OpenShift set to revolutionize PaaS platforms

Download this podcast

No single project has shaken up the cloud computing segment more than OpenStack, and no single project has the capacity to revolutionize the platform as a service (PaaS) space more than OpenShift, which is why all the announcements coming out of the 2015 Red Hat Summit about the future of OpenShift are of such great interest to the enterprise computing community.

So what's new in the world of OpenShift? "There's a lot of good stuff going on," said Clayton Coleman, a lead engineer with OpenShift at Red Hat. "We've got our new platform build on top of Kubernetes and Docker, so it's a big leap forward for OpenShift." Among other advancements, the latest iteration of OpenShift integrates a great deal of collaboration with the minds behind the Google cloud platform --meaning enhanced support for clustering, scheduling, orchestration and management of containers. And it probably doesn't require mentioning, but the Docker container experiences a similar first-class treatment with OpenShift 3.

Of course, with container management being such a hot topic, it's the work OpenShift has done with Docker and Kubernetes that always gets the most media attention. But the future success of open source PaaS is dependent upon much more than simplifying the technical challenges of orchestrating the communications between distributed containers. According to Coleman, providing services and tools that address higher level concerns are the future of the platform. "Docker and Kubernetes are two incredibly powerful and popular platforms," Coleman said.

"We want to build a layer on top of them for the administration team for security, authorization, policy and also include development focused tools as well. We want to bring all of these things together and deliver them as part of a coherent package." And the work doesn't stop there, with future aspirations including the introduction of more native cloud applications that will simplify autoscaling, cluster management and database software integration.

For those paying attention, OpenShift is not only revolutionizing the PaaS space, but it's also embracing the entire philosophy of DevOps by creating tools and advancing technologies that simplify the lives of operations professionals and also help to make many of the necessary but largely unproductive tasks that slow down software development a little less tedious. "We are trying to build out solutions that make it easy for both developers and operators to run these types of applications," Coleman said.

We want to reduce the amount of things developers have to keep track of, and give more power to operators.

Clayton Coleman, lead engineer with OpenStack at Red Hat

"We want to reduce the amount of things developers have to keep track of and give more power to operators to make those types of things happen." There is a reason people who are passionate about DevOps are equally passionate about OpenShift. The OpenShift PaaS quite simply makes it incredibly easy for software developers to get new projects started quickly, which means starting development early. Similarly, OpenShift tools make it simple to roll out changes to hundreds, if not thousands of applications at the same time, with little to no interruption of the development process. And application lifecycle management is greatly simplified when the platform of choice is OpenShift.

Along with Ashesh Badani, Joe Fernandes and Matt Hicks, Clayton Coleman is speaking at the 2015 Red Hat Summit in a session entitled OpenShift 3 and the next generation of PaaS. Understandably, not everyone is able to make it to Boston in late June, but to hear Coleman's insights about DevOps, OpenStack, PaaS technology and the future of OpenShift, listen to the accompanying podcast.