It was one year ago that our own Steven Merrill, Director of Engineering at Phase2, found himself at the RedHat Summit, when he stopped in front of the OpenShift booth. OpenShift is an open-source Platform As A Service (PaaS) solution that offers developers a cloud application platform with a choice of programming languages, frameworks and application lifecycle tools to build and run their applications. The platform provides built-in support for Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Java, as well as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB. Developers can also add their own languages.

Right away Steven was intrigued by OpenShift since it’s the only PaaS that’s open source (OpenShift Origin,) and that also has a Red Hat-supported behind-the-firewall install (OpenShift Enterprise) and a public PaaS (OpenShift Online.) As Phase2’s DevOps luminary and frequent contributor to the Drupal community, Steven quickly acquainted himself with the OpenShift team and started to explore the possibility of spinning up OpenShift environments for Drupal. By the end of RedHat Summit 2013, Steven had laid the groundwork for a Drupal 8 cartridge and had created an updated PHP 5.4 cartridge for OpenShift.

Steven’s introduction to OpenShift at the RedHat Summit ignited excitement about diversifying our deployment optimization services here at Phase2. The possibility of creating quickstart packages for our Drupal distributions on OpenShift was especially attractive to us. Soon after the RedHat Summit, the Drupal 8 quickstart cartridge was committed to OpenShift, allowing developers to quickly and safely spin up a Drupal 8 environment to test and develop on.

Throughout the past year, our relationship with OpenShift strengthened as we worked together at DrupalCon Portland and DrupalCon Prague to develop Drupal compatibility with OpenShift. To our clients’ delight, we began implementing OpenShift into our deployment services. One of our recent clients, a Fortune 500 publishing company, was overjoyed to find that the deployment process we created for them using Openshift allowed them to cut onboarding time for new developers from an entire month to as little as a week.

Steven and Diane Mueller, the OpenShift community manager, recently co-hosted an OpenShift for Drupal training at NYC Camp. The training gave Drupal developers the tools and knowledge they need to quickly develop, host, and scale applications in an open source cloud environment.  Next week we will be once again heading to RedHat Summit, one year later, exhibiting at the summit as an Advanced OpenShift partner.

Our partnership with OpenShift is a classic open source story: equally committed to open source solutions, Phase2 and OpenShift have teamed up to develop mutually beneficial service capabilities for our clients. We look forward to continuing our close relationship with OpenShift and announcing several more exciting developments and collaborative projects launching in the near future. Stay tuned – there are big things coming for Drupal on OpenShift, the cloud, and Phase2’s deployment services.