Category: Red Hat

Red Hat Releases OpenShift Enterprise 1.1

This week, Red Hat announced the release of version 1.1 of its platform as a service offering, OpenShift Enterprise. OpenShift Enterprise is the product within Red Hat’s PaaS OpenShift offering that can be deployed both within customer data centers as well in public or hybrid cloud infrastructures. The product supports Java, Ruby, Node.js, Python, PHP, and Perl and runs on the same code used for Red Hat’s online PaaS OpenShift offering.

Key features of Red Hat’s OpenShift Enterprise 1.1 include the following:

•A web-based, developer console for application deployment that supplements the command line interface introduced in version 1.0.
•Reference architecture for deploying OpenShift Enterprise
•Bug fixes that enhance stability and security, particularly with respect to the broker and the node component that serves as the repository for applications, according to The Register.

Built on open source Red Hat software such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss and OpenShift Origin, OpenShift Enterprise represents part of the OpenShift portfolio that was recently named the winner in the “Best Platform as a Service” category by The Cloud Awards 2013 program. Red Hat’s release of OpenShift Enterprise 1.1 three months after the product’s launch in November suggests a seriousness on the part of the Raleigh-based company about enterprise PaaS given that it typically operates in longer release cycles on the order of 18 months.

Red Hat Continues IaaS, PaaS, Hybrid Cloud And Storage Solutions Rollout

At this year’s Red Hat Summit conference in Boston, Red Hat announced plans to release four sets of product packages that more accurately reflect the diversity of the company’s product line now that it has progressed beyond its roots in Red Hat Enterprise Linux as follows:

• OpenShift Enterprise PaaS
-Access to Red Hat’s public PaaS, OpenShift
-Red Hat CloudForms, a management framework for managing on premise hybrid clouds
-JBoss Enterprise Application middleware platform for Java applications
-Red Hat Enterprise Linux
-Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization based on the KVM hypervisor

• Red Hat Hybrid IaaS Solution
-A self-contained solution for building a public and private cloud that allows customers to leverage prepaid computing hours from major cloud providers. The solution contains a virtualization manager as well as cloud orchestration tools.

• Red Hat Cloud With Virtualization
-Virtualization as well as cloud onboarding solutions that collectively enable customers to avoid the two step process of virtualizing applications first, and then moving to a cloud-based infrastructure. Customers can migrate Red Hat Linux server installations to multi-hypervisor infrastructures as well as public and private cloud environments.

• Red Hat Storage Server 2.0
-“Scale-out network-attached storage (NAS)” solution
-Compatible with over 50 dual-socket x86-based servers from the industry’s leading server vendors
-Support for file access protocols such as Common Internet File System (CIFS), Network File System (NFS), HTTP and OpenStack Swift

All this means that Red Hat has placed its bets squarely in the IaaS, PaaS, virtualization and storage verticals as it attempts to diversify from its base as one of the leading enterprise distributors of Linux. The main question, now, concerns Red Hat’s investment in commercializing a variant of OpenStack in tandem with its Platinum member position in the OpenStack Foundation. According to a recent interview in InternetNews with Red Hat’s CTO Brian Stevens, Red Hat is actively thinking about how to deliver enterprise support for OpenStack over an extended period of time, recognizing OpenStack’s six month release schedule, while committing developer resources to contribute to OpenStack code as well.

Red Hat Open-Sources OpenShift PaaS And Calls For Cloud Without Vendor Lock-In

It’s official. Red Hat has open-sourced the code to its Platform as a Service (PaaS) product OpenShift as of Monday. The commercial Linux distributor open-sourced the code for its OpenShift Origin product under an Apache License version 2. Developers can now download OpenShift Origin for free and deploy applications on their laptop or behind a firewall. Developers can also deploy OpenShift Origin on top of OpenStack, the open source IaaS platform that has the support of over 160 organizations including Red Hat itself, which is a Platinum member of the OpenStack Foundation that presides over its governance.

OpenShift Origin is open-sourced within the context of a “meritocratic community project, regardless of developer affiliation.” Red Hat’s commitment to a meritocratic governance model for contributions to OpenShift Origin’s code base recalls the OpenStack Foundation’s pledge of a “technical meritocracy” with respect to OpenStack’s software development.

Red Hat will serve as the principal contributor to OpenShift Origin in the early stages, but invites input from the developer community at large. Red Hat’s wiki on the OpenShift Origin community reminds readers of the company’s historical commitment to “the open source way” as follows:

Red Hat is the initial main contributor to OpenShift Origin, and is the initial donor to the community. Red Hat does not intend to unilaterally dictate roadmaps, to institute self-serving governance models or to censor critical commentary. Please remember, the people who work at Red Hat do so because they also believe in the open source way.

Red Hat underscores its intention not to “unilaterally dictate roadmaps” or “institute self-serving governance models” but rather to foster a development environment marked by “good faith, merit, open development, working community, and well written code.

