It hasn't been that long since we announced the availability of EAP 6.0 and I'm really please to make another related announcement: EAP 6.0 is now running on OpenShift! We've been running the community version of the application server on OpenShift for over a year now, with much success and adoption. We started last year with AS7.0 and the Web Profile, moving on earlier this year to AS7.1 with the Full Profile. However, as I said earlier these are the latest and greatest community versions, with all that that entails. I won't go into the community versus product differences again, except to point you at a great article from Rich Sharples. So putting our platforms (all of them eventually) on to OpenShift was an obvious next step. This gives developers and customers the stability that they've come to expect from all of the JBoss platforms, along with the great capabilities that we get from AS7 such as performance, scalability, lightweight(-edness?!) and manageability. And guess what? This is the world's first PaaS based on a supported Full Profile EE6 application server!

In fact being "cloud ready" is something we've been trying to ensure for all of our projects and platforms for several years now, and especially EAP 6.0. But what does this really mean precisely? Well for a start the tools that developers use are more naturally integrated with the cloud. To see what I mean by this you should really take a look at some of the great work of the JBDS team under the leadership of Max Andersen. Furthermore, because we've been working on cloud (PaaS and IaaS) for several years now, we've architected EAP 6 so that it can take advantage of the underlying infrastructure services to scale out on demand, as well as cope with some of those interesting idiosyncrasies that some IaaS providers impose, such as no multicast. And if you saw my keynote from last year's JBossWorld, you'll understand some of the architectural changes we've made within AS7 and associated projects to better support an "as a service" approach, which is important for the Cloud.

It is worth repeating that this announcement means we're the first to put a supported EE6 application server into the cloud. As part of doing that work we've learned a lot about what it means to be "cloud ready" and the limitations or restrictions that current standards impose. So although we can say we are done for now in terms of the implementation, we're definitely not done in terms of feeding those experiences back into projects, specifications and evolving standards. As a result I'm expecting to see us use these experiences to influence heavily new standards such as EE7 and EE8.

OK, so what next? Well now that EAP 6 is on OpenShift you should expect to see more of our platforms appear there over the coming months. But for now, just enjoy EAP 6 on OpenShift and for the best experience ever, make sure you check out JBDS as well! Onward!!