Two words describe the stakes of cloud computing today: open source. Despite the proliferation of vendors and the radical prolixity of cloud product offerings, open source remains the world on everyone’s lips in both IaaS and PaaS circles. As the web buzzed with news of Citrix’s defection from OpenStack, and the tech blogosphere took in Red Hat’s feat of surpassing the $1 billion mark in revenue, Red Hat’s decision to open-source its OpenShift PaaS platform escaped the attention of cloud pundits that had focused on the ascendancy of the Amazon Web Services API, CloudStack’s incubation by the Apache Software Foundation and OpenStack’s release of its latest version, Essex.
Red Hat announced plans to open-source OpenShift at the Open Cloud Conference from April 30 to May 3, 2012 in Sunnyvale, California. OpenShift, which supports Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl and Node.js, will be available under an Apache license on Github. The Raleigh, NC-based commercial Linux distributor acquired the foundation of OpenShift as a result of its acquisition of Makara in November 2010, although OpenShift additionally uses JBoss Application Server as well. Red Hat plans to run a number of workshops at the Open Cloud Conference to guide developers in the steps required to install its PaaS platform in addition to instructing users how to run OpenShift on OpenStack. OpenShift will join VMWare’s Cloud Foundry as another open source PaaS platform that can be commercialized by aspiring vendors into an enterprise-grade PaaS offering.
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