So I need to warch some YouTube deployment videos or sign up to know how this actually works? And costs? Beyond the cute graphics on the home page it gets very confusing regarding what differentiates this from the competition.
Why all the hatred towards OpenShift? It's just another PaaS solution and primarily a competitor to VMWare's CloudFoundry. Personally I welcome competition in this area.
It's true that we're intent on serving enterprise customers, but we realize that many developers working on enterprise apps start out with personal project or small department projects and want as much innovation as they can have as long as we can stand behind it. The issue with many platforms is that the vendor doesn't have the long-term ability to stand behind the APIs and offer support. That's important when you get sick of debugging your own platform and you want to debug your app instead.
Power is intended to be a hosted version of the Aeolus capability: configure, update and migrate VMs across different clouds on-prem and off-prem.
We do support Java EE, and we're the only ones to do so right now. Check out the new Java development model called CDI which is part of EE 6 and is a radical simplification for Java while still providing access to nice things like transactions.
Finally, yes you could stand up your own JBoss on EC2, but then you'd have to patch it, back it up, configure all the systems management and load balancing and networking and keep that all up to date, etc. The lovely thing about whichever PaaS you choose is that we do all of that for you.
Wow, that's some bad layout. The content section is narrow enough, but at least for me I have to make my browser window pretty wide so that it's all visible (OS X, Safari/Chrome/Firefox).
I like Elastic Beanstalk, especially since it's just EC2 under the hood. You can still tweak for example Tomcat or Linux settings if you really need to (by creating a custom Beanstalk AMI).
Concerning message queues and other JEE features. There's nobody preventing you from deploying an EC2 instance with ActiveMQ or another broker :).
I think Red Hat has an advantage here since they're a vendor that is now trusted by major corporations. These corporations have difficulty embracing the cloud because it's managed by someone else and use tools in ways that's far removed from their standards and expectations. It's good to have more competition in this space.
EDIT: OK, I found more answers here: https://www.redhat.com/openshift/faq