Hot on the heels of this week’s DockerCon fest, enterprise Linux vendo Red Hat Inc. yesterday unveiled a couple of new container-centric products at its own Red Hat Summit in Boston.

The biggest announcement was Red Hat’s OpenShift Enterprise 3, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering designed to help enterprises build private clouds.

According to Red Hat, the new release takes all the best bits of previous versions and throws in support for Docker containers and Google’s Kubernetes software, which is designed to help even smaller organizations build and manage their own networks.

“As a leading contributor to both the Docker and Kubernetes open source projects, Red Hat is not just adopting these technologies but actively building them upstream in the community,” Red Hat said in a press release.

No doubt, Red Hat’s decision to support Docker containers is another ploy to try and make OpenShift a bit more appealing to enterprises. Most companies have shown an interest in some kind of cloud deployment, but the majority of these embrace the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model as opposed to PaaS. But, Ashesh Badani, Red Hat’s VP and general manager of OpenShift, believes that the inclusion of containers may help to change company’s minds.

“This release of OpenShift Enterprise 3 employs open source containers and orchestration practices to change the developer experience and move the platform in the direction of what customers are asking for – a flexible platform for a microservices architecture,” he said in a statement.

Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise 3, like previous iterations, throws in a bunch of tools on top of the basic software, including its new source-to-container that’s able to pull source code directly from GitHub repositories and deliver a final product in Docker containers. Red Hat has also added middleware services from its JBoss suite, including the JBoss A-MQ message queue and Tomcat application server.

The company said OpenShift Enterprise 3 is available now. Pricing is based on core pairs and CPU sockets, while a public cloud version of the software has also been made available in private preview.

Red Hat’s second major announcement was the Atomic Enterprise Platform, an IaaS offering that delivers much the same infrastructure as OpenShift Enterprise, including support for Docker containers.

Atomic Enterprise Platform is almost like a stripped-down version of OpenShift Enterprise 3, only without the databases, DevOps tools, language runtimes, middleware and PaaS features. However, customers will be able to choose if they want to build their clouds on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 OS, or Red Hat’s Atomic Host alternative. The platform is designed for scaled-out clustered environments which host apps based on microservices running acrosss multiple containers, Red Hat said.

Red Hat said the Atomic Enterprise Platform is now available under an early access program open to current customers and partners. Those who qualify can apply for access at this link. No timeline for general availability was given.

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