Red Hat delivers ‘powerful’ new capabilities in OpenShift Enterprise 2.1

Red Hat, Inc. has announced the general availability of OpenShift Enterprise 2.1, the next generation of its award-winning, on-premise Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. Enhancements in OpenShift Enterprise 2.1 are aimed to further enable DevOps practices through the delivery of new capabilities within the PaaS platform that bring development and operations closer together. With OpenShift Enterprise 2.1, Red Hat is introducing consolidated log and metrics management, offering new versions of application programming languages, increasing application availability with a new concept of zones and regions, exposing a new plugin interface that will allow operations to better integrate existing policy orchestration into the PaaS platform, allowing new ways to integrate and work with large numbers of groups within corporate organisations, and releasing new intelligence into the platform around the automatic remedy of common application service issues OpenShift’s scalable and open source architecture enables faster developments with decreased delivery time for enterprise business applications that are fully integrated into datacentre best practices.

Since its introduction in November 2012, OpenShift Enterprise has focused on delivering innovation through four product releases designed to meet expanding customer requirements for a cloud-based application platform. OpenShift Enterprise 2.1 aims to drive PaaS innovation further through rapid feature introduction on a platform that provides a trusted and stable architecture that developers have come to expect from an enterprise-class PaaS.

OpenShift Enterprise 2.1 continues Red Hat’s open enterprise PaaS leadership with several new features, including:
· Updated MySQL 5.5, Python 3.3*, PHP 5.4, and MongoDB 2.4* cartridges with OpenShift Enterprise entitlement that allows OpenShift to offer proven security and bug fixes including technical support for both the platform and the content it provides.
· New gathering and consolidation method for platform and application logs. Plus a new way to gather and store key performance attributes from the operating system and application services.
· Ability for applications provided by OpenShift to intelligently span infrastructure across zones within regions, increasing the resiliency of the services provided by OpenShift
· Plugin interface that allows OpenShift to integrate with complex decision automation policies a datacentre might need to follow due to regulatory, ITIL, or change management facilities.
· Introduction of teams as an interface for LDAP group integration with OpenShift user management features.
· The release of the watchman daemon that aids in the automation of common remedies to help administrators scale to the PaaS platform in a more efficient manner.
* Scheduled for release shortly after OpenShift Enterprise 2.1 in a x.x.x release

These additions to the OpenShift Enterprise platform provide organisations with an enterprise application platform, supporting the Red Hat JBoss Middleware solutions, all presented in an automated fashion backed with the natural elasticity of PaaS. Red Hat is applying its unique combination of skills and expertise in open source, enterprise middleware, and cloud architectures to deliver key technologies to its users through an open hybrid cloud portfolio of products.

OpenShift Enterprise is built on a proven stack of open-source Red Hat technologies, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, and OpenShift Origin (the upstream code that powers both OpenShift Enterprise and OpenShift Online). OpenShift reflects Red Hat’s deep commitment to the developer experience, automating much of the provisioning and systems management of the application platform stack in a way that enables IT teams to more easily meet growing business demands for new application services. OpenShift provides an on-demand, elastic, scalable and fully configured application development, testing and hosting environment for application developers so that they can focus on coding new services. OpenShift leverages the industry-proven security of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) subsystem, and the lightweight, Linux Container technology provided by OpenShift Gears. OpenShift offers an architecture that allows it to be a platform for more complex application services through continuous integration and delivery practices.