Red Hat To Offer Open Cloud Application Platform

Open-source enterprise software provider Red Hat on 9 May revealed a strategy for offering its OpenShift platform as a service (PaaS) cloud operating system, which is aimed at becoming an alternative to current industry market-share leaders, such as VMware’s vSphere, Microsoft Azure and NASA/Rackspace’s OpenStack.

Red Hat describes OpenShift is an open cloud application platform for enterprises that provides a consistent environment for public cloud and on-premise data centre usage.

Flexibility and efficiency

Red Hat plans to extend OpenShift PaaS to allow enterprises to use both leading-edge DevOps operational models as well as traditional application management methodologies. OpenShift PaaS, built on Red Hat’s core Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) stack, will help provide both operational flexibility and application development efficiency, the company said.

“While use of PaaS and the blending of application development and deployment known as DevOps are growing rapidly and we expect the enterprise PaaS market to be worth more than $3 billion (£1.8bn) by 2015, it is still early days for PaaS offerings, combinations and support,” Jay Lyman, senior analyst with 451 Research, said.

“That’s why it is critical that the underlying components and supported pieces of PaaS are open, flexible and available the way customers and developers want them, which is typically in the cloud, on-premises or both. Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS benefits from its depth of enterprise Java support for the application lifecycle and Java EE6. This is key for enterprises looking to scale, automate and treat software as services, not only for new applications and development, but also for their large, legacy investment, infrastructure and process around existing applications.”

Red Hat introduced OpenShift PaaS in May 2011 as a cloud application platform with a choice of programming languages, frameworks and application lifecycle tools to build their applications. Since then, the OpenShift platform has evolved to include emerging development languages, such as Node.js, and became the first PaaS to support Java EE 6 and to offer comprehensive lifecycle support for Java in the cloud.

Red Hat also made available to the open-source community the code that powers its OpenShift platform through the open-source OpenShift Origin project in April 2012.

Secure and scalable

Red Hat said that OpenShift PaaS features built-in secure and scalable multi-tenancy, enterprise-grade application containers, middleware, services and the latest technologies. In addition to RHEL, it includes Red Hat Storage, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and OpenShift’s integrated programming languages, frameworks and developer tools.

Red Hat plans to deliver the OpenShift cloud application platform available as a PaaS for enterprises in an open and hybrid cloud.

Red Hat said OpenShift PaaS will provide a choice of deployment models across multiple cloud providers, enabling enterprises to:

• Use OpenShift as a service, available in developer preview since May 2011 via openshift.redhat.com. A fee-based version of this service with full support from Red Hat is expected to be available later this year.
• Deploy and manage their own private PaaS leveraging the OpenShift PaaS platform, built on Red Hat enterprise technology.
• Deploy OpenShift on a variety of cloud and virtualisation providers.

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