What Challenges Have You Faced When Migrating from OpenShift?

Honestly, I’m puzzled as to why anyone would want to move away from OpenShift. Sure, it comes with a cost, but it provides so much out of the box. Still, I’ve seen discussions around vendor lock-in and costs driving people towards vanilla Kubernetes instead. Most pain points stem from the complexities involved, like Security Context Constraints. If those can be resolved, I think many would stay with OpenShift.

For me, when moving away from OpenShift, the transition mostly revolved around understanding how to work with Ingress instead of the OpenShift-specific routes. This seemed manageable through well-scripted solutions. While OpenShift has its benefits, sometimes it just makes sense to go with a simpler setup like GKE or even plain Kubernetes when you have existing tools in place.

I've helped a few clients transition from OpenShift to OKD or even pure Kubernetes due to the costs, but many end up coming back because of the all-in-one features OpenShift provides. It can be a pain to set up initially, but once it's live, the ease of management becomes so appealing. Some have switched to Rancher or even traditional Kubernetes out of frustration with pricing and vendor lock-in. So it really depends on the needs of the organization!

Cost plays a huge part in this decision. While some love the streamlined approach of OpenShift, especially for managing multiple clusters with ease, others find it hard to migrate due to the support and features that come with it. For example, automatic upgrades through OpenShift's channels make life a lot easier! But yeah, if someone is looking at just basic workloads, vanilla Kubernetes might be the way to go. And by the way, DeploymentConfigs are deprecated now, so migrating to standard Deployments should be a consideration!