OpenShift by Red Hat

Re:OpenShift by Red Hat by bobsy on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @09:11AM (#3976370)

I don't like this "Free" business.

It doesn't make sense and the complete lack of pricing info really puts me off.

So I play around with this, like it and choose to stick with it. They then introduce uncompetitive pricing.. I just wasted my time. They do not need to give exact pricing - they might not know at the moment - but they should at least give an overview of what they plan to do.

> We will keep this free plan for the foreseeable future. The free plan allows...

> This free plan will exist while we develop and test the service. As the service becomes stable we will be introducing paid plans and you will be asked to upgrade.

These 2 statements make sense to me. The fact they mention nothing about pricing on their site confuses and annoys me.

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Re:OpenShift by Red Hat by mhicks on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @12:11PM (#3977229)

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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Re:OpenShift by Red Hat by gcr on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @08:36PM (#3979726)

Thank you for the clarifacation. The service sounds interesting.

How are you keeping the free plan going now though? Who's paying for it? RedHat doesn't exactly strike me as the kind of company that's wallowing in spare cash.

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Re:OpenShift by Red Hat by mhicks on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @08:21AM (#3981682)

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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Re:OpenShift by Red Hat by rpsw on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @06:33AM (#3981398)

I don't know how much was profit, but they did hit $1 bn in revenue recently and an in share price. http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/red-hat-hits-a-billi...

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Re:OpenShift by Red Hat by rplnt on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @10:28AM (#3976702)

> So I play around with this, like it and choose to stick with it. They then introduce uncompetitive pricing.. I just wasted my time.

No, this is not Google AppEngine. The platform is opensourced. You can host this "cloud" on your own servers or rely on some 3rd party provider.

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Re:OpenShift by Red Hat by fabianofranz on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @12:44PM (#3977395)

Also, take the Java platform for example: it's good old (okay, not old) Java EE 6. Just take your app and deploy it wherever you want (JBoss, Glassfish, Websphere, etc). On AppEngine, you have a blacklisted Java API, proprietary API for common tasks like threads, etc.

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Re:OpenShift by Red Hat by salimmadjd on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @11:24AM (#3982361)

I'm still paying for the mistake of deploying on the App Engine. BTW, I spoke with open shift folks and they are going to provide a way to migrate your app to openshift

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Re:OpenShift by Red Hat by adestefan on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @11:25AM (#3976973)

I have a feeling Red Hat is going to try to make money off the private cloud businesses. Pitch OpenShift + support as an offering for companies to use internally. The free hosting that they're currently offering is just a way to get beta testers. Anything they make off of future plans would be icing on the cake.

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Re:OpenShift by Red Hat by jamesgeck0 on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @10:01AM (#3976568)

They might be holding off on announcing pricing until they see get enough real-world usage to determine what it'll cost to provide the service. Even Google underestimated with App Engine, and came out of beta with an unpopular price jump for some people.

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Re:OpenShift by Red Hat by sgdesign on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @09:28AM (#3976429)

The problem with free stuff is the lack of support. If I mess something up and my site crashes after hitting the HN front page, I want someone to throw money at until things work again.

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Re:OpenShift by Red Hat by prplhaz4 on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @11:08AM (#3976891)

That is likely where the introduction of pricing plans comes in. Redhat is still in business (ie, making money) because they support the enterprise usage of their products, and do it well.

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Re:OpenShift by Red Hat by thefotios on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @12:23PM (#3977285)

While OpenShift doesn't have a paid support model per say, there is a very active community (which includes developers constantly monitoring forums, IRC, and Bugzilla, as well as Twitter). Chances are, if you hit a problem, you'll have a bunch of people jumping on it very quickly.

There forums are here: https://openshift.redhat.com/community/ as well as a very active IRC channel (#openshift on FreeNode)

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Re:OpenShift by Red Hat by sabat on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @01:15PM (#3977550)

I want someone to throw money at until things work

In that case, although you can certainly pay for support (as others have pointed out)—but you're probably not the intended audience for this service.

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Re:OpenShift by Red Hat by TheSteve0 on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @02:01PM (#3977830)

Actually you are the intended audience. We are keenly aware that people want this capability. The free tier won't have this built in, but the other tiers will.

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