Today we announce the initial availability of the next generation of Red Hat OpenShift Online, a cloud-based container platform that enables developers to build, deploy, host, and scale container-based applications. OpenShift Online can dramatically improve developer performance by providing a ready, easy to use container-based platform from any web browser, IDE, and command line - with support for local development. Re-engineered to be built on the same powerful and agile technology as Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, OpenShift Online is one of the first multi-tenant cloud application platforms powered by docker-format containers and Kubernetes-based container orchestration.

OpenShift Online adoption

Since it was first introduced in 2011, more than 3.5 million applications have been launched on OpenShift Online. Startups, educational institutions, and enterprise customers around the world use OpenShift Online to deliver innovative applications and services with no up-front investment. For example, A.IX Capital uses OpenShift Online to deliver automated investment advice for its customers.

Code Healthy with OpenShift, a hackathon based on the developer preview of this new version of OpenShift Online, attracted more than 600 developers who built new, creative healthcare applications to encourage healthy living, better cope with illnesses, and track and manage nutrition and fitness goals.

Enhanced developer experience

This next generation of OpenShift Online offers what developers tell us they are looking for - the ability to focus on their applications instead of dealing with the complexity of assembling and managing container images and dependencies. OpenShift Online provides quickstart templates for developers to push code with one click, helping to avoid the intricacies of application provisioning and deployment. OpenShift already supports a wide variety of developer languages, frameworks, databases, and middleware services, along with OpenShift Online additional capabilities designed to make container application development faster and easier, including:

Source-to-image (S2I) build for containers to aid and build Docker-formatted container images transparent to the developer

One-click deployment to OpenShift through git hooks so developers can focus on their own projects instead of system administration and rebuilding container images;

IDE integrations, making Red Hat OpenShift the only container application platform that includes both cloud-based developer tooling, an embedded IDE using OpenShift.io, and existing IDE and CI/CD tools as well.

Local development, with the ability to easily deploy a fully functional OpenShift cluster on your local machine, instantly setup port-forwarding to use your remotely deployed services as if they were running locally, support for rsync to synchronize your local source code changes with your remote application, remote command execution and SSH access to your running containers, and more.

More secure, automated container management and orchestration

Red Hat OpenShift Online builds and runs containers using the latest Kubernetes enhancements for container orchestration. Built-in operations management is designed to enhance the developer experience since developers are now only responsible for maintaining and building their code. Automated scale-out of applications improves user experience by adding more resources or instantiating new containers when demand increases.

OpenShift Online also delivers greater security enhancements with network isolation at the container level, automated scanning of container images, and blocking execution of unsafe containers, for example, when container images require root access. And because OpenShift Online is built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it inherits the enterprise-grade security features the world’s leading Linux platform is known for. Additional enhancements that make OpenShift well-suited for developing traditional and cloud-native apps include:

Automatic scaling to account for traffic increases through natively-integrated Kubernetes orchestration based on CPU demands

Stronger encryption using TLS, rolling certificate and automated secret management

Continuous integration and release management with Jenkins - Jenkins can perform tests upon code check-in, orchestrate the build process, and automatically promote or cancel an application release based on results of the tests or build

Stateful Sets enable a broad range of diverse workloads, including traditional SQL servers and message queues, to run in a container environment

Extensive options to customize your build and deployment process, whether you’re developing a new application from scratch or bringing an existing application (with support for binary, container images, source code, and more)

Availability

Developers can now register for a Red Hat OpenShift Online account at www.openshift.com. OpenShift Online is initially offered as a free service and includes 1GB RAM and 1GB of storage per user, which provides sufficient resources to run up to four containerized multi-tier or micro-services based applications. Additional resources and premium services will be available for purchase at a later time. OpenShift Online is also the deployment platform of choice for OpenShift.io, a set of developer tools optimized for cloud-native application development delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).