Maximize your OpenShift investment: 6 reasons to upgrade to OpenShift Platform Plus

If you’re currently using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, you already know it provides a solid foundation for containerized applications. So why upgrade to Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus? The answer depends on where you are—and where you’re going. Maybe you started with a single team working on one project. But suddenly that team turned into 10 and now you’re drowning in security checks, management tools, and developer requests. If you’re juggling apps across a dozen environments and wondering, "How do I keep all of this secure and manageable—and keep my developers happy?," OpenShift Platform Plus can help.

With OpenShift Platform Plus, you gain an agile application environment with enhanced security and management tools, built to boost your efficiency and simplify your operations. And, you can upgrade with ease—no reinstalls needed.

Let’s dive into how OpenShift Platform Plus can help your business.

Why upgrade to Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus?

1. Built-in security that works from development to deployment

Security and compliance are challenging for every organization, especially when you’re trying to keep systems consistent across different environments. If you feel like every time you push a new app into production, a whole new audit process slows everything down, you’re not alone.

OpenShift Platform Plus gives you integrated security with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes. It scans everything from the moment you build to when it’s running live. It takes the guesswork out of security and helps you automatically fix compliance issues. You also get a private container registry with Red Hat Quay. It’s like having your own secure locker for all of your container images—with continuous scanning so you know what’s there (and who’s accessing it.)

2. Simplify management of all of your clusters

As you grow and scale, it’s easy to end up with a bunch of Kubernetes clusters scattered across different environments—on premise, in different clouds, and at the edge. It can feel messy, with different tools in use, no visibility across clusters, and a lot of wasted time.

OpenShift Platform Plus brings your clusters together with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes. You get one console to see and manage all of your clusters. From provisioning to deploying apps and maintaining consistent policies—it simplifies your operations and makes your life easier. Simply put, it frees you up to focus on what matters.

3. Integrated data services for your apps

Managing stateful apps is challenging in even the best circumstances, but especially in distributed environments. Getting storage to work right—including making sure your data is safe and can actually be recovered if something goes wrong—is often clunky and disconnected from everything else.

With Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation, which comes with OpenShift Platform Plus, it’s all integrated. Think of it as reliable, software-defined storage, built right into OpenShift for your apps. Snapshots, backups, multisite disaster recovery—it takes that worry off your plate and makes your data and storage work for your applications, instead of the other way around.

4. Help developers build faster and smarter

Developer teams are often frustrated by dealing with complex infrastructure when they’d rather be writing code and innovating. It can drain energy and slow release cycles.

OpenShift Platform Plus streamlines the developer experience by integrating advanced features including security, management, and data services into one cohesive workflow. Developers gain integrated tools, self-service capabilities, and, with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security, security-enhanced pipelines (like Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines and Red Hat OpenShift GitOps), allowing them to "build once, deploy anywhere." For example, our customer Telekom Slovenije used OpenShift Platform Plus to get code to production quicker, going from 3-4 deployments per month to multiple releases each day with no downtime.

5. Keep things consistent, no matter where your apps run

Running applications across environments? Each location—like on premise, different clouds, and the edge—presents different challenges for IT and development teams, which adds more work and the possibility of more errors and risk.

OpenShift Platform Plus gives you a consistent experience, no matter where your apps live. You get the same tools, same management, and same security at each location. It makes moving apps around less complicated. And it helps everything run smoother and more reliably.

6. Handle new tech—and support the old

Your business is always evolving, and your platform needs to keep up. Whether you’re eyeing new tech like AI/ML, modernizing existing applications (rehosting, replatforming, or refactoring), or even looking for better alternatives to traditional virtualization, OpenShift Platform Plus offers a complete solution to develop, manage, and scale applications.

It provides a scalable AI foundation on which AI platforms like Red Hat OpenShift AI can run, offering capabilities like dynamic GPU resource management and intelligent job scheduling Kueue for model training. It is infused with AI-ready tools, such as Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed, a natural-language virtual assistant, and API gateway capabilities through Red Hat Connectivity Link that help set up private AI Models-as-a-Service (MaaS) environments.

But don’t worry—we don’t leave traditional tech behind. OpenShift Platform Plus includes Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, so you can run your traditional VMs alongside your containers on the same platform, making migration and management easier. You get one, consolidated view and your VMs get the same support containers do from a single control plane in OpenShift. See how the University of Gothenburg uses OpenShift Virtualization with OpenShift Platform Plus.

Invest in your app dev journey

Scaling your app platform is similar to expanding your developer team from regional to national. If you have a small team in a single region working on one application, you can manage with simple tools and manual processes for testing, deployment, and security. But, as demand increases, you start building more applications—and growing your team to keep up. You may need to manage multiple teams in different cities, states, or countries, scale your processes, and use sophisticated security and deployment systems. You’ll also likely require virtual assistants to automate some work. You would benefit from tools that keep your growing business agile, like predictive analytics for resource management and automated testing for busy release cycles.

So if you’re considering expanding your operations nationally—or even globally—OpenShift Platform Plus is how you can get there. It’s the complete toolkit to build smart and modern apps in any cloud, datacenter, or remote site, with advanced management, security, compliance, data services, and automation built in. It helps you focus on what you do best: growing your business.

If you’re ready to talk about how Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus can simplify your operations and accelerate your app development, let’s connect.

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