Its flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform — a hybrid cloud platform as a service built around Linux containers orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

OpenShift originally came from Red Hat's acquisition of Makara, a company marketing a platform as a service (PaaS) based on Linux containers, in November 2010.

OpenShift introduced the concept of routes - points of traffic ingress into the Kubernetes cluster.

[11] OpenShift includes other software such as application runtimes as well as infrastructure components from the Kubernetes ecosystem.

The Red Hat branding of Istio is called Red Hat Service Mesh, and is based on an opensource project called Maistra, that aligns base Istio to the needs of opensource OpenShift.

OpenShift Container Platform (formerly known as OpenShift Enterprise[12]) is Red Hat's on-premises private platform as a service product, built around application containers powered by CRI-O, with orchestration and management provided by Kubernetes, on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS.

[18] This version supported a variety of languages, frameworks, and databases via pre-built "cartridges" running under resource-quota "gears".

Developers could add other languages, databases, or components via the OpenShift Cartridge application programming interface.

[22][23] OpenShift Dedicated (OSD) is Red Hat's managed private cluster offering, built around a core of application containers powered by Docker, with orchestration and management provided by Kubernetes, on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.