Red Hat is planning to commercialize its 13-month-old OpenShift PaaS later this year when it splits the widgetry into two initial tiers: FreeShift and MegaShift. Until then it’ll be available as a developer preview.
FreeShift will offer three small gears, the ability to auto-scale and access to the languages, frameworks and data stores developers like to use. It will leverage community-provided support. Developers using the OpenShift PaaS now will be able to automatically migrate to FreeShift.
MegaShift, the initial paid tier, will offer up to 16 gears, and the ability to add storage past the 1GB-per-gear limit in FreeShift. MegaShift users will get support from Red Hat. The platform fee is supposed to be $42 a month with a per-gear-an-hour fee for gears past the first three. However, Red Hat says the pricing is provisional and subject to change.