Maureen O'Gara

At the Amazon Web Services Re:Invent conference Tuesday Red Hat rolled out OpenShift Enterprise, the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) designed to be installed on-premise in customer data centers or on private, public or hybrid clouds that it announced in May.

Since it launched the thing at Re:Invent one might logically deduce that Red Hat will host the widgetry on Amazon's EC2.

The product is bound to compete with VMware's open source Cloud Foundry and its Spring framework if for no other reason than Red Hat loathes VMware and regards it as its biggest enemy, someone to crush.

Anyway, it's Red Hat's latest step in delivering its PaaS strategy and is supposed to be the industry's first comprehensive open on-premise PaaS for the enterprise.

It's also the only so-called Java EE 6-certified on-premise PaaS around and that's because Red Hat has leveraged a lot of its existing open source technologies into the thing including JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6. Besides Java, the polyglot PaaS supports Ruby, Python, PHP and Perl and includes a cartridge-based architecture to enable customers to include their own middleware services.

OpenShift Enterprise is also built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift Origin, Red Hat's online OpenShift PaaS service that's been available in free beta since a year ago May.

The new widgetry is supposed to let customers streamline and standardize developer workflows and get to market faster. They get access to a cloud-based application platform for building cloud apps that automates much of the provisioning and systems management to meet the growing business demands made of new application services.

OpenShift Enterprise also provides application developers with an on-demand, elastic, scalable and fully configured application development, testing and hosting environment so that they can focus on coding these new application services.

Because of it development and operations folks are supposed to work more closely together on new apps and it should "transform a Linux administrator into a cloud administrator."

Using Red Hat's Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux), its hardened RHEL, OpenShift Enterprise promises reliable security and multi-tenancy with the ability to subdivide the node instances.

Red Hat will charge by the number of server cores OpenShift Enterprise uses, starting at $5,550 for an annual subscription good for two cores. It'll be available initially in the US, UK, Canada and continental Europe, with plans for global availability down the road.

The OpenShift PaaS online service remains available in developer preview at https://openshift.redhat.com.

Red Hat is planning on integrating OpenShift into its OpenStack distribution at some point.