CentOS Now Supported By OpenShift
Hot on the heels of the news that CentOS was officially joining the RedHat family, the OpenShift project has announced that OpenShift Origin would now be officially supported for CentOS, which joins Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. OpenShift is Red Hat’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift has three flavors: the Red Hat hosted Online version, the self hosted and supported Enterprise version, and Origin, the community-driven upstream version of OpenShift.
What Fedora is to RHEL, Origin is to OpenShift. The object of this part of the project is not necessarily for large scale enterprise deployment, but for individual contributors or small groups to evaluate the system for possible adoption, and developers to contribute fixes and enhancements.
OpenShift claims that there is very little different about OpenShift on CentOS:
We've included some new package(s) for avahi-based MDNS Multicast support. All packages compiled against EL6 mock target to ensure that CentOS has all the required dependencies in it and it will work on both RHEL and CentOS. Other than that, it's just been the regular build/test/debug "business-as-usual" for any Origin release cycle.
The concept behind OpenShift is compelling. At it's core, OpenShift is a management infrastructure for deploying applications in Linux containers, which it calls "Gears". "Cartridges" are reusable application components, like PHP or MySQL, which are plugged into Gears to run the application. The entire system is managed from a Ruby on Rails application called the Broker, that can be interacted with using the web console, the rhc ruby gem, or by using JBoss Tools in Eclipse.
The OpenShift team will become a part of the CentOS community,joining in with the Cloud special interest group, as well as making appearances at upcoming Dojos, which are one day community events sponsored by CentOS. Additionally, OpenShift has committed to continuing support for CentOS, integrating testing into their build and release process.
I will be the first to admit that I was a bit on edge when I read the news that CentOS and Red Hat were joining forces, but the first fruits of their union appear to be quite sweet. Deploying CentOS in our datacenter has been a resounding success, and if what we are seeing with OpenShift is an example of deeper integration and collaboration with Red Hat and associated Red Hat sponsored projects, I think we can look forward to great things for both CentOS and the rest of the Red Hat family.