Red Hat follows VMware with open-source PaaS

Red Hat has become the latest vendor to offer companies open source platform as a service (PaaS), OpenShift, which will enable software developers to build, test, deploy and run new applications as a cloud based service.

The announcement comes hot on the heels of virtualisation giant VMware's own open source PaaS service, Cloud Foundry, announced in April, while other companies, including Microsoft, Google, Salesforce.com, and Amazon have been offering non-open source PaaS for years.

Both OpenShift and Cloud Foundry say they will provide development tools to build applications in both public and private clouds using a wide choice of development languages and models that include Ruby on Rails, Java, Java EE, PHP, Django, CDI and Python and access middleware such as JBoss, and databases including MySQL, NoSQL and Postgres.

OpenShift has two versions, currently available as free betas and set for final release to registered users later this year, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): Express, which Red Hat will operate for users content to transfer their applications, and Flex, which provides more control of the development environment. A third option – CloudForms – provides a more comprehensive infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform.

Not all of the OpenShift components will be immediately available as open source options and the company has yet to announce pricing for subscription to support and maintenance services.

VMware's Cloud Foundry offers similarly flexible options, which include a hosted service delivered in partnership with provider RackSpace, one that enterprises run behind their own firewalls, or a downloadable Micro Cloud environment that developers install on their own laptops.

While some developers worry about losing control of their software development environments, especially when it comes to modifying and distributing their applications, others prefer using PaaS because it leaves them to concentrate on developing new code and effectively outsources responsibility for provisioning server, middleware and database resources or handling application lifecycle management tasks required to support software development.