What is Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA)?

Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) is a fully-managed service operated by Red Hat and jointly supported by AWS. It provides hourly or annual pay-as-you-go billing on a single invoice via AWS. You can also contact Red Hat or AWS for additional support. 

ROSA enables enterprise developers to build and deploy applications with Red Hat OpenShift in the AWS cloud. The service provides various benefits, including AWS Security Token Service (STS) support for an integrated experience when deploying applications with dependencies on AWS cloud native services.

What are the benefits of OpenShift on AWS?

ROSA simplifies the process of creating and operating Red Hat OpenShift clusters on the AWS public cloud. It provides an integrated experience to create and scale clusters and a unified billing model that supports hourly or annual on-demand prices. 

Easy integration

ROSA can integrate with AWS APIs for cluster creation and provides a fully integrated offering. ROSA also supports applications already containerized on-premises on the OpenShift Container Platform by providing a familiar API surface and keeping the same deployment toolchain to ensure developers need to refactor only the data model rather than the entire application stack. 

Unified licensing model

ROSA’s intuitive self-service functionality lets you easily create, scale up, and deploy clusters. It provides an integrated billing and licensing model that includes Open Shift licensing and cloud usage in one AWS bill, allowing you to choose between hourly or annual on-demand prices.

Simple cloud migration 

ROSA provides a fast and easy path to exit data centers and supports dependencies when migrating applications to the AWS cloud. It offers a managed experience for undifferentiated tasks and self-service functionality to support management and deployment operations. 

You can leverage ROSA to confidently migrate OpenShift containerized applications to AWS, relying on the joint management and support offered by Amazon and Red Hat. This native service enables you to accelerate data center exits using your existing orchestrator, deployment tooling, and API surface.

Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS pricing

ROSA provides a managed service for integrating OpenShift with AWS. The cost of using ROSA includes two fees: AWS infrastructure and ROSA service charges. 

The service fees are $0.171 per hour for every 4vCPU used by the worker nodes. In addition, there are cluster charges of $0.03 per hour. There are no service charges for critical infrastructure nodes or the control plane. ROSA offers one- and three-year contracts with a discount of 33% or 55% off the worker node on-demand service rates. The service fees for ROSA are the same in every supported AWS Region.

Infrastructure pricing includes charges for underlying infrastructure nodes, worker nodes, control plane nodes, networking, and storage. The minimum Amazon EC2 footprint for a Multi-AZ (Availability Zone) ROSA deployment is three worker nodes, three infrastructure nodes, and three control plane nodes. 

For Single-AZ deployments, the minimum footprint decreases to two worker nodes, two infrastructure nodes, and three control plane nodes. The size of the infrastructure and control plane nodes differs according to the number of worker nodes in the cluster. 

Multi-AZ clusters also incur charges for data transfers between nodes. The cost of a data transfer increases as you add more nodes to your cluster.

How the Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS works

You can start using ROSA by going to the AWS Management Console and utilizing the CLI and API to provision clusters for your account. After creating your cluster, you can manage them through the OpenShift Console or OpenShift Cluster Manager. These consoles enable you to leverage familiar tooling and skillsets to move quickly.  

Here are OpenShift features you can use with ROSA:

  • APIs—ROSA allows you to use the same OpenShift APIs for operating your clusters. 
  • Updates—ROSA supports OpenShift updates that send new feature releases and help align with the OpenShift Container Platform. 
  • Versions—ROSA helps achieve version consistency by supporting the same versions of OpenShift as OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated.
  • Clusters—ROSA provides a new API for cluster creation that eliminates the need to manually deploy a cluster in an existing virtual private cloud (VPC) and account.

AWS Service Broker

You can also deploy applications with dependencies on AWS using the OpenShift Service Catalog with an AWS implementation of the Open Service Broker API called AWS Service Broker. It provides an intermediate layer that lets users deploy services using the OpenShift Console and native manifests. 

AWS Service Broker supports various AWS services, such as Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EMR, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

A unified bill

This service is jointly managed and supported by Red Hat and AWS, but you get only one bill from one vendor – AWS. Each AWS service that supports your cluster and application appears as a separate billing item, and the bill includes your OpenShift subscription. 

For example, all infrastructure-related components, such as instances, storage, and load balancers, are reported as separate AWS line items. The Red Hat OpenShift subscription is listed like any other AWS Marketplace subscription. 

This approach enables you to leverage a unified adoption experience and continue building your existing Red Hat relationship through AWS Marketplace Private Offers.

Red Hat OpenShift on AWS with Solo

Solo Gloo products are enabled to run on any deployment of Red Hat OpenShift, both on-premises (private cloud) as well as in any public cloud. Solo Gloo Platform products can run on instances of Red Hat OpenShift on AWS as a value-added addition, enabling Kubernetes Ingress, Kubernetes-native API-Gateway, and Istio Service Mesh.
Improve Red Hat OpenShift on AWS with Gloo Platform today!

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