With just about every vendor trying to get in front of what will likely be a major shift to platform as a service (PaaS) in the enterprise, Red Hat has outlined a next-generation cloud computing strategy based on the company’s OpenShift architecture.
According to Red Hat President Paul Cormier, the core element of the Red Hat PaaS platform is Red Hat JBoss xPaaS Services for OpenShift, which is based on the JBoss middleware that Red Hat acquired in 2006.
On top of that service are what Red Hat refers to as cartridges that IT organizations can plug in, which includes modules for integration, business process management (BPM) and building mobile applications. The end goal, says Cormier, is to give IT organizations an open source option for deploying a PaaS environment that can be easily deployed across private and public cloud computing services.
Going forward, Cormier says that Red Hat will add additional BPM modules for the cloud, a Fuse data virtualization platform, support for shared processes, advanced data synchronization capabilities and new data grid services.
Instead of having islands of cloud computing resources, Cormier says OpenShift provides a foundation for integrating private and public cloud computing services in any way an IT organization sees fit. The difference between the Red Hat approach and rival PaaS platforms, says Cormier, is that Red Hat is delivering PaaS across hybrid cloud computing environments in a way that doesn’t require IT organization to change their processes or developers to modify their code.
Clearly, vendors of all sizes are more than aware that the battle for control over the cloud is moving to the PaaS level, and many options are available. In fact, it’s even more than likely that IT organizations will be supporting multiple PaaS environments across an extended hybrid cloud computing environment. As a provider of open source software, Red Hat expects to be one of the major PaaS environments.