Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the business model and pricing plans for its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering to provide support to companies in application development and deployment. Available as a free service since May 2011, OpenShift PaaS delivers to developers a cloud application platform with a choice of programming languages, frameworks and application lifecycle tools to build their applications.

The OpenShift platform has made its mark on the PaaS industry over the past year, becoming the first PaaS to support Java EE 6 and to offer comprehensive lifecycle support for Java in the cloud. The code that powers Red Hat's OpenShift platform was made available to the open source community through the OpenShift Origin project in April 2012. The following month, Red Hat announced plans to extend OpenShift PaaS to allow enterprises to use both leading-edge DevOps operational models, as well as traditional application management methodologies.

Building on this, Red Hat today announced plans for its supported, OpenShift PaaS hosted offering.

OpenShift PaaS will initially be offered with two tiers. OpenShift PaaS is available now in Developer Preview. FreeShift and MegaShift are expected to be available later this year.

• FreeShift: The first tier of OpenShift PaaS offers three small gears and is available for free. It includes the ability to autoscale, offers access to the languages, frameworks and data stores developers like to use and leverages community-provided support. Developers using OpenShift PaaS today will have the opportunity to automatically migrate to FreeShift, which will continue the same experience they already are enjoying.
• MegaShift: The initial paid tier of OpenShift PaaS will extend the FreeShift offering with larger gear capacity, up to 16 gears, and the ability to add storage space past the 1GB per gear in FreeShift. MegaShift users will get support from Red Hat. Pricing for MegaShift is planned to start with a $42 monthly platform fee and a per-gear-hour fee for gears past the first three.*

Availability

The new OpenShift PaaS pricing structure is expected to be available later this year.