The primary advantage of the Platform as a Service model, in theory at least, is that it allows user businesses to pull together the core underpinnings of whatever service they require from a repository of tools and services, and with the minimum of integration engineering, leaving them more free to concentrate on building their own IP into a full service offering.
It is this model that Red Hat is pitching at with OpenShift PaaS, the latest version of which, OpenShift Enterprise 2, is now generally available. This is being pitched by Red Hat at those customers looking to increase the velocity, efficiency and scalability of their IT service delivery, and achieve faster development of new applications and business services in order to reduce time-to-market.
This comes with a range of new features, such as datacentre infrastructure integration, a new, advanced administration console, support for even more programming languages, and new collaboration capabilities. The company has also expanded its global availability, offering a wider range of developers the opportunity to use private PaaS technology for their cloud deployments. “Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”
Red Hat sees OpenShift Enterprise as a critical component of its vision for the open hybrid cloud, providing an on-demand, elastic, scalable and fully configured application development, testing and hosting environment. This is expected to allow application developers to focus on coding new application services with reduced operational burdens. It automates much of the provisioning and systems management of the application platform stack in a way that enables the IT operations team to more easily meet growing business demands for new application services.
It is built on a trusted stack of open source-based Red Hat technologies, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and OpenShift Origin, the open source PaaS project that forms the foundation for all of Red Hat’s suite of OpenShift PaaS platforms.
The new Enterprise 2 version introduces several new features that the company claims will make private PaaS easier to consume and implement. These include new levels of datacentre integration that simplify the deployment of OpenShift on OpenStack via OpenStack Orchestration (Heat) templates. This enables OpenShift’s plugin-based integration with external router and load balancer infrastructure, and provides a streamlined OpenShift Enterprise installer, enabling IT to more quickly realise the benefits of cloud computing.
It also adds an advanced administration console, offering IT operations a more streamlined PaaS experience and giving them visibility into the applications, users and overall capacity of their PaaS platform.
Support for the latest programming languages gives developers access to a wide variety of popular programming languages, including Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and now Node.js for server-side JavaScript. This enables them to push their development creativity and innovation while meeting enterprise business requirements.
It also adds new collaboration capabilities, enabling developers to more easily share access to their applications for team-based development, bringing the benefits of community-powered innovation to the enterprise.
