“With OpenShift, you have a platform without any lock-in layer”

Bruno Georges, Director – Worldwide Application Platforms Engineering at Jboss, RedHat talks about company’s OpenShift platform and its benefits.

Excerpts ..

What is Red Hat’s OpenShift platform and how is it beneficial to enterprises?
We are moving towards environments that are not just working offline [but online as well]. OpenShift is our platform as a service. It is an on-premise, private Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution offering that meets growing application demands. The OpenShift Enterprise improves developer productivity, increases operational efficiency and expands hardware utilisation. With OpenShift, enterprises no longer have to worry about the infrastructure.

If you want to build an application and present it to a customer here or anywhere across the globe, then how can that be done today?
In the old days, you needed a server, a software stack, hardware etc. In a best case scenario, this would take a week. But with OpenShift, you just have to register, write the code, and deploy it directly on the cloud. You don’t have to worry about the infrastructure at all, but just have to request for suitable capacity. Let’s say you are doing an HTML5 application, you just have to request for that. You just have to send a URL to your boss or customer. It just takes five minutes.

OpenShift can not only be applied online, but can also be implemented on-premise. In Pune, a large bank has used Red Hat’s PaaS to give the benefit of open source to their developers, saving a large amount of money, especially while going to market. Today we have 1.5 million applications on OpenShift and 20,000 new users registering every week.

What are the key benefits linked to the OpenShift platform?
There is an openness to integrate technology, allowing us to expand our ecosystem. The value is beyond just the open source model — to allow collaboration, partnership and innovation. The time to market for an application has reduced from weeks to practically a few hours. This is a huge value for businesses. Earlier, there were many different flavours of Linux. We have removed the ‘lock-in’, so that you no longer have to worry about compatibility. With OpenShift, you have a platform without any lock-in layer. The value therein is to give choice and this openness is in our DNA.

The OpenShift platform enhances the productivity and agility of application developers by  removing much of the tedium and delays involved in provisioning the server, the operating system and middleware–through on-demand and self-service application stack access. This enhances productivity, along with standardisation of the application development lifecycle workflow and enables application service delivery acceleration. This effectively increases the velocity of IT.

Being built on a stack of open source technologies, the OpenShift platform is designed to provide freedom of choice, including the freedom to choose to move off the PaaS. To support this, only unaltered open source language run times and frameworks are used within the OpenShift platform. No proprietary APIs, technologies, or resources are used. This ensures application portability both on to, and off the OpenShift platform, thereby preventing vendor lock-in.

What is your vision for JBoss?
We work on a different level, and of course we want to stay open. The way open source functions is  through contribution from communities, different players and the academia. There is one fundamental difference between closed and open source: while closed source is driven by product marketing, open source is driven by real problems in the industry. For instance, the current innovations around the ‘internet of things’.

We want enterprises to unlock the full potential of all their existing and new data assets and gain critical business insights by making all data easily consumable by people who need it. We are working very hard to improve utilisation of data assets, and to help enterprises derive more value from existing hardware and storage investments, complementing existing integration technologies like SOA, enterprise application integration (EAI), and extract, transform, and load (ETL).

Do you see any challenges for enterprises wanting to shift to an open source platform?   
From a customer standpoint, we do not see challenges; we only see opportunities vis-à-vis adopting the open source platform. Migration is not just moving from RBM to JBoss or Weblogic to JBoss; we look at it from a different perspective. Not being able to look at the codes poses tremendous challenges, especially in the event of attempting to move the data. The open source model itself is very beneficial for the enterprise.

Globally, which are the regions that are largely adopting open technology?
Most of the stock exchanges, including the New York Stock Exchange, are not only using Red Hat Enterprise Linux but moving to the middleware stack as well. Europe is also seeing a high affinity level for the open source model. In Asia, we have been around for about five years and the adoption level is surprising.
Bangalore is the number one city in the world to be consuming our technology. At least 250 cities in India and around the same number in China have been using JBoss. Telco, finance and government are the primary industry verticals driving JBoss adoption.

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