Red Hat details OpenShift pricing

Red Hat announced that the Developer Preview of the OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) will, later this year, become FreeShift, a free of charge, entry level PaaS service, and will be complemented by MegaShift, a paid-for commercial service which will offer extra compute and storage capabilities.

OpenShift is based on technologies developed by Makara, a company that was acquired by Red Hat in November 2010. Red Hat introduced the PaaS at last year's Summit: the platform is built around a range of already existing open source products and has been available as an open source project under the name "OpenShift Origin" since the end of April.

The OpenShift software stack was written in Ruby and uses YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language) to define the application containers that are hosted on the platform; Red Hat calls these containers "gears". Red Hat says that OpenShift was the first PaaS to support Java EE 6 Full Profile (Java Enterprise Edition).

Since then, the company has also added support for the Jenkins continuous integration server and the Maven build system, as well as Node.js and Perl. Other supported programming languages include Java, PHP, Ruby and Python. The platform's runtime environment is based on Red Hat's JBoss 7 application server and currently supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB as back-end databases.

Red Hat says that those who use the Developer Preview will find it easy to migrate their applications to FreeShift. With this version, users can use three free gears. MegaShift customers receive up to 16 gears and more storage than FreeShift users. Current plans are to offer MegaShift at a monthly subscription fee of $42 plus additional hourly rates for running gears and Jave EE 6 Full Profile support. There are also $1/GB per month charges for additional storage. Red Hat says that these price plans will "be available later this year".

See also:

• Red Hat updates JBoss EAP and adds NoSQL database, a report from The H.
• Red Hat increases revenue by 19 per cent, a report from The H.

(crve)