Insiders have publicly bet against Red Hat’s platform-as-a-service, but I say it’ll stand by OpenShift without regret.
Is platform-as-a-service only a feature of infrastructure-as-a-service and destined to vanish? Citrix’s chief technology advocate Reuven Cohen made that argument recently, but i feel it is the wrong way around: Infrastructure may best be approached through a PaaS.
I think there’ll several different platforms-as-a-service that will help you launch your next-generation application at the cloud of your choice. I say several because there’s been a debate recently about whether the successful launch of a Cloud Foundry Foundation amounted to the death knell of Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS and the related Project Solum in OpenStack.
Project Solum is suffering momentary suspended animation, because the dust settles around rival VMware/Pivotal’s announcement of a foundation for its Cloud Foundry project. Some Solum backers, comparable to Rackspace, IBM, and Ubuntu, seem like shifting allegiance. Joshua McKenty, CTO of Piston, gave the look to be only stating the most obvious when he bet $10 that Red Hat can be forced to desert OpenShift and join Cloud Foundry by the top of the year. This is not the primary time within the loosely aligned world of software partnerships that practical considerations have left high hopes unsupported.
[Need to learn more in regards to the bet against Red Hat? See Cloud Crossroads: Which Way PaaS?]
Still, if i do know Red Hat, it will become stubborn about keeping OpenShift alive. It has been pushed right into a corner before, and told (by seemingly knowledgeable observers) that its position was untenable and it might be left to wither at the vine. When Oracle disliked the pace at which Red Hat updated the kernel in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat refused to budge. Oracle responded by announcing Oracle Linux and said it’d charge half up to Red Hat for technical support. Software industry watchers predicted a dire future for Red Hat, and its stock value plunged.
Likewise, when Microsoft rattled the patent saber and said only those Linux distributors who reached an agreement with it were safe from patent litigation, Suse Linux and a number of other smaller distributors signed up. Red Hat was stubborn again. a prolonged legal battle was the very last thing a narrow-margin, open source company needed. But Red Hat believed Linux must be beholden to nobody, and Microsoft’s perceived threats never materialized into any action.
Now, McKenty observed, Red Hat is somewhat off on its own in a corner, having lost key support for OpenShift. Rackspace announced the Solum Project because the base from you can deploy a brand new application into an OpenStack Cloud. Red Hat was an early enlistee and said it’d gear OpenShift to feed that deployment system. Now Rackspace is a platinum supporter inside the Cloud Foundry camp.
Is McKenty right? One participant within the debate that came about inside the comments to that story said, no, Red Hat will take longer than the ten months McKenty predicted to confess it’s backing the inaccurate horse. i’d suggest otherwise: Red Hat will redouble efforts to make OpenShift a viable PaaS platform, though that issue just isn’t solely in Red Hat’s hands. It’ll ought to work in this type of way that other companies and independent software developers join to assist.
The world’s first $1 billion open source company has experience in doing just that. It also has a fund of workmanship in regards to the Linux kernel and the direction wherein Linux applications are moving. What will happen isn’t a Red Hat capitulation, but an expression of Red Hat’s stubbornness — and the emergence of the concept PaaS is a more valuable platform than first imagined.
There won’t be one sort of PaaS, but several, each with distinct advantages. PaaS will survive, not as a feature of infrastructure, but as a different sort of cloud computing that eases access, development, and deployments to public cloud. Go, Red Hat.
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Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week. He’s a graduate of Syracuse … View Full Bio
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