The beta testing is over. As of today, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) has shifted gears and is officially in the “cloud computing” service business.

The Raleigh-based Linux software developer and services provider is plunging into the growing cloud computing services market, but with a twist: OpenShift is a “platform as a service,” offer users support – not just hardware and access similar to Amazon and other companies.

“Unlike traditional infrastructure-as-a-service clouds, platform clouds bundle in middleware, automation, provisioning and dependencies, so developers can concentrate on their apps, rather than the infrastructure for them,” notes The Register, a technology website.

But as PCWorld notes, the Hatters face competition.

“OpenShift is one of a growing number of business offering PaaS, a class of services that could help cut developer time by providing all the support tools to write and run an application in a hosted environment,” PCWorld reported. “Red Hat will compete against other services from Engine Yard, Heroku, Microsoft and Google.”

Red Hat is targeting application developers who need on-demand access to additional hardware power and storage. The comapny’s ser vice also supports a variety of languages, not just Linux. Among them are: Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Node.js, and Perl.

Those services are referred to “infrastructure as a service,” or IAAS.

With OpenShift, Red Hat offers customers support as well for as little as $20 per month.

The launch of OpenShift was formally announced at the annual Red Hat Summit on Monday. This year’s event is taking place in Boston. 

Availability begins today in the U.S. and follows in Europe next week. 

Red Hat began OpenShift testing for developers in 2011, and so far the company says users have created more than 1 million applications.

The Hatters offer a variety of services, including an open source PaaS project, an on-premise private PaaS product, and OpenShift for an enterprise.

Customers also will have access to support and other resources from Linux and JBoss developers at Red Hat.

Ashesh Badani, general manager of Cloud and OpenShift at Red Hat, noted: “As PaaS matures, enterprise developers want world class support so they can focus less on system administration and more on coding. Our new OpenShift Online brings enterprise-grade services to public PaaS, and gives Red Hat the industry’s most complete PaaS portfolio.”

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