Red Hat Takes OpenShift PaaS Commercial

Red Hat has taken its OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering commercial, with the North American launch of OpenShift Online on Tuesday, following a two-year period in which the service was available as a developer preview.

The launch, which will be followed by a European debut next week, adds to Red Hat’s existing PaaS line-up, which includes the open source OpenShift Origin and an on-premise product called OpenShift Enterprise.

Support

As a commercial product, OpenShift Online includes access to technical support, via Red Hat’s Global Support Services, and additional platform resources. Red Hat said more than 1 million applications have been created using OpenShift Online during its test period.

“Our new OpenShift Online brings enterprise-grade services to public PaaS, and gives Red Hat the industry’s most complete PaaS portfolio,” said Ashesh Badani, Red Hat’s general manager for Cloud and OpenShift, in a statement.

PaaS is a relatively new business in the cloud industry, which is dominated by infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) products. PaaS offerings include everything needed to automate provisioning, management and scaling of applications, in theory allowing developers to simply focus on coding their applications.

Red Hat’s competitors in the PaaS market include large companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google as well as cloud specialists such as Engine Yard, Heroku and Jelastic, which last week added Mark Zbikowski, a former Microsoft software architect and prominent software developer, to its development team as a senior technical adviser.

Industry analysts have argued that as IaaS offerings grow increasingly indistinguishable from one another, PaaS services will take off since they are an area where vendors can differentiate themselves from the competition.

With OpenShift Red Hat is emphasising its support for a wide variety of languages, including Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Node.js and Perl, which it says lowers the barrier of entry for developers.

New API for extensions

OpenShift Online is based on the OpenShift Origin open source project and uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its operating system, using the SELinux subsystem to secure its multi-tenant architecture.

OpenShift uses a packaging system called “cartridges” to allow developers to add capabilities such as new data stores, additional languages or application extensions. With OpenShift Online’s commercial release, Red Hat released version 2 of the OpenShift Cartridge application programming interface (API), which it said is more flexible than the first version.

Red Hat said it has seen growing interest in the open source OpenStack IaaS project, and has plans to offer OpenShift on OpenStack.

North American pricing starts at $20 (£13) per month, with an option to pay in euros. Red Hat said that following the European launch next week it plans to make OpenShift Online available in other countries in the coming months.

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