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I don't feel like any of the responses really answered your question well, so I'll take a stab. Up front disclaimer tho: I work for Red Hat and work on OpenShift nearly every day. OpenShift in general I don't think can be compared here, because most of the time OpenShift isn't a cloud product. There is OpenShift online, which I would love to see improved, but it's a minority of OpenShift uses. The pricing there isn't direct apples-to-apples either, since OpenShift adds a lot of value on top of "raw k8s" (there's really no such thing as "raw k8s" since k8s is a platform for platforms, and every cloud vendor adds stuff to it, but it's a useful simplification for comparison). OpenShift adds some non-trivial features to Kubernetes and they aren't just plucked from existing projects and bundled. Some major K8s features started out as OpenShift features and got merged upstream (Ingress, Deployments, etc). Red Hat innovates and improves the distribution rather than just repackaging it and slapping on a support contract. Red Hat also tests and certifies other products so you have confidence that they'll work together, which is important for decision makers that don't have the technical depth to evaluate everything themselves. > is there any merit to IBM trying to sell it so hard? Red Hat is trying to sell it hard, and technically Red Hat is a subsidiary of IBM, so what you say is not technically wrong. However, it's not really accurate either. People that work for "IBM" don't really care much about OpenShift, people that work for "Red Hat" do. It's an amazing product and is getting better every day, and we see it as a major contender in the Kubernetes and PaaS space. Internally we don't think of ourselves as "IBM." The two companies are quite separate and are being kept that way. Over time we will cross-polinate more, but that's a ways down the road IMHO. If we `s/IBM/Red Hat` tho, I probably shouldn't answer regarding if there's merit to selling it. I do, but then I wouldn't be working on it if I didn't think that. I am not a fan of our pricing model, and hope that changes, but nobody in pricing cares what I think :-) If you are an enterprise customer, I think OpenShift is a great buy. If you're a startup, it probably isn't (at least not yet. I'm hoping to change that in the future). |