I've been talking and presenting about cloud and PaaS for a number of years and each time I do, I say pretty much the same thing (and I paraphrase): "I think private (on premise) PaaS will be more important than public PaaS". I won't go into the reasons why, except to encourage anyone interested to check out some of the older posts. That's not to suggest that public Cloud isn't important or useful, which is why Red Hat has been making great strides with our OpenShift offerings, which we're proud to ensure remain open source. Over the last year or more, we've seen Java added to OpenShift, as well as JBossAS and EAP, and many other languages and frameworks are there too. The number of applications running on OpenShift has grown significantly since we officially released it last year and our community has increased much more.

However, although there is still a lot more we want to do on public OpenShift, the feedback we have been getting from community and customers has been the need for an on-premise offering. The intention with any on-premise PaaS has got to be that it's a cloud and not just a rebadged virtualisation offering and I'm really pleased to see that we've stuck to our principles with the announcement of OpenShift Enterprise. All of the things you've heard about OpenShift, such as its mission critical security (based on SELinux), flexibilty (multiple languages, frameworks etc.) and scalability (including, cloud bursting eventually) will be part of OpenShift Enterprise, the first enterprise PaaS. So what about JBoss? Well as I've said several times before, if you want an enterprise PaaS then you need an enterprise infrastructure (middleware), so it shouldn't come as a surprise that your favourite JBoss technologies and products will be coming to OpenShift Enterprise. In fact EAP and EWS (the production versions of the application server and Tomcat) are available already.

This is a very exciting time to be involved in middleware and the Cloud. I'm pleased that we can finally push forward on the larger vision we've been talking about for so long. And what next? Well maybe we'll be able to bring some of that ubiquitous computing cloud into the picture eventually

Onward!!