Red Hat's OpenShift Online opens for paying customers

Red Hat has announced the commercial launch of its public Platform-as-a-Service cloud, OpenShift Online. The new service has been in preview or beta since May 2011 and has been developed alongside an on-premises enterprise version, OpenShift Enterprise, released in November 2012, and drawn its technology from open source basis for the platform, OpenShift Origin, released in May 2012.

OpenShift is built around an architecture of gears and cartridges that run atop of Red Hat Enterprise Linux typically on an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud. Gears are the OpenShift term for the resource constrained containers the OpenShift platform runs on and come in small or medium. Cartridges are software stacks which run on the gears. Application code is handled through a Git repository built into the application; a developer can create an OpenShift application, then clone the built in-repository, develop the code and configuration, test locally and then push the changes up to the application in the cloud where they would be put in place and executed.

Cartridges are available with language stacks for Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, Node.js, Perl, or with application server stacks for JBoss EAP/AS, Tomcat and Zend. There are also database cartridges for MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL and utility/tool cartridges for Jenkins (server and client), SwitchYard and Cron scheduling. Developers can, of course, create their own cartridges too.

Red Hat says its "Silver Tier" service, which gives subscribing developers access to technical support and additional resources, will be available from today in North America, with pricing "as low as $20 per month". The service will become available in Europe next week with pricing yet to be announced. As well as the supported tier, there is also a free plan in the pricing with community support and three small gears and limited storage. "Silver Tier" users can, with additional usage costs, run up to 16 small (4c/hour) or medium(10c/hour) gears with auto-scaling and 6GB of storage per gear at no extra cost. SSL is also available for custom domains under the plan too.

(djwm)