Red Hat launches openshift.io

Red Hat launched openshift.io at Red Hat Summit 2017.

Its a SaaS based development environment, that provides everything you need to get up and running and start producing code.  The marketing speak actually says is a "A free, end to end, cloud native development environment".

This obviously caused a lot of questions for developers - it's sometimes (well, 99.99%) difficult to join the dots between marketing and reality. This caused some questions on Hacker News, but luckily Tyler Jewell, CEO of Codeny, was on hand to provide more clarity - its worth a read.

Just to reiterate - what openshift.io is going to provide for developers is a really  convient  hosteddevelopment environment to start their journey to developing apps for the cloud.

1. A deployment environment for your code native apps: You can use GitHub as your src repo, but deploy onto openshift to run your apps, for free (within limits). Red Hat wants to give developers the opportunity to run reasonable applications at no cost, but they don't have bottomless pockets, so there has to be some reasonable constraints - obviously you can chip in if you need more space/cpu.

2. A continuous deployment pipeline, that will enable you to run any code changes through test, stage to run, (which uses fabric8 and openshift pipelines under the covers).

3. A web based IDE, based on Eclipse Che, so you can edit your code in situ, without leaving openshift.io. This is a great feature for development, and allows you to develop and test the application you are building. However, if you don't want to leave the comfort blanket of your favourite IDE running on your laptop, and just push code to GitHub for openshift.io to pick up and deploy, that's OK too.

4. Analytics built in (using fabric8 analytics): to identify security risks in dependencies you maybe using, and also identify other dependencies that might be a better fit (e.g. flag you're using a really old version of commons math).

5. Agile management, to allow you to plan, and track development items for your code. This is really useful for collaborative development.

The fabric8 ecosystem also provides lots of developer tooling and examples to help developers get started.

Fabric8 keeps on growing

The fabric8 project has been at the forefront on innovation to enable software professionals to develop and deploy faster to cloud native environments. With the announcement of openshift.io at Red Hat Summit, 2017, the eco system of fabric8 has expanded to incorporate all (except the IDE - which is based on Che) of the technologies that make up the openshift.io developer platform:

The fabric8 project will continue to innovate and increase its scope to ensure it becomes the best environment for developers to continue to accelerate from idea to production. The fabric8 platform consists of over a hundred repositories under the GitHub fabric8io organization - all built on top of the fabric8 platform itself, keeping all releases in sync, and allowing us to continually improve our delivery.