Red Hat Collaborates with Code for America

Open source solutions provider Red Hat (News - Alert) signed a collaboration agreement with Code for America (CfA), a not-for-profit organization to bring Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service offering to CfA fellows and partner communities.

OpenShift offers developers a cloud application platform with a choice of programming languages, frameworks and application lifecycle tools to build their applications. With built-in platform support for Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl and Java and customizable cartridge functionality, developers can also add additional languages that they choose to develop in. OpenShift also supports many popular frameworks, such as Zend, Java EE, Spring, Rails, Play and more.

As per the deal of this agreement, the CfA Fellows will receive access to OpenShift free-of-charge for one year. CfA’s 2013 partner cities – Kansas City (Missouri and Kansas); Las Vegas; Louisville, Ken.; New York; Oakland, Calif.; San Francisco; San Mateo County, Calif.; South Bend, Ind.; and Summit County, Ohio will also receive an option of one additional year of free hosting and services.

In total, the value of Red Hat’s contribution to CfA is worth approximately $300,000 in hosting and service per year, said the company.

“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,” Ashesh Badani, global leader, Cloud and OpenShift, Red Hat said in a statement.

With OpenShift, CfA Fellows will be able to build, test, deploy and manage applications with the benefits of ease of use, flexibility and scalability for their applications.

 “Through this partnership with Red Hat, the Code for America Fellows will be equipped to collaborate with our cities and counties and do even more, creating sustainable, innovative civic technology,” Mick Thompson, engineer in residence, Code for America stated.