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Red Hat brings full JBoss software stack to OpenShift

Red Hat's Java Enterprise Edition middleware stack is now available on the company's Plaform-as-a-Service cloud.
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor

Three years ago I wrote about how Red Hat was bringing its JBoss Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) middleware to the PaaS cloud. It took longer than I expected. But, the full Red Hat JBoss Middleware stack is now containerized and available on Red Hat's OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud.

JBoss Cloud

JBoss is cloud ready.

JBoss makes up a complete family of open-source, lightweight development frameworks and servers. Red Hat has now moved it to 21st-century computing. Diógenes Rettori, Red Hat's OpenShift principal product manager, explained, "Somewhere along the way, Linux containers, Kubernetes, and Docker happened. [This] made us realize that containerization of applications is the base for your next 20 years."

Rettori continued, "A platform is only as important as the applications you run on top of it ... With that in mind, we made an important decision and investment to evolve our application portfolio in similar ways that we ask our customers to do to theirs: let's take our Red Hat JBoss Middleware products, commonly deployed on Linux and Windows machines, and make them available as containerized deployments."

With the arrival of JBoss Data Virtualization for OpenShift, 100 percent of the JBoss Middleware runtime portfolio is now containerized and available on OpenShift. To be exact, the available JBoss OpenShift programs are:

                    Red Hat realizes that you can't simply take your existing programs and port them to JBoss on OpenShift. As Rettori wrote, "We don't have the utopia of thinking we'll get to a point where we'll be able to predict 100 percent of the environment's characteristics, but we have gotten much closer to that with OpenShift and Kubernetes."

                    So, for example, in an old style development environment, applications are often delivered to operations as JARs, WARs, EARs, ZIPs, or RPMs with a 70-page "how to" document. This is still how applications are often delivered at many companies.

                    This method is difficult to install and maintain. For instance, Java applications can require specific versions of glibc to be installed. Why? Because the .war file could require Tomcat, the open-source Java Servlet program. This in turn needs OpenJDK, the open-source Java Standard Edition, which requires glibc.

                    All too often you need to do this by hand. That's an enormous investment in time and energy. But, if you use an OpenShift-based container, Red Hat manages the life-cycle of all the JBoss EAP dependencies.

                    The end-result? You save a lot of DevOps time, it's more secure to boot, and you save a lot of IT money ...

                    Rettori thinks "the future is bright for our Red Hat JBoss Middleware products on OpenShift." He's right. It is.

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