We've been talking about cloud for a while, whether that's IaaS or PaaS. In terms of JBoss and the cloud then there's been a lot of activity for almost 18 months, covering both short term needs and long term vision. We coined the term Enterprise PaaS to distinguish between what we believe is really important and required from a cloud middleware offering and that which is offered by others. I'm not going to reiterate all of that, or how it relates to the bigger JBossEverywhere picture, but today marks a significant milestone in our roadmap towards the vision.

We released OpenShift at JBossWorld and Summit. At the time we explained the differences between the flavours, like Express and Flex. And back then we supported JBossAS 6 in Flex. However, since then we've made huge leaps an bounds with our Java and JBoss support in both Express and Flex. These have been happening in parallel with our work on JBossAS 7, so you can probably imagine how much midnight oil the teams have been burning over these many months! So here it is: OpenShift Express running JBossAS 7. Flex will be running JBossAS 7 very shortly, but we wanted to give people a taster with Express now! This is not only the first real enterprise PaaS, but it's the first one that is EE6 compliant! Hopefully you already know of the advantages of JBossAS 7, and these are all present in OpenShift. I've been developing on it for weeks and the first thing you notice compared to some other PaaS implementations is the boot time: it's so quick that deploying on to OpenShift is almost as quick as deploying locally! (OK, network speeds notwithstanding.)

One of the areas we've concentrated on with OpenShift+JBoss is improving the developer experience. For instance, we want to make it as natural to code for the cloud as it is when you're working locally and since many of our projects use git today, and the dynamic redeployment in JBossAS has always been an important feature for developers, we looked to combine the two in the cloud. As you'll see and hopefully experience first hand, with OpenShift we have JBoss AS a Service and you now simply push your application, e.g., a war, in a git repository and it'll be deployed automatically. It really is that simple!

So how can you learn more? Well not only have the teams been producing code, but we've also been working on a lot of collateral material, such as videos and blogs. Some of this is being released now, but we plan on releasing a lot more over the coming weeks and months as more of our projects integrate further with OpenShift. We'll also be giving various webinars, including a couple of deep dives into the architecture of both the Flex and Express integrations of JBossAS 7, so watch out for them! One theme that you'll hear through many of our videos is "Zero to Cloud in 30 minutes or less!" As I said, we've spent a lot of effort on simplicity and integration with OpenShift so you don't have to waste your time and effort! And the most obvious benefit of this is that you really can develop and deploy your applications in less time than it takes to read this blog entry!

One last thing: as usual for our open source efforts we'll have a forum where you can ask question and give us feedback. Our developers and users have made JBoss one of the most successful open source communities around. Moving to the cloud is intended to benefit those communities and grow them. So it's critically important to us and to me, that whether or not you're a Red Hat employee, you have a say in our future direction. Use the forums, raise issues, give us ideas for use cases we haven't considered. And if you have any problems with responsiveness or clarity, you know where you can find me.