Red Hat Leverages AWS to Push OpenShift Further into Enterprises

Red Hat has just announced the general availability of OpenShift Dedicated, a new cloud-based service targeting enterprise IT and development teams. OpenShift Dedicated includes the Docker container and Kubernetes orchestration technologies included in the recently-released OpenShift Enterprise 3.1

and builds on OpenShift Online, Red Hat's offering for individual developers to build, launch and host their applications in a shared public cloud, supported by Red Hat.

The company is also leveraging the Amazon Web Services platform with its middleware and container offerings.  OpenShift Dedicated is essentially a new, Amazon-based option for deploying Red Hat's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) applications platform, with help from Google’s Kubernetes.

According to a recent IDC MarketScape report, Red Hat has become a major player in the cloud application platform space. Since it’s launch in November 2011, there has been a notable increase in the number of applications created on and developers using OpenShift Online. Red Hat says that the general availability of OpenShift Dedicated presents a third consumption model for Red Hat's OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. According to its advisory, customers will have the following options:

OpenShift Enterprise, designed for organizations who want to deploy and manage their OpenShift instances on their choice of on-premise hardware or certified cloud provider;

OpenShift Online, for individual developers or teams who want to access OpenShift as a service in the public cloud, using on-demand consumption in a multi-tenant environment hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS); 

OpenShift Dedicated, the newest offering for enterprise IT organizations who want to use Red Hat technology to deploy, manage and support their OpenShift instances running on AWS.

Many customers in the application space want more control over the building and isolation process for their applications, but often do not want to complete administrative and operational management tasks alone. Unlike other public cloud offerings that may require administrative support, Red Hat claims it acts as the service provider, managing OpenShift Dedicated and offering industry-leading support, helping boost efficiency.

OpenShift Dedicated’s base package includes single-tenant isolation and a resource pool of 100GB SSD-based persistent storage, 48TB network iops and nine nodes to deploy container-based applications. Administrative and security controls enable each customer to customize and more securely access their cloud environment using VPN and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) functions. With OpenShift Dedicated, customers can also access Red Hat JBoss Middleware container-optimized services, integration and business process capabilities from applications developed and deployed on OpenShift.

Ashesh Badani, vice president, OpenShift, Red Hat, said:

”We are pleased to continue to expand OpenShift's portfolio of offerings, extending new support to users running OpenShift in the public cloud and enabling the power of an open source application platform to extend into more layers of cloud computing. New users signing on to OpenShift Dedicated can experience the same powerful combination of Red Hat-backed support, middleware services and container functionality they have come to expect in OpenShift Enterprise – now optimized for the public cloud.”