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mhicks

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Matt Hicks is one of the founding members of the Red Hat OpenShift team. He has spent over a decade in software engineering with a variety of roles in development, operations, architecture and management. His real expertise is in bridging the gap between developing code and actually running it in production. An expert in IT and cloud-based architectures, he spends his time these days evolving OpenShift to harness the power of cloud and make developers more productive.

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OpenShift by Red Hat 14 years ago

Red Hat is funding the free plan right now. One of the reasons we started the service this way was so that we would really understand cost control in the public cloud from the point of view of customers. That lead us down the multi-tenancy path (lots of workloads on a single VM). SELinux and Linux Control Groups (as well as a lot of other tech) have been key for us in keeping costs under control.

Check out the OpenShift Origin work (https://github.com/openshift/crankcase) if you are interested in the code that we use to run all of this.

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OpenShift by Red Hat 14 years ago

Yeah, defaults are always tough to choose and we tend to default to what is in RHEL. That said, Ruby comes up a lot and we are actively working on a slick 1.9.x experience out of the box. In the meantime (I know it's a hassle) but we've built the underlying foundation to let you do what you want. For example:

http://bit.ly/HHp9aR

Also... if you wouldn't mind helping vote it up, that would help:

https://openshift.redhat.com/community/content/support-for-r...

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OpenShift by Red Hat 14 years ago

Well, we do provide a level of free hosting - trying to keep it meaningful but it's certainly not unlimited. We will offer pricing plans for expansion and we also allow people to move off the platform (with their data) to another environment if they choose (see: rhc app snapshot).

We also wanted to make sure we open sourced the code itself. As you mentioned, that gives you some assurance outside of the service or any specific vendor.

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OpenShift by Red Hat 14 years ago

Not sure where the second statement came from but if you can let me know the source, I can correct it.

I can represent OpenShift fairly well. We will always have a free level of service and we are trying very hard to keep what is free today, free forever. We have tweaked a couple of things based on user feedback but the goal is to have a meaningful free offering.

At the same time, we are getting constant feedback that users want more than just the free offering. We also know that with pricing, they will want stability and predictability in pricing so we've spent a lot of time to get users involved and a lot of feedback in the pricing before we launch it. We want that pricing to be sustainable as well as valuable to users.

Hope this helps

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