Birth of an xPaaS

When we announced our vision for Red Hat JBoss xPaaS services for OpenShift in September 2013, we knew that it not only represented the natural and necessary evolution of enterprise software development, but also that it was a radical shift from the traditional software development paradigm. Our vision of delivering key Red Hat JBoss Middleware technologies as services on OpenShift remains the same today, and we’ve made great progress toward making it a reality for our customers through foundational capabilities for aPaaS (application platform-as-a-service), iPaaS (integration platform-as-a-service), bpmPaaS (business process management platform-as-a-service), and mBaaS (mobile backend-as-a-service).

Our goal is to help enterprises compete successfully in a modern, technology-centric, digital world. What enterprises must do to accomplish this is very different today from what it was only a few years ago. Customers expect interactions with businesses to be more immediate, that the business has a more pervasive presence, and that it is more aware of who the customer is and what he or she wants.

Mobile devices and applications, cloud services, social technologies, and big data are all moving into the mainstream. As as result, IT is no longer seen as a supporting or ancillary function. It is now front-and-center in the new digital world. Business is software. And a new group of modern application “builders” will emerge alongside traditional developers, leveraging their work, and assembling solutions in new ways, for new devices, to meet new business needs. Modern middleware technology is required for building enterprise applications that help businesses achieve this goal of becoming more immediate, pervasive, and aware by leveraging these forces.

To address business needs and move more into the enterprise, private and public PaaS needs to move beyond basic application services to a richer set of middleware services. This richness of middleware services is what xPaaS is all about. Modern PaaS technology can enable application builders to be more efficient in deploying, as well as building, applications through DevOps.

Red Hat is in the unique position of having not only technology, but also the skills and expertise in open source, middleware, and cloud computing required to modernize the development platform for the new digital world. xPaaS provides these new builders with the abstractions and capabilities of traditional middleware in a more immediate, unified, and powerful—yet simple—paradigm enabled by the cloud. With xPaaS, modern application builders can leverage components and services, deploy them quickly in a variety of highly scalable and portable containers, migrate them across hybrid environments, integrate them using any of a wide variety of patterns, and orchestrate them using higher-level models such as business rules and processes.

Today, we are delivering on our promise of xPaaS to bring integration, business process management (BPM), and mobile services to OpenShift, with the following xPaaS services now available:

• Application Container Services (aPaaS) – Based on Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, the application container service delivers Java aPaaS capabilities that enable developers to build and deploy complex enterprise applications in the cloud.

• Integration Services (iPaaS) (currently in developer preview) – Based on Red Hat JBoss Fuse and Red Hat JBoss Data Virtualization, Red Hat’s integration services allow developers to create connections to, in, and with cloud and on-premise applications and data.

• Business Process Services (bpmPaaS) (currently in developer preview) – Based on Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite, the business process services are designed to enable business and IT users to model, build, run, integrate, and manage business process applications that automate workflows and business processes within and across organizations.

• Mobile Services (mPaaS) – Based on the AeroGear project, mobile services simplify and streamline support for numerous mobile client types while extending applications to those devices through capabilities such as push notifications.

Availability of these services marks an important milestone for us, but there is still more work to be done. From here, our focus will shift toward hardening the integration and business process technologies for production use and then begin to bring the services together into a unified experience. While we continue down this path, you can get started with the technologies now. Sign up for a free OpenShift account and select the service that best suits your needs. As you begin to familiarize yourself with the technology and capabilities, we encourage you to leave feedback in the OpenShift forums or consider contributing to the technology. Join us at www.openshift.com/xpaas to learn more about Red Hat JBoss xPaaS services for OpenShift.