"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,” said Ashesh Badani, global leader, Cloud and OpenShift, Red Hat, as RH announced a collaboration with Code for America (CfA), a non-profit organization that partners with local governments to foster civic innovation, focused on using technology to increase civic engagement.

“OpenShift offers an application platform in the cloud that manages the stack so that developers can focus on their application code. 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," Badani continued.

The collaboration brings Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering to CfA Fellows and partner communities free-of-charge to help achieve CfA’s goal of fostering collaboration between city hall and city residents and innovative problem solving through technology.

"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," said Badani. He added:

"The pairing of OpenShift’s rapid deployment capabilities with the innovative applications built by CfA Fellows is a compelling mix for moving civic technology capability forward. Rather than the municipal IT staff or Fellows having to provision and maintain servers, the application developers can focus on what they do best: writing code. Code for America matches Red Hat’s vision of community-powered innovation, and open source technology gives civic groups the opportunity to not only solve pain points for IT and developers, but also improve service to end users."

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.

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.