2011 Sees Red Hat’s Push for Better Cloud Deployment, Management 
As 2011 begins, Red Hat Inc. is mapping out details for how its acquisition of Makara will fuel the next generation of open source options for cloud computing. Makera, a provider of deployment and management solutions for cloud-based apps, will simplify app deployment and management, according to Red Hat execs.
As 2011 begins, Red Hat Inc. is mapping out details for how its acquisition of Makara will fuel the next generation of open source options for cloud computing. Makera, a provider of deployment and management solutions for cloud-based apps, will simplify app deployment and management, according to Red Hat execs.
Makara’s technologies will accelerate the build-out of Red Hat’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution as part of its Cloud Foundations portfolio. Makara provides tools to deploy, manage, monitor and scale applications on both private or public clouds. Red Hat will integrate Makara’s tools and Cloud Application Platform with JBoss Enterprise Middleware.
“Cloud Foundations is about enabling customers and developers to have an easy on-ramp to the cloud. With the addition of Makara, we aim to further simplify application deployment and management,” said Paul Cormier, president of Red Hat’s Products and Technologies in a statement. Makara will be key to Red Hat’s offer of a comprehensive PaaS solution that let cloud adopters quickly move applications to both public and private clouds -- with few modifications, Cormier added.
Later this year, Red Hat plans to make its Red Hat PaaS available as software offered as a service in public or private clouds to help developers and organizations build, deploy and manage the lifecycles of the applications.
Red Hat’s Vision for
PaaS, Cloud Foundations
Last August, Red Hat delivered its vision for a comprehensive Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution delivered as part of its Cloud Foundations. The solution would be a portfolio that promotes consistency between enterprise applications and the cloud.
Red Hat PaaS will also provide comprehensive reference architecture to enable existing applications to be re-purposed within a wide choice of private and public clouds.
“Red Hat PaaS services will offer powerful application and integration runtime services whose APIs can be used by application developers when they build applications,” according to a post from the JBoss team, adding they will “fundamentally change the way our customers deploy mission critical applications.”
Red Hat PaaS will allow enterprises, cloud service providers, ISVs and SaaS (software-as-a-service) providers to take existing assets and develop new applications and deploy them to a wide range of public and private clouds. In addition, it will simplify the development of web apps, transactional enterprise applications and integration tasks. The infrastructure would be an open source flexible “cloud stack,” Red Hat said at the time, built from operating system, virtualization and middleware based on JBoss Enterprise Middleware.
Among the top-level benefits from red hat PaaS and Cloud Foundations are:
- Monitor and manage an organization’s cloud resources and environment,
- Control Red Hat PaaS access, stand up applications.
- Redeploy from one systems infrastructure to another.
- Scale an application’s systems infrastructure and middleware up or down to respond to business needs and runtime conditions.
Management and provisioning services are key to delivering the full value of cloud computing, and the Red Hat Cloud Engine provides a comprehensive set of management and provisioning services specifically for cloud deployments, the JBoss Team post continued.
To that point, with Red Hat PaaS, each service can be run and scaled independently from the container, allowing devs and administrators to customize the application runtime environment for any given application and its workload.
Available services will span the cloud lifecycle, and include application development and integration requirements including: application, data, transaction, presentation, messaging, integration, rules and business process services.
The Red Hat PaaS/JBoss teams also note these important advantages to devs and admins:
- Support Programming Models of Choice. Red Hat PaaS will be based on the JBoss Open Choice strategy, which enables devs to build applications on a variety of languages and frameworks, including Java EE, POJO, Spring, Seam, Struts, GWT, Groovy and Ruby. JBoss Developer Studio will include Eclipse plug-ins to deploy applications into a JBoss platform instance within a cloud.
- Deployment Portability & Interoperability. JBoss cloud images will be available through a variety of public and private clouds, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Amazon EC2, Windows Hyper-V and more through Red Hat's cloud engine. This will enable devs to migrate existing applications to the cloud without rewriting them. The Red Hat application engine will be designed to enable devs and IT operations to create JBoss platform instances in public or private clouds.
- Comprehensive Middleware Reference Architecture for PaaS. Red Hat PaaS will offer a comprehensive set of middleware capabilities, beyond simple containers, for building, deploying and integrating applications within clouds and on-premise deployments. Red Hat PaaS is expected to include containers, transactions, messaging, data services, rules, presentation experience and integration services.
- Cloud Lifecycle Support Red Hat PaaS will seek to provide all of the services necessary for application lifecycle management, including building, deploying and managing. JBoss Operations Network offers the tools to manage and monitor JBoss platform instances in the cloud. Over time, Red Hat PaaS will expand to testing and QA services, automated elasticity, provisioning, deployment services for building multi-tiered, multi-service applications and metadata management across services.
One analyst at Gartner noted the importance of middleware to Red Hat’s PaaS vision.
“Application infrastructure (middleware) is a key technology layer in enterprise computing, and it is of equal role and importance in cloud computing as well,” said Yefim Natis, vice president, Distinguished Analyst, Gartner Inc. “To achieve the full cost, agility, productivity and scale benefits of cloud computing, applications must be deployed over a native cloud-enabled application infrastructure.”
