Azure Red Hat OpenShift

Azure Red Hat OpenShift is a fully managed service jointly operated by Microsoft and Red Hat. This means engineers from both companies handle the underlying infrastructure, security patching, and cluster upgrades. This shared responsibility model frees up internal DevOps teams to focus strictly on developing containerized applications.

No, because it is a managed Kubernetes service, the underlying virtual machines, networking, and storage are provisioned and maintained automatically by Microsoft and Red Hat. You simply define the compute size you need, and the service spins up the worker nodes. This drastically reduces the operational overhead compared to running self-hosted Kubernetes.

While AKS is Microsoft's native Kubernetes offering, Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides the full enterprise OpenShift platform natively integrated into the cloud. OpenShift includes a more opinionated framework, built-in developer tools, and stricter default security policies out of the box. It is generally preferred by organizations that already heavily rely on the Red Hat ecosystem.

Yes, Azure Red Hat OpenShift fully supports running Windows container workloads alongside Linux containers. Organizations can apply their existing enterprise Windows Server licenses via the Azure Hybrid Benefit program to reduce compute costs. This makes it a highly flexible platform for companies transitioning legacy applications to a modern architecture.