One of the most balanced things I’ve seen written recently about OpenShift in the media was from Red Hat’s Stubbornness Will Keep OpenShift Alive,
There won’t be one form of PaaS, but several, each with distinct advantages. PaaS will survive, not as a feature of infrastructure, but as a distinct form of cloud computing that eases access, development, and deployments to public cloud. Go, Red Hat.
As a part of the first group of people to work on OpenShift when it launched in May 2011, it’s amazing to look back at how far the product has come. I was the scrum master and program manager to the development team before moving over to the marketing team in 2012.
In the past year there’s been a definite uptick in the news about OpenShift and it’s been amazing to me to watch all the media attention around it compared to when it first launched. One thing that is puzzling to me is how much drama some of the pundits have tried to create by calling it the “PaaS Wars.” The funny thing is that it’s cast as a war between two providers in space that has many more providers than that.
The idea that seems to have taken hold is that there can only be one Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider and that it will automatically not be OpenShift in this alleged zero-sum game. Time will tell who the prevailing players are, but there are many providers in the PaaS space. It’s early days too, so it’s puzzling to me why people are so anxious to call a clear winner so soon and why some competitors are so condescending towards others. It’s also pretty unusual in the software space for there to only be one successful provider so the idea of only one winner doesn’t stand up.
I think OpenShift can survive because of much more than stubbornness. Here are some other reasons it will survive that have been overlooked or unmentioned :
- It’s a great product that solves a problem people have
- Customers find that OpenShift is a better fit for them
- Despite all the hype around some providers, OpenShift actually has a lot of features other providers doesn’t have
- OpenShift is backed by a great software company with a deep history of reliable open source stewardship
Leave a comment with what you’d add to the list.
On Monday it was fun to publish a post about our latest product release and help spread the word about why contributor license agreements are often overblown in open source projects. There’s lots of good stuff happening in OpenShift even if you aren’t reading about it on Twitter or in the news.
Want the OpenShift side of the story? Follow OpenShift Twitter and see what we are up to or join our mailing list for periodic updates and news of substance for getting the most out of PaaS.
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