Red Hat Announces the Pricing Details of OpenShift

Red Hat claims that they are the only PaaS offering to support Java 2 EE. Like Heroku and Windows Azure, OpenShift offers compute units in the form of Gears, which are containers that typically host fine-grained applications. Cartridges are pre-configured containers that host a framework like PHP or a service like MySQL. I deployed a few PHP applications on OpenShift shortly after it was made available and the experience has been smooth. It is encouraging to see Red Hat constantly add features and services to the platform making it one of the viable PaaS offerings in the market.

The new pricing announcement has two tiers – FreeShift and MegaShift. FreeShift offers up to 3 free small Gears that come with 1GB of storage on each Gear. MegaShift is the paid tier that offers additional Gears of medium size and the key feature is the official support from Red Hat. Below is a summary of the new pricing structure.

It is interesting to note that Microsoft has recently announced Windows Azure Websites with similar capabilities. Developers can host up to 10 websites free of cost with an ability to move into the reserved mode when they need to scale.

With every PaaS turning to be polyglot and offering free compute and storage resources, developers can try a variety of Clouds before going live!

-Janakiram MSV, Chief Editor, CloudStory.in