Red Hat Outlines Its Cloud Strategy

Last week open source software vendor Red Hat (RHT) laid out its vision for a comprehensive Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution as a part of its Cloud Foundations. It's the latest company to unveil solutions aimed at bridging the corporate data center and the cloud. Aiming to create consistency between enterprise applications and the cloud, the Foundations portfolio is a flexible cloud stack that incorporates operating system, middleware and virtualization.

For the middleware strategy, Red Hat is looking to bring JBoss Enterprise into their PaaS solution as means to  take existing assets and new applications and deploy them to a range of public and private clouds. The solution will also include Red Hat's engine for life cycle management of applications.

"To achieve the full cost, agility, productivity and scale benefits of cloud computing, applications must be deployed over a native cloud-enabled application infrastructure," said Yefim Natis, vice president, Distinguished Analyst, Gartner, Inc. "Mainstream organizations must prepare to evaluate a full range of deployment options, including cloud, when planning their future application infrastructure investments."

JBoss Open Choice
Based on the JBoss Open Choice strategy, the Red Hat solution will enable programmers to build in their programming framework of choice, including Java EE, PJO, Spring, Seam, Struts, GWT, Groovy and Ruby. JBoss cloud images are expected to 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.

"Our enterprise customers leverage the JBoss Open Choice strategy today to protect existing investments while retaining the ability to choose the right developer environment for the problem at hand and skill set," said Craig Muzilla, vice president and general manager, Middleware Business Unit at Red Hat.

DreamWorks to utilize Red Hat cloud strategy
Following the Red Hat cloud strategy news, the company announced that DreamWorks Animation SKG will use its Cloud Foundations to aid in the production of its future animated feature film releases. "At DreamWorks Animation, cutting-edge technology is a key enabler to our creative ambition," said Ed Leonard, DreamWorks Animation's CTO. Red Hat's Cloud Foundations provides a compelling platform to enable our cloud strategy, giving us the ability to quickly scale our compute needs to meet the demands of our productions."

Red Hat IaaS
On the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution, RedHat has submitted an API specification for Apache Deltacloud to the Distributed Management Task Force (DTMF) as a part of its participation in the DTMF Cloud Management Work Group. The Deltacloud project is an open source implementation of a RESTful web service API abstracting common proprietary IaaS cloud management APIs.

"As cloud computing continues to expand into today's enterprises, interoperability and portability become increasingly important," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager, Cloud Business at Red Hat. "We're excited to submit the Deltacloud API to DMTF to help bring this level of interoperability to all clouds. Red Hat is continuing to help enterprises build real cloud today."