Red Hat, one of the few major corporations that centre around open source, had launched its own cloud platform called OpenShift over a year back, and they are now expanding their offerings for enterprises. Like most things by Red Hat, their OpenShift PaaS solution is also open source; it is available on GitHub.
“We’re excited to offer our enterprise customers the only comprehensive, open on-premise PaaS offering ready for enterprise deployment today with OpenShift Enterprise. This product offers our customers further freedom and choice in the cloud with the backing of Red Hat’s full stack and open source leadership. Developers are now able to choose among leading application development languages and tools for the job, and IT operations leaders can choose to deliver these application stacks to their enterprise on their choice of clouds in compliance with their security, governance and compliance requirements. This offering stands to revolutionize how enterprises use PaaS platforms.” Ashesh Badani, general manager, Cloud Business Unit and OpenShift, Red Hat.
OpenShift competes with the likes of Amazon AWS, and Google AppEngine, but is closer to Heroku. It supports a number of development technologies such as Python, Java / Jboss, PHP / Zend Server, Ruby, and Node.js. These technologies are directly supported, but it is possible to use just about any technology you need that can run on Red Hat Linux.
[do action=”inside-quote”]We’re excited to offer our enterprise customers the only comprehensive, open on-premise PaaS offering ready for enterprise deployment today with OpenShift Enterprise[/do]
OpenShift uses terminology such as “gears” and “cartridges” to describe how components in their service work together. Each “gear” is a container with access to a limited amount of RAM and storage; this amount depends on the size of the gear (only Small or Medium currently). Each gear in turn can have one or more “cartridges”, where each cartridge is a package that provides a specific component. So you could have a gear that has a cartridge to add Ruby support, another cartridge for MySQL, and yet another cartridge for Cron support. You can scale the number of gears in your application easily as load changes.
The service requires you to install a client tools package, after which deploying and updating applications is as simple as running a Git push. With each push, OpenShift automatically deploys the latest code, while making sure all code dependencies are met before it does so.
Their latest announcement concerns their new solution OpenShift Enterprise, which will allow enterprises to run OpenShift’s PaaS on their own infrastructure. Since OpenShift is already open source, what the enterprise edition offers is a tested and certified version of the open source project, with the backing of Red Hat.
Red Hat will contribute to and maintain OpenShift Origin, the open source community version of their service, and use a stable and supported version of that on both their own OpenShift Online on-demand service, and OpenShift Enterprise.
[do action=”inside-quote”]OpenShift Enterprise brings Red Hat’s advanced PaaS capabilities into the private datacenter where they are most needed and enables hybrid cloud computing with enhanced security, flexibility and consistency[/do]
The Enterprise version is launching North America, the United Kingdom and Continental Europe, but there are plans to make it global in the future. The OpenShift Online version of the PaaS is of course still available as a developer preview.
OpenShift Online also has a free tier that offers three small gears and a “MegaShift” paid tier that allows more scaling and support.
“The worldwide public PaaS market grew over 40% in 2011 as organizations continued to leverage the benefits of platform services to develop, deploy and manage applications of all types. Advanced PaaS products support multiple development patterns, high availability, high performance, automated provisioning, dynamic scalability and shared services delivered as public, private or hybrid clouds. OpenShift Enterprise brings Red Hat’s advanced PaaS capabilities into the private datacenter where they are most needed and enables hybrid cloud computing with enhanced security, flexibility and consistency.” Stephen D. Hendrick, group vice president of application development and deployment research, IDC.
