Red Hat’s OpenShift platform-as-a-service started as a hosted solution for developers. It was, ostensibly, Red Hat dipping its toe into the platform-as-a-service waters. It proved successful enough to keep going. In keeping with Red Hat’s open source ethos, the product was released as an open source project called OpenShift Origin. This allowed anyone to deploy and run the Red Hat PaaS on their own hardware. Like most open source projects, though, OpenShift Origin doesn’t come with any official support.
Today, Red Hat is releasing OpenShift Enterprise, an officially supported version of its PaaS offering designed for enterprise customers. Red Hat had publicly committed to an enterprise version of its OpenShift PaaS earlier this year, and today’s news is the first supported release of that effort. As one would expect from a Red Hat product, OpenShift Enterprise is built atop Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and leverages things like cgroups and SELinux.
