The newest version of Red Hat's PaaS for business uses the container-centric revamp of OpenShift for easier app deployment and management
OpenShift Online, Red Hat's hosted open source PaaS solution, is getting a container-powered revamp.
Specifically, it's being upgraded to run Red Hat's OpenShift 3, which reworks the platform around container technology. This constitutes another step, if a small one, toward Red Hat's vision for an open source-powered enterprise hybrid cloud.
OpenShift 3, released last year and reviewed by InfoWorld's Martin Heller, ditched the "cartridges" and "gears" metaphors earlier versions of OpenShift used for app management and replaced them with Docker and Kubernetes, both of which have large followings outside of Red Hat and OpenShift. But OpenShift kept the developer-centric workflow, which is a key reason for its appeal in the first place.
The new OpenShift Online, currently only in a developer preview, provides OpenShift 3's features and workflow in what amounts to a multi-tenant public cloud. Many of OpenShift 3's features are being deployed as complements to the new environment -- e.g., using Kubernetes as an automatic traffic-scaling system, so admins can focus on the next revision of code rather than on tweaking the system to run well.
With OpenShift in all its incarnations, new and old alike, Red Hat has been trying to avoid recapitulating the failures of previous enterprise PaaSes, many of which were purely public-cloud offerings. Heroku, now a Salesforce property, was one of the first success stories in that vein, but it held on mainly by being a first mover with a loyal audience. CloudBees tried to distinguish itself with a focus on hosting Java and enterprise Jenkins, but it closed its doors to focus on more directly delivering the latter.
By contrast, Red Hat wants OpenShift to be a true hybrid PaaS for businesses that can be consumed in a variety of ways -- the multi-tenant public cloud of OpenShift Online, the managed service offering of OpenShift Dedicated, or the on-premises OpenShift Enterprise.
Red Hat also wants to stand out by having strong hybrid interoperability in each one of these scenarios, courtesy of the container tech on which Red Hat has been focusing its whole product line. OpenShift has always been part of the overall do-it-yourself hybrid-cloud plan, but it was originally devised as an alternative to VMware vSphere: still strongly centered on VMs and legacy technologies like JBoss. With containers, the theory is that Red Hat and its customers won't have to reinvent as many wheels when it comes to deploying and managing apps in a hybrid scenario.
Because the changes to OpenShift are so radical, Red Hat's plan for evolving OpenShift Online is to run both the old and new OpenShift Online platforms side-by-side for a time, allowing those on the previous incarnation of the service to migrate to the new one. Red Hat has published some general plans for how OpenShift 2 will be sunsetted over time in favor of 3.
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