OpenShift: Red Hat’s PaaS Offering
OpenShift, Red Hat’s PaaS (platform as a service) was announced in May 2011, during the Red Hat Summit 2011 in Boston. The PaaS environment supports a variety of programming languages and frameworks, including Java, Ruby, PHP, Python and more. It enables developers who build on open source and offers a wider variety of languages, frameworks and clouds for developers to build, test, run and manage applications. OpenShift builds on Red Hat’s JBoss expertise.
At the release, Vice President of Engineering and Chief Technology Officer at Red Hat, Brian Stevens said: “Developers turn to open source for innovation and choice. With OpenShift, we deliver the first Platform-as-a-Service that meets those needs. By providing the broadest platform and choice of languages, frameworks and supported cloud providers, OpenShift gives developers the cloud destination they’ve been dreaming of.”
Currently, OpenShift code is not open source, though the company has promised to make the code available at some point in the future.
According to Isaac Roth, Red Hat’s PaaS Master, OpenShift “is PaaS 2.0. It’s open choice of frameworks. It’s open choice of clouds – it’s not our cloud, it’s the cloud you want. And it’s open choice of middleware. Open, open, open.”
Roth also went on to describe how Red Hat OpenShift delivers greater flexibility than other PaaS options, as it supports more development frameworks for Java, Python, PHP and Ruby, including Spring, Seam, Weld, CDI, Rials, Rack, Symfony, Zend Framework, Twisted, Django and Java EE. Openshifts allows developers to run their apps on any supported Red Hat Certified Public Cloud Provider.
Delivery Models
OpenShift currently comes in three versions:
- Express – OpenShift Express offers a quick and convenient way to get Ruby, PHP, Perl and Python apps in the cloud. It is a shared-hosting, multi-tenant environment. The OpenShift Express client tools are easily downloadable, and allow the deployment and management of the app in the cloud. This offering is developer-oriented.
- Flex – OpenShift Flex manages resources offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). OpenShift Flex is available as a free trial, in developer preview form, without any service level agreements. It allows developers to carry out the following: build server cluster and application stack; deploy, modify, rollback and restart applications; end-to-end monitoring and auto-scaling built-in. This offering is operations-oriented. It will soon be offered as a dedicated hosting environment.
- Power – OpenShift Power can deploy applications to the cloud that are written to Linux and anything that builds on Linus. This includes completely customized architectures as well as standard n-tier deployments. OpenShift Power will be able to deploy applications which lack a web front-end (e.g. modeling systems, payment processing, client-server, trading systems, etc.). It includes an image configuration system, scripting template system, image library for reusing templates and a way to dynamically define multi-VM architectures. This model is not yet released.
Java EE 6 Support
On August 10, 2011, OpenShift announced that it supports Java Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6). This support comes as a result of than integration with the open source JBoss Application Server 7 (AS7). Red Hat claimed that OpenShift is the first PaaS offering in the industry to delivery Java EE 6 to simplify (how application developers build and deploy Java in the cloud.”
Notably, this announcement means that Java EE 6 includes Content and Dependency Injection (CDI), which is a standards-based programming framework which makes it easier for developers to build dynamic applications. According to Isaac Roth:
“We’re really excited about CDI… [because it] allows Java developers to get going in the cloud in a really fast, agile manner. I feel like this development model for Java is going to power the next generation of mobile, social and cloud-scale applications. It’s a great way to develop applications, and combined with OpenShift, it leaves all of the operational aspects to a service, so you don’t have to worry about that stuff.”
Summary
This article takes a look at OpenShift, a PaaS offered by Red Hat Cloud. Since its launch in May 2011, OpenSHift has offered developers a service for building, hosting and readily scaling applications. The platform is able to run Java, Ruby, PHP and Python applications. it is anticipated that by the end of the year, the OpenShift platform cloud will be able to support production apps and offer standard service level agreements.
CCSK Exam Preparation
In preparation for the Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSK), a security professional should be comfortable with topics related to this post, including:
- Provider Selection (Domain 8 )
- Differences in SPI Models (Domain 10)
- Virtual Machines (Domain 13)
