OpenShift is the First PaaS to Support Java EE 6 Full Profile in the Cloud

Tonight kicks off the 2012 Red Hat Summit event in Boston and cloud, including Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), is a main focus at the event. In addition to today’s announcement about plans for commercial availability and support for OpenShift with FreeShift and MegaShift, we’re excited to announce that JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 6.0, which became generally available last week, is now available in OpenShift.com’s developer preview. This combination offers customers an open source Java PaaS solution that enables hybrid cloud scenarios and helps to usher in the era of cloud-enabled application servers for HTML5, mobile and enterprise. OpenShift is now the industry’s first PaaS that runs Java EE 6 Full Profile.

Speaking for the middleware and cloud teams here at Red Hat, we’re thrilled about the exciting news being unveiled at Red Hat Summit. The OpenShift engineers have done amazing work collaborating with the community and making this a reality.
 
Just last week we released JBoss EAP 6.0, which is our commercially supported version of the popular open source JBoss Application Server (JBoss AS). Fully Java EE6-certified, it includes the features you’d expect: EJB 3.1, JMS, clustering and high-availability, as well as newer innovations like context dependency injection (CDI).
 
Now you can try it for free on OpenShift PaaS.

Java PaaS & the cloud-enabled application server

EAP 6.0 is available as a developer preview in OpenShift’s free introductory offering via OpenShift.com, creating the industry’s first enterprise-grade Java PaaS. This is more than just hosting JBoss EAP. We’re taking advantage of all of the OpenShift PaaS features to define a new category of cloud-enabled application servers. You can:

• Deploy code directly to OpenShift within JBoss Developer Studio 5.
• Use advanced Java features such as EJB 3.1 and JMS
• Take advantage of simplified web and command-line configuration and administration
• Run a variety of Java frameworks for web, mobile, HTML5 and complex applications

Developers today can take advantage of advanced features such as:

• Distributed transactions
• Automatically configuration of clustering, session-replication and auto-scaling of JBoss EAP instances

One of the things we’re incredibly enthusiastic about is how JBoss EAP + OpenShift bridge the needs of the enterprise with next-generation application development for publishing web APIs, mobile apps and NoSQL. For instance, it’s a great environment for trying out new combinations like JBoss EAP and MongoDB. Additionally, developers now can choose to develop, test and run their projects in the cloud or on-premise based upon their needs and schedules.

Experimenting and getting started is free: visit http://www.jboss.org/openshift. It has instructions on how to get started, as well as links to all the necessary tools. Our engineering teams have also authored some great tutorials and quickstarts. For more developer guidance you should also check out the JBoss Way, which has guides on how to get the most out of JBoss.

Later this year Red Hat plans to offer commercial support for this combination as part of our planned paid tier MegaShift offering. In addition to being one of the top leaders in customer support, more advanced options are planned such as larger gear sizes, auto-clustering and scaling.

Many of our customers have been on this journey with us providing valuable feedback that we’ve incorporated to shape our cloud offerings. We’re listening to our customers and in turn driving innovation in the industry with open source and shaping the future of simple-to-use cloud computing.

Hybrid clouds, portability & choice

The combination of JBoss EAP and OpenShift validates the importance of openness and hybrid cloud computing. The hybrid cloud is one of the fastest-emerging and most important trends that we strongly believe empowers and preserves open choices for our customers. In fact this was a key part of the story with the launch of JBoss EAP 6 last week. This supports our philosophy and strategy for the cloud of:

• Flexibility– offering choice in deployment models, whether it’s on-premise, virtualized or in a public or private cloud infrastructure.
• Cloud portability without lock-in – empowering customers to migrate deployments to the cloud location and type of their choosing, offering choice and avoiding lock-in from proprietary offerings.
• Spanning & connecting clouds – our customers are now running multiple cloud environments concurrently, dictating the need for flexible deployment and portability. Just as important is the need to connect and synchronize data across systems separated by differing cloud infrastructures, network boundaries and physical locations

We encourage you to try it out and get started. Stay tuned for some really interesting new community projects we’re working on and for the expansion of our hybrid cloud vision with more releases expected this year.