After years in which Platform as a Service vendors had been eclipsed by the Infrastructure as a Service space, PaaS vendors appear to be making a comeback as enterprises take stock of the benefits of preconfigured technology stacks and development platforms that absolve IT administrators of the complexities of provisioning and managing ecosystems of virtual machines. Responding to consumer demand, for example, Red Hat recently announced the expansion of its commercial, public Platform as a Service, OpenShift Online, to 14 European countries including Greece, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Cyprus and Malta. The geographic expansion of the purview of OpenShift renders the commercial, silver tier of OpenShift Online available to customers and thereby provides them with the option of technical support, free storage upgrades and additional resources.
In related news, Red Hat also announced the expansion of its partner program for its ecosystem of OpenShift PaaS products, which provides pre-configured support for development in Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Node.js, and Perl. While OpenShift Online represents Red Hat’s public PaaS, its suite of PaaS offerings also includes OpenShift Enterprise, a PaaS for on premise private clouds, and OpenShift Origin, the open source PaaS project whose code forms the foundation for all of Red Hat’s suite of OpenShift PaaS platforms. Red Hat expanded its partner program for the OpenShift PaaS suite of platforms to include application performance management, backend as a service, database as a service, IT integration and consulting vendors such as AppDynamics, Continuent, Kinvey, Netsource Partners, Phase 2, StrongLoop, Vizuri and Pat V. Mack. The expansion of Red Hat’s partner program means that OpenShift developers and customers now have even more tools at their disposal for building applications using the OpenShift platform.
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