Red Hat opens OpenShift PaaS cloud for business
Leading Linux company Red Hat announced on June 10th that OpenShift Online, its public Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud offering, is now open for business.
OpenShift is an open-source PaaS cloud. It's based on the OpenShift Origin open-source project which was released in May 2012. This, in turn, uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux) sub-system for its foundation.
OpenShift supports multiple languages including Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Node.js, and Perl. Red Hat claims that this "allows for a low barrier to entry so developers can start their project with ease and start coding faster." The company also states that since its developer preview in 2011 more than 1 million applications have already been created on the platform.
This new commercial OpenShift offering runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and comes with Red Hat Global Support Services. In a statement, Ashesh Badani, Red Hat's general manager of Cloud and OpenShift, said, "As PaaS matures, enterprise developers want world-class support so they can focus less on system administration and more on coding. Our new OpenShift Online brings enterprise-grade services to public PaaS, and gives Red Hat the industry’s most complete PaaS portfolio."
Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder of CloudBees, which uses the open-source Jenkins server as the basis for its PaaS, isn't so sure: "We are very happy to welcome OpenShift to the fast-growing public PaaS market. It will be very interesting to see how they manage the challenging switch from being a traditional software vendor to becoming an online service provider. It’s an entirely different business model."
The commercial service, "Silver service tier for OpenShift Online by Red Hat," will be available in North America beginning June 11, 2013 and in Europe the following week, with pricing starting as low as $20.00 per month, including a payment option for Euros. The service will be readily available in other countries in upcoming months.
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