Red Hat Collaborates with Open Source Community to Deliver Innovative Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Red Hat has long believed in the open source development model – the open source way drives the evolution of Red Hat technologies and products.

With Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) portfolio, OpenShift, it’s no different. OpenShift Origin is the upstream community distribution for the OpenShift portfolio, which feeds into both OpenShift Online, Red Hat’s public PaaS service, and OpenShift Enterprise, Red Hat’s on-premise PaaS product. The OpenShift Origin community is where the community-generated magic happens before Origin moves upstream to become part of the commercially focused and supported OpenShift offerings from Red Hat.

Red Hat open sourced OpenShift and established the Origin project in April 2012. Since then, we’ve been investing in the open source Origin community.

Governance Model: Open & Community-Driven

Today, we are excited to outline several new OpenShift Origin community developments designed to accelerate its evolution as a thriving open source project:

A contribution model based on pull requests. We realize that after developing code you need a simple way to contribute it to the community. Since our initial project launch, we've been working on a frictionless way that allows you to contribute changes in a scalable manner. In fact, our entire team participates in the same process. Submit a pull request, we'll evaluate your contribution against the included tests and if the tests run without failure, we'll mark it ready for merging / reviewing by a subject matter expert. Want to see who's working on what? Check it out: https://github.com/openshift/origin-server/pulls.

A public continuous integration (CI) environment. The process above means a lot of tests are running against a lot of pull requests. Given that, we needed a system that is running those tests and collecting all the test results in a way you could easily access in case of failure. This CI environment, hosted on OpenShift itself, provides a transparent process for how contributions are tested and included into the project.

We also realize that to be able to understand the direction of feature development is as important as making individual changes. To address this, we have introduced an enhancement that makes proposals available on GitHub. By communicating and discussing these changes on our mailing list, we are able to establish implementation direction and allow everyone involved to have visibility into the process.

But where do you go to get involved?

While we use the traditional channels popular with open source projects, we've also introduced a Google+ community to provide a single place where we will cross-post as much interesting stuff as we can find.

If you want to keep your eye on what's happening in the OpenShift Origin community, come check it out.

And to top it off, we're even trying to make our agile sprints more accessible. Whether you want to see how we work or you want to work with us on something, you can now follow our progress on OpenShift Origin via our Trello storyboards. Suggest something, pick up an item and start hacking. We'll walk you through it.

With these enhancements, we, at Red Hat, believe we are building a strong foundation to take our community involvement to the next level.

We're excited to host the first OpenShift Origin Community Day, which will be co-located with the OpenStack Design Summit in Portland, Oregon, and will take place on April 14, 2013. We're also continuing to work on OpenShift with the goal of making it an ideal PaaS for other leading open source technologies, like OpenStack – check out our blog on our continued work in this space.

We hope to work with you in the OpenShift Origin community or interact with you via one of our other channels so we can work together on the next great ideas for the Origin project.