Free and open source company and Linux distribution vendor Red Hat has introduced ‘OpenShift’, its new open source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) designed to allow software developers to build, test, deploy and run new applications as a cloud-based service.
Companies such as Microsoft, Google, Salesforce.com, and Amazon have been offering non-open source PaaS for years. Virtualisation company Vmware had announced its own open source PaaS service, Cloud Foundry, in April this year.
OpenShift comes in two versions, which are now available as free betas. The final release will take place later this year and will be hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): Express and Flex. Another third option – CloudForms – is expected to provide a more comprehensive infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform, said the company.
However, Red hat has said that some parts of the new offering are preserved and that the service will be fully open source in future.
Red Hat PaaS master Isaac Roth said, "Some parts [of OpenShift] are open source but other parts, like the user interface, are preserved. OpenShift is planning to be open eventually."
