Using containers in the Enterprise with Red Hat OpenShift

Companies throughout the globe are focusing on creating customer-centric applications that will help them to grow their business by increasing the customer base. For achieving this they required certain tools, and what else is best than container and Kubernetes?
Using containers and Kubernetes, they had reduced the delivery time of applications. Kubernetes plays a vital role in breaking down the application from monolith to microservices. In order to achieve higher agility, they had migrated their existing applications to the cloud. When we consider the enterprise applications, we required a platform that can offer the best security and automation because the platform needs to be able to scale, heal and constantly evolve. So, the platform should offer additional features beyond deploying and managing container environments, And that is the reason, enterprises are adopting the RedHat OpenShift Container Platform(RHOCP).

So, what is OpenShift?

Redhat OpenShift is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments.

RedHat OpenShift is an extension of the capabilities of traditional Kubernetes with built-in authentication and authorization, secrets management, auditing, logging, and an integrated container registry for granular control over resources and user permissions.

Let’s understand the use of RedHat OpenShift in enterprise applications by discussing one of the customer stories of RedHat OpenShift from Volkswagen.

Volkswagen Tests Autonomous Cars with GPUs and OpenShift

A few years ago, Volkswagen was looking for a solution that could help them build self-driving autonomous cars. They have all of the internal pieces required to build those cars and write that software. But the software must pass through the testing and here the trouble begins. Volkswagen had a testing problem and they had a short time to solve it.

Volkswagen had noticed that the normal way of doing testing with dedicated hardware would not be enough because of the new challenges of the autonomous cars and the many new functions for the driver system. So, they got an idea that what if they moved all of the tests that they do with hardware onto the virtual test environments? To put these virtual test environments in the containers, they came to the containers in OpenShift. The main goal is to make sure that all the electronic control units in the car work together.

According to Marcus Greul, IT project manager at Volkswagen AG, Integration testing is one of the most complex tasks in automotive development. This is because electronic systems in the car consist of several components like sensors, activators, and control units. These control units are integrated together with the help of their software components. Integration testing is a way of making sure that the electronic systems in the car are working as expected for each combination of components.

Why did Volkswagen move towards OpenShift?

Marcus Greul says that they need the time to build a virtual environment. They required a virtual car, a virtual driver. The system under test or the test object could be a software component, the control unit itself or the complete system, or a couple of systems that represent the function.
These tests are carried out in a virtual 3D environment with virtual physics, so it required a higher GPU. Also, humans are good at sight. So, the output of these testing systems is required to be a video. Those output videos would show the scenario when the test failed.

Now, you may think that where all of this is related to the OpenShift? The components that we are using for testing are just software running on some hardware. These components include a virtual 3D environment, analytics tools, test cases, simulations of traffic and road surroundings, and the software components that go to a control unit. They required massive scalability and fully automated test benches. OpenShift helped them to execute hundreds of thousands of test cases in an automated way.

Source: https://www.openshift.com/blog/how-volkswagen-tests-autonomous-cars-with-gpus-and-openshift

That’s it for this article.

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