Red Hat Provides Code for America Fellows, Partner Communities with Free OpenShift Use

Late last week, Red Hat began collaborating with Code for America (CfA), a not-for-profit organization that aims to driver innovation in local governments, primarily through technology that increases civic engagement. As such, this collaboration brings Red Hat's OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering to CfA's local government partners free of charge, in an effort to provide improved communication between city hall and city residents.

Indeed, OpenShift allows CfA Fellows to build, test, deploy and manage applications with a great deal of flexibility and scalability for those applications. Best of all, municipal IT staff will now be able to focus on developing innovative new applications rather than server maintenance.

"OpenShift offers an application platform in the cloud that manages the stack so that developers can focus on their application code," Ashesh Badani, global leader for Cloud and OpenShift at Red Hat, said in a statement. "As PaaS becomes an increasingly important component in the adoption of cloud across industries and geographies, it will become more crucial for government agencies to be ahead of the curve. We are excited to be able to offer the great benefits of our OpenShift PaaS to city governments through our work with Code for America."

CfA Fellows will receive free access to OpenShift for a period of one year, while the organization's 2013 partner cities will also receive the option of an additional year of free hosting and services.

Altogether, this comes to a value of around $300,000 in hosting service per year.

OpenShift is a cloud application platform that offers a broad range of programming languages, frameworks and application lifecycle tools for application building. Meanwhile, built-in platform support for Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl and Java, as well as customizable cartridge functionality, allows developers to add other languages to develop in.

In December, Red Hat expanded its OpenShift Partner Program, introducing several new partner categories and adding new partners.

Earlier this month, the company began leveraging its recent acquisition of ManageIQ, integrating the company's enterprise cloud management and automation technologies with the Red Hat CloudForms hybrid IaaS solutions and the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization management solution.