Red Hat Looks To Build OpenShift Momentum
Leveraging the "momentum" of its commercial platform-as-a-service, Red Hat says it is looking to expand its OpenShift Online service in Europe with a new hosting offering in Ireland.
Red Hat is boasting rapid uptake of its OpenShift Online service since it was introduced in November 2011, including the launch of more than 2 million applications on the public PaaS. Since August 2013, the open-source specialist claims 105 percent annual growth in applications along with 103 percent year-on-year growth in users.
"We have a lot of momentum," Sathish Balakrishnan, Red Hat's OpenShift director, added in an interview. "There's been a lot of developer traction, especially in Europe."
In order to maintain that momentum in the face of growing competition from the likes of Cloud Foundry, the new OpenShift hosting service will deliver applications from a second European location while offering functionality equal to Red Hat's other U.S. and European hosting locations. The new service also is intended to host applications closer to user access points in the growing European market.
Along with expanded availability, Red Hat is stressing greater flexibility in its platform cloud, promising a mix of online and hybrid services. "We want to give customers an option on where they want to run their applications," Balakrishnan said.
OpenShift's "end-to-end stack" from operating system on up provides a more consistent user interface for app developers working in both public and private clouds, Balakrishnan maintained, differentiating its platform from competitors such as Cloud Foundry.
The rivalry between the two open-source PaaS services is expected to heat up with the launch of the Cloud Foundry Foundation later this fall. Pivotal Software, the enterprise PaaS provider coordinating the Cloud Foundry transition, announced eight new financial and technology members in May.
Some Foundation members have already built PaaS offerings based on open-source approaches. Cloud Foundry is expected to compete against OpenShift as well as proprietary services from Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
Hence, Red Hat is promoting OpenShift Online as allowing developers to build, launch and host applications in the public cloud. Running on top of Amazon Web Services, the PaaS architecture automates the provisioning and scaling of applications. That is supposed to free developers to write code for new or upgraded applications.
Balakrishnan added that OpenShift uses a "fairly consistent" three-week release cycle in which Red Hat pushes out new code to production containing new OpenShift features and bug fixes. Earlier this month, the company said it was rolling out a new "production gear" dubbed Small.highcpu designed to double CPU performance.
Meanwhile, Red Hat has deployed its own OpenStack along with its own OpenShift platform cloud atop AMD SeaMicro SM15000 servers launched by the chipmaker two years ago.
In April, Red Hat rolled out an OpenShift Marketplace designed to make it easier to add technologies developed by its open-source partners to applications running on the commercial PaaS.
