Red Hat delivers enterprise-grade OpenShift PaaS for app development

Red Hat has expanded its cloud computing portfolio with the release of OpenShift Enterprise, a ready-packaged platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering for application development and deployment, which can be deployed on-premise, or in public or hybrid clouds.

OpenShift Enterprise is claimed by Red Hat as the industry's first fully open PaaS platform, built with components such as Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation and the Red Hat Storage technology the firm gained through its acquisition of Gluster last year.

Crucially, OpenShift Enterprise is a fully supported product backed by Red Hat's enterprise support services, unlike the OpenShift Origin code it released as an open-source project earlier this year.

It also includes Red Hat's JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, and provides developers with multiple application development choices including Java, Ruby, Python, PHP and Perl.

Ashesh Badani, Red Hat's general manager for Cloud and OpenShift, explained that PaaS was the best approach for enterprise application development, as it does not require specific infrastructure to be provisioned and allocated for each project, radically shortening development cycles.

However, many firms are still wary of using public cloud infrastructure for key applications, and so OpenShift Enterprise can be hosted on premise, as well as deployed by service providers.

"We recognise the choices that enterprise customers want, whether they wish to deploy to physical, or private cloud or trusted public cloud infrastructure, and we see that as a real differentiator for us against other PaaS platforms," Badani added.

OpenShift Enterprise is designed to scale and provide an elastic, on-demand application development environment, as well as providing support for high availability and multi-tenant environments, according to Red Hat.

OpenShift Enterprise is available initially in North America, the UK and Europe, with plans for global availability in the near future. Red Hat said that its own OpenShift PaaS online service remains available in developer preview.