instances of Red Hat OpenShift running on their respective cloud platforms.

Sathish Balakrishnan, vice president of hosted platforms at Red Hat, says Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated offers an alternative to relying on a cloud service provider to deploy Red Hat OpenShift that provides a way to centralize the management of multiple instances of the Kubernetes-based platform running on multiple clouds.

While Red Hat partners with cloud service providers that deploy their own instances of Red Hat OpenShift as a service, Balakrishnan notes Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated is managed directly by Red Hat anywhere an IT organization opts to deploy the platform.

It’s not clear just yet whether Red Hat OpenShift will be consumed more as a service or managed by an internal IT team. Red Hat with Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated is making the case for a services-based approach to deploying a platform that runs on bare-metal servers.

In addition, Balakrishnan says organizations should expect Red Hat to start layering on additional third-party services that are certified to run on the platform via the processes Red Hat and its IBM parent company have set up around the Red Hat OpenShift Marketplace.

IT organizations can opt to deploy either monolithic based on virtual machines or microservices-based applications on the platform, Balakrishnan notes. That approach enables IT teams to migrate existing monolithic applications to the cloud before modernizing using cloud-native technologies later, he says.

In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of organizations relying on external IT service providers is expected to increase, especially if they don’t possess the skills internally required to deploy and manage platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift. In theory, that approach should also enable IT organizations to devote more of their resources to building and deploying applications. Regardless of motivation, the cost of employing those services is starting to come down as providers look to make managed services a more attractive option.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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