Red Hat Open Sources OpenShift in a bid to compete with VMware Cloud Foundry

The Open Source PaaS space gets hot with this announcement. VMware was the first to announce Cloud Foundry as the Open PaaS. Both VMware and Red Hat aim at competing with the closed PaaS implementations like Microsoft Windows Azure, Google App Engine, Heorku and Engine Yard. Both of them also want to play in the space of Private PaaS. Technically, Red Hat OpenShift’s architecture resembles VMware Cloud Foundry. It is a polyglot PaaS with built in support for Node.js, Ruby, Java, Python, PHP and Perl. It supports various databases including MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL. Developers can also push any language and framework as DIY applications on OpenShift. Red Hat will host OpenShift to continue the commercial implementation while expecting developers to download the source code and build their own PaaS implementations. Cloud Foundry has picked up quite a bit of momentum in the last one year with the prominent players like ActiveState, AppFog and Tier 3 going live with their implementation. It may not be easy for Red Hat to compete with Cloud Foundry in gaining the mindshare.

This announcement also gives enterprises an option to choose Private PaaS frameworks between OpenShift and Cloud Foundry. Just like Cloud Foundry, OpenShift can be deployed anywhere from a single VM to a multi node cluster. It will be interesting to watch this space in the coming days.

In January, Red Hat has announced that it is unifying OpenShift Express and OpenShift Flex to offer a consistent experience. It is unclear whether Red Hat will start charging for subscription and support in the future. But unlike VMware, Red Hat seems to be keen on turning its OpenShift implementation to support commercial applications through its support for JBoss and J2EE applications.

- Janakiram MSV, Chief Editor, CloudStory.in