- Give an overview of OpenShift
- Discuss node.js and why it's interesting
- Highlight some of the other interesting news with OpenShift
Listen to OGG (0:06:15)
Transcript:
Gordon
Haff: Hi, everyone. This is Gordon Haff, cloud evangelist with Red
Hat, and I'm sitting here with Juan Noceda, who's the product manager for Red
Hat's OpenShift Platform‑as‑a‑Service, I want to spend the next few minutes
talking about OpenShift and also, some of the new news around OpenShift. Hi,
Juan.
Juan
Noceda: Hi, Gordon. Glad to be here.
Gordon:
Great. So, to level set, what is OpenShift?
Juan:
Well, OpenShift is an application platform. Essentially, it's a place in
which you can outsource the entire platform for your application. The platform
takes care of all the details of dealing with that application: servers, back
ends, and so forth.
Gordon:
Now, there are a number of Platform‑as‑a‑Services out there, how is OpenShift
different?
Juan:
It's ideal for new entrepreneurial applications that you want to go and
deploy on the platform. So, there are several advantages. First of all, it's
very open in essence. At Red Hat, we have a huge commitment with open source.
The full application that you can deploy there could be based on a full open‑source
stack. That's very important.
Because
of this, then you don't have any sort of lock‑in. What we provide is full
support for your application, for your stack. And then, from there, that
promotes actually, a great deal of portability between your application and
between your traditional data center and the cloud, back and forth. So, no
subsets of the specifications, no subset of the libraries; full freedom, full
power for your applications.
Gordon:
What type of developers are using OpenShift today?
Juan:
We see a nice range. We are in developer preview, but we have several types
of people. The most important type of developers that we see is people that
want to do new types of applications, applications of what we call next‑generation
applications: systems of engagement, mobile applications, social applications,
and big‑data applications and so forth. And we see these in enterprises, as
part of the department‑level efforts, and we see this also in independent
developers and startups. So, the good news is we see a lot of new‑generation
applications in different sort of technologies.
Gordon:
What are some of the trends you're seeing within these new languages and
new types of applications?
Juan:
Well, we see several ones. We see, as I said before, a lot of mobile
applications going on, and therefore we see a lot of interest on dynamic
languages, languages like the recent release that we've just done of node.js,
which is friendly, lightweight, server‑side, event‑driven JavaScript. So, we
see a lot of trends in this direction, so we wanted to make sure that our
platform captures the whole experience of a developer wanting to develop these
types of applications. We see a lot of trends, also, in terms of big data. We
have great support for MongoDB. We are actually seeing that more and more.
Gordon:
Can we talk a little more about node.js, since you just recently had
announced around that? What is it, and why, in your view, is there so much
interest in it?
Juan:
Well, it's a great technology. It shifts, in a big way, some of the ways
we think about web servers and server‑side programming for the cloud, in
general. Though I would say that it is a new technology that is focusing, is
kind of a cloud‑age technology, instead of coming from the legacy view. Think
about traditional web servers. They were based on file systems. They were
designed to serve files. This is technology dates back to the '90s, when
Internet just started up. So, this is new generations of servers, a new way of
thinking about server‑side programming, and a new way of thinking about
servicing requests that could come from different devices.
Gordon:
And it leverages JavaScript, which pretty much any web developer knows.
Juan:
It's amazing. Even if you have other languages that are very popular,
like Java, if you just do a quick survey, pretty much, JavaScript doubles any
other language in terms of the number of people that knows how to code in
JavaScript.
Gordon:
I guess one of the things that that shows, and Red Hat's even done some
surveys on this, is that developers don't necessarily like things that totally
break from the past 100 percent. They want to do new things, but they don't
want to throw out everything that they know.
Juan:
It's interesting that you mention that, Gordon, because one of the things
that our platform, one of the value propositions of OpenShift, is to be the
bridge between the traditional programming models and the new wave of
programming models that are actually “sponsored” by cloud. So, that's exactly
the bridge that OpenShift wants to actually get together.
Gordon:
Cool stuff. Anything else coming down the road you'd like to share?
Juan:
Definitely. We're going to be investing much more in our overall user
experience. And when I say that, this is not only from the UI perspective, but
the idea is OpenShift really wants to engage the developer in an experience
that is about covering the full life‑cycle management of the applications. So,
you will see, in the next generation of our web UI console and OpenShift
overall experience, much more detail in all the aspects of the application life‑cycle
management.
Gordon:
If any of our listeners want to get into OpenShift and start playing with
it...
Juan:
Very simple. OpenShift.com. It's free. So, we want to always have a free
entry level. We are in the developer preview, and we're going to be eventually
having a full service. This will be announced later this year, but the good
thing is you can set up for free and use OpenShift on the cloud for free now.
Gordon:
That sounds great. So, that was OpenShift.com. It's free. Take a look.
Thank you, Juan.
Juan:
Thanks, Gordon.
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