Red Hat’s blog post announcing the open-sourcing of OpenShift Origin elaborated on its philosophy of meritocratic code development by taking a thinly disguised jab at VMware and its control over the open source Cloud Foundry PaaS platform:

The cloud in general, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and PaaS implementations specifically, should not be vehicles that promote vendor lock-in, nor should they be under the control or “guidance” of vendors. For the cloud to remain open and vibrant, implementations should be truly open, not only in license, but in governance. The OpenShift Origin project sets a high bar for PaaS offerings, developed and governed by developers, for developers.

Here, Red Hat implicitly questions the open-ness of VMware’s Cloud Foundry given the disproportionate influence had by VMware over the Cloud Foundry project. With these notes about the importance of true open source cloud computing, Red Hat appears to be quietly gearing up for a major entry into both the PaaS and IaaS spaces. OpenShift Origin is intended as the product that will lead developers and organizations “upstream” to its commercial variants of OpenShift such as OpenShift Power, which runs on Red Hat’s IaaS platform CloudForms. Moreover, Red Hat’s commentary about IaaS and PaaS platforms that avoid vendor lock-in hint at the beginnings of a marketing platform that positions the Raleigh-based Linux giant as a major player in the OpenStack space.

Red Hat Delivers Storage Appliance On Amazon Web Services

Red Hat is ready to deliver an online storage solution that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) called the Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services. Based on technology from its recent acquisition Gluster, the Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services is intended to provide enterprise grade cloud storage with high availability, performance and scalability. The appliance enables users to aggregate instances of Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and Amazon EC2 to obtain a highly scalable, virtualized storage environment that allows enterprises to leverage the cloud for storage purposes in addition to application deployment. The Red Hat storage appliance boasts asynchronous and synchronous file replication. Synchronous file replication ensures replication across multiple availability zones within a single AWS region, whereas asynchronous file replication enables availability across more than one AWS region. Importantly, the appliance is POSIX compliant, meaning enterprises need not rearchitect applications to transition them to the cloud. Because of its POSIX compliance, the Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services can accommodate Intel-based Unix applications.

Red Hat intends to make its storage appliance available within the platforms of other cloud providers as well. Provisionally, however, the Amazon Web Services partnership with Red Hat represents yet another coup for the Seattle cloud giant as it consolidates its branding as a one stop shopping ground for cloud, Big Data and storage solutions. Red Hat acquired Gluster, the company that provided the underlying technology for its virtual storage solution, in October 2011 for $136 million in cash.

Red Hat Broadens Access To Ceylon Programming Language

Red Hat released a website dedicated to its new programming language Ceylon, a Java Virtual Machine-based language that aims to deliver solutions for some of the drawbacks of Java. The website provides links to access Ceylon code through GitHub, even though the language has not been formally released to the public. Additionally, the Ceylon website contains directions for downloading Ceylon’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE), ahead of the official release expected to arrive upon completion of the Ceylon Project’s first milestone.

Red Hat developer Gavin King provided the first sustained elaboration on Ceylon in April 2011 at QCon Beijing, the Enterprise Software Development Conference. In his keynote address at QCon, King noted that Java provided an exemplary combination of virtual machine execution, automatic memory management and safe referencing, static typing, lexical scoping and readable syntax. Moreover, King described Java as easy to learn, robust and illustrative of a culture of openness with a “huge tradition of developing and sharing reusable code (frameworks, libraries).”

However, King’s keynote remarked upon the importance of an alternative to Java by noting that “after ten often-frustrating years developing frameworks for Java, we simply can’t go any further without a better solution for defining structured data and user interfaces for the following reasons”:

• The interdependence of Java with XML
• The difficulty of defining a user interface in Java
• Lack of modular solutions and reliance instead on multiple platforms
• Lack of support for first class and higher-order functions
• Difficulty of meta-programming in Java

Ceylon’s syntax features attributes that differentiate it from Java such as inherent modularity and a declarative syntax for defining user interfaces, structured data and hierarchical structures. According to its website, Ceylon positions itself in relation to Java and C# as follows:

Ceylon is deeply influenced by Java. You see, we’re fans of Java, but we know its limitations inside out. Ceylon keeps the best bits of Java but improves things that in our experience are annoying, tedious, frustrating, difficult to understand, or bugprone. Furthermore, Ceylon makes it much easier to write generic code (frameworks or libraries), or to naturally describe treelike structures (especially user interfaces). Of course, Java isn’t the only language with good ideas, so Ceylon looks for inspiration in other language families, in everything from Smalltalk to ML.

Despite its differences from Java, Ceylon is intended to appeal to Java developers who can migrate to the language with speed. Ceylon is one of the most recent languages to run atop the Java Virtual Machine alongside JRuby, Scala and Ruby.