News

Red Hat to Provide Java EE-based EAP 6 in OpenShift PaaS, Announces Plans for 'Supported' OpenShift

• By John K. Waters
• June 26, 2012

Red Hat is now providing its Java EE-based JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6.0 (EAP 6) in the developer preview of its free OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environment. Announced last week, EAP is the commercially supported version of the company's open source JBoss Application Server.

Red Hat grabbed headlines last August when it announced that OpenShift would support Java Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) via integration with JBoss Application Server 7 (AS7). At the time, Mark Little, senior director of engineering in the company's JBoss group, told ADTmag that OpenShift was the first PaaS in the industry to deliver Java EE 6 to simplify "how application developers build and deploy Java in the cloud."

Running EAP 6 on OpenShift creates "the industry's first enterprise-grade Java PaaS," the company said, and "defines a new category of cloud-enabled application servers."

Writing in his blog, Little declared that "this announcement means we're the first to put a supported [Java] EE6 application server into the cloud," adding that, "now that EAP 6 is on OpenShift you should expect to see more of our platforms appear there over the coming months."

With EAP 6 running on OpenShift, the company says, developers can deploy code directly to the PaaS within JBoss Developer Studio 5 dev environment. They can also use such advanced Java features as EJB 3.1 and JMS, and take advantage of simplified web and command-line configuration and administration. They can also run a variety of Java frameworks for Web, mobile, HTML5 and complex applications, the company said.

Information on how to get started with EAP 6 on OpenShift is available here. The company is providing tutorials and quickstarts authored by its engineering teams.

In a related announcement, Red Had also unveiled a new business model and pricing plans for OpenShift. The company said it will offer two tiers of support for a hosted version of the PaaS: FreeShift, which, as the name suggests, is free, and MegaShift, which is the "initial paid tier."

Launched last year, OpenShift was initially aimed at open source developers. It comes with built-in management and auto-scaling capabilities that freed developers from stack setup, maintenance, and operational chores so they could focus on coding. OpenShift supports a range of programming languages, including Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, and Perl, as well numerous frameworks, databases and clouds. And integration with the JBoss app server enables a cloud-ready architecture with a lightweight footprint and dynamic container model, the company said, to better support multi-core processing and multi-tenancy.

The FreeShift version will provide developers with essentially the same features and capabilities. OpenShift PaaS today will have the opportunity to automatically migrate to FreeShift, the company said in a statement, "which will continue the same experience they already are enjoying."

The MegaShift version will extend the PaaS's ability to add storage space past the 1GB "per gear" limit of FreeShift. Red Hat uses the metaphor of automobile transmission "gears" to define a container with a set of resources that allows users to run its applications. "OpenShift runs many gears on each virtual machine and dynamically distributes gears across them," the company says on its website. While FreeShift users are limited to three gears, MegaShift users will be allowed up to 16 gears. The company expects to charge a $42 monthly platform fee and a per-gear-hour fee for gears past the first three.

The company made the announcements at the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World 2012 events in Boston.