Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments have essentially emerged as a superset of functionality traditionally associated with application servers. Today, Red Hat moved to better integrate those two environments in a way that further blurs the line between them.
With the launch of private integrated platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) in the cloud, Red Hat is extending its xPaaS cloud services using the company’s JBoss Fuse enterprise service bus and JBoss A-MQ messaging software.
Meanwhile, version 2.2 of the Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise PaaS environment that can be deployed on premise now supports application placement and middleware cartridge configuration controls in addition to being integrated with Red Hat CloudForms, the company’s hybrid cloud computing management platform and enhanced PaaS management.
Red Hat is also now previewing an ability to run multiple types of containers within the OpenShift PaaS platform, in addition to new containers for mobile applications, data virtualization capabilities and business process and rules management tools.
Finally, Red Hat is also now providing out-of-the-box integration with a variety of identity management and DNS management platforms.
Joe Fernandes, Red Hat director of product management for OpenShift, says the ultimate goal is to advance adoption of hybrid cloud computing models that can then be more naturally extended to Red Hat PaaS environments running on a public cloud. To that end, Fernandes says Red Hat is making a concerted effort to unify application development and IT operations in the enterprise regardless of where an application workload happens to be running. For example, OpenShift Enterprise deployments can be fully automated and controlled by Red Hat CloudForms.
Over time, it will be interesting to see how many of these technologies ultimately merge into one another. But until then, IT organizations will have to be content with the fact that progress is at least being made in terms of establishing more actual interoperability between them.