Building on its experience with the OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for developers, Red Hat has followed through on its promise to release OpenShift Enterprise. The move follows a road map and strategy the company first announced in the spring.
During that announcement in May, Red Hat said it would extend OpenShift PaaS so that enterprises could maximize their operational flexibility and application development efficiency.
With Tuesday's launch, OpenShift GM Ashesh Badani said in a statement, "developers are now able to choose among leading application development languages and tools for the job," while IT can select the clouds on which to deliver these application stacks to the enterprise  . Red Hat Vice President of Engineering and CTO Brian Stevens described OpenShift as the cloud destination that developers have "been dreaming of," because of its broad choice of languages, frameworks and supported cloud providers.
'Redefines the PaaS Market'
Red Hat had launched OpenShift the preceding May, in 2011, for developers who use open source. It said at that time that OpenShift "redefines" the PaaS market by providing a "new level of choice in languages, frameworks and clouds" for developers to build, test, run and manage their applications.
The company said OpenShift offered greater flexibility than any other PaaS because of its support for more development frameworks for Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby, including Spring, Seam, Weld, CDI, Rails, Rack, Symfony, Zend Framework, Twisted, Django and Java EE. Additionally, both SQL and NoSQL data stores and a distributed file system are included, and OpenShift utilizes the Deltacloud cloud interoperability standard so that developers could run their applications on any supported Red Hat Certified Public Cloud Provider.
The core enterprise technologies powering OpenShift PaaS are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Storage, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, and OpenShift's integrated programming languages, frameworks and developer tools.
Management Choices
In launching the enterprise version, Red Hat noted that the OpenShift platform has evolved to include emerging development languages, such as Node.js, and it became the first PaaS to support Java EE 6 and to offer comprehensive lifecycle support for Java. The company, in keeping with its ethos, has also made available the code behind the OpenShift platform through the open source OpenShift Origin project that began in April.
In its May 2012 road map, the company pointed out that enterprises have additional operational considerations beyond developers' needs, such as ones related to compliance, enterprise architecture standards, IT governance, security, application lifecycle management , application development methodologies, data and computer locality, privacy, and other requirements.
With OpenShift Enterprise, companies have several choices of management and operational models. A DevOps model allows developers to deploy and manage applications either through a Public PaaS solution, or via a Private PaaS solution with OpenShift on-premise. Using an ITOps model, IT teams can maintain centralized control over their applications and infrastructure , based on OpenShift with Red Hat Cloud Forms. OpenShift can also be self-managed and available offline, running on a developer's laptop .
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