Red Hat has announced commercial availability of its OpenShift Online platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud computing offering, enabling customers to develop and operate cloud-based applications with full commercial support from Red Hat and additional resources.

OpenShift Online, which has been available as a developer preview since 2011, is an enterprise-class PaaS public cloud for development and hosting applications and services.

The platform is built upon Red Hat’s OpenShift Origin open-source project and is being delivered from Amazon’s EC2 cloud infrastructure. However, Red Hat is at pains to point out that it is not competing against Amazon; its closest rival is in fact Microsoft’s Windows Azure service.

Like Azure, OpenShift Online is designed to automate the provisioning, management and scaling of application resources so developers can focus on producing the code to run their project. It supports multiple languages including Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Node.js and Perl, according to Red Hat.

With commercial availability, Red Hat is introducing a new support tier, the Silver Plan. This will run alongside the existing Free Plan tier already available to customers who have been part of the OpenShift Online preview.

The Silver Plan adds customer service, technical support, higher scaling, additional storage, and more, according to Red Hat. It is available in North America immediately, with pricing starting at just $20 (£13) per month. European customers will get access from next week, with payment options in Euros, Red Hat said.

That $20 per month gives users 3 small ‘Gears’ included (application containers providing CPU, memory and storage), scalable up to 16 Gears; a choice of Small (512MB RAM) or Medium (1GB RAM) Gears; up to 6GB of file system storage per Gear; and Red Hat Technical Support.

Ashesh Badani, Red Hat general manager for Cloud and OpenShift, said: “As PaaS matures, enterprise developers want world class support so they can focus less on system administration and more on coding.”

The move follows Red Hat’s announcement last year of OpenShift Enterprise, a version of the platform designed for deployment by a customer in a private or public cloud.