Red Hat plans OpenShift cloud SLAs

Red Hat has committed to offering offer service-level agreements (SLAs) around availability and latency on applications hosted on its OpenShift platform-as-a-service, which is based on the Amazon Web Services cloud, according to the company's head of cloud.

Red Hat plans to offer SLAs around availability and latency on applications hosted on its OpenShift platform-as-a-service "in the coming months", Scott Crenshaw, head of Red Hat's cloud business unit, indicated to ZDNet UK on Wednesday.

"It is possible. We could offer [SLAs] very soon," Crenshaw told ZDNet UK on Wednesday. "We are intending to offer SLAs and getting surprisingly high demand."

SLAs will be a key component of Red Hat's commercial version of the OpenShift technology, which should come out within six months, he acknowledged. The company launched the cloud platform in May and though some developers have used it, enterprise adoption has been light, he admitted.

"Enterprise usage has been gated at this time because we have not yet offered enterprise-class SLAs against OpenShift," he said. "When we do reach the point where we can deliver enterprise-class SLAs then we will."

However, he said offering SLAs will require significant work on the backend IT that runs OpenShift and communicates with the AWS cloud, so there is a "30 percent chance" Red Hat could miss its rough target of doing it within the next two months.

"We expect to do [SLAs] soon, we intend to do it soon, we will do it soon," he said.