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Red Hat's Diane Mueller Talks About OpenShift (Video)
OpenShift, says Wikipedia, "is a cloud computing platform as a service product from Red Hat. A version for private cloud is named OpenShift Enterprise. The software that runs the service is open-sourced under the name OpenShift Origin, and is available on GitHub." This is a video interview in which Diane Mueller Explains OpenShift in depth. You may want to watch this OpenStack demo video as well.
OpenShift Origin, except where otherwise noted, is released under the Apache License 2.0.
Services like EC2 provide you with Linux OS instances (among other things). If it suddenly becomes more expensive to use AWS that it is to stand up a data center, we'll stand up a data center... with Linux boxes. It's not like people will stop making servers, all these hosting businesses actually have to use the same hardware I would.
The data security issue is a little more on-point, but decentralized maintenance of data creates uneven results that are more likely to tend towards the insecure end. While Amazon or RedHat could hire morons to maintain your data, so can anyone else, and your local morons are more likely to be unchecked and unsupported by people who do know what they are doing.
These businesses will not toss your data if you are paying for them to maintain your data. Yes, free Google products might, but that's because they're... well... free. The paid stuff doesn't just delete your data at will. And they don't have to, because you're paying to keep it up.
Disclosure: I work on OpenShift Origin.
Services like EC2 provide you with Linux OS instances (among other things). If it suddenly becomes more expensive to use AWS that it is to stand up a data center, we'll stand up a data center... with Linux boxes. It's not like people will stop making servers, all these hosting businesses actually have to use the same hardware I would.
EC2, OpenStack, GCE etc are infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers. They provide you with just a VM and its up to you to install your own stack on top of it. OpenShift is a platform as a service (PaaS) which already has various software stacks ready to go. You just choose the language/databases etc you need and start working on code.
There are 3 different variants of OpenShift. Online is the one Red Hat runs. But you can take Origin (open-source) or Enterprise and run it on your own hardware. That way you can move you applications or the whole PaaS around as needed.
The data security issue is a little more on-point, but decentralized maintenance of data creates uneven results that are more likely to tend towards the insecure end. While Amazon or RedHat could hire morons to maintain your data, so can anyone else, and your local morons are more likely to be unchecked and unsupported by people who do know what they are doing.
As far as security goes, OpenShift uses selinux (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selinux) to secure everything. Unlike plain unix permissions, which are discretionary, selinux implements mandatory access control. Processes dont have access to any resource unless explicitly allowed. This means that even if someone managed to hack one container, they will be hard pressed to go beyond that. If that is not enough for your app/organization, you can always run the PaaS locally and control it how you like.