Red Hat Open Sources ManageIQ Code For OpenStack Clouds

Red Hat announced it will open source software it gained when it acquired ManageIQ in 2012 and create an open source development community around it. The now open source cloud management platform is meant to ease creation of testing and development clouds based on OpenStack. The software company made the announcement at the OpenStack Summit this week in Atlanta, Ga.

Additional content will be provided by a partner ecosystem joining Red Hat in the ManageIQ community, including AutoTrader Group, Booz Allen Hamilton, CiRBA and Chef.

ManageIQ is a solution for enterprise cloud management and automation and currently serves as the basis for Red Hat's hybrid cloud management product CloudForms. That commercial product provides support for management of hybrid clouds built on OpenStack, VMware, KVM, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services technologies.

Red Hat's contribution makes a mature code base available for OpenStack developers. The contribution continues investment in the cloud platform by the company, which has been a leading corporate contributor of code to many OpenStack releases and core technologies that complement the OpenStack ecosystem.

Like with all software platforms, the key to fostering growth is attracting developers. In supplying valuable software and community resources to a collaborative group of open source developers Red Hat is investing in solving cloud management challenges and strengthening its position for cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies.

“Some industry players have focused on building an open source cloud infrastructure with OpenStack and selling expensive, proprietary management software on top of that," Joe Fitzgerald, general manager of cloud management at Red Hat, said. "We believe the entire cloud should be open with no lock-in, so we are contributing this valuable code base to open up the management stack for the first time.”

Web-scale, cross-domain integration and agile, open platforms may all sound like cloud hype terms. However, this is really what Red Hat is helping to build and leverage - management capabilities for virtual, private and hybrid cloud infrastructures.

The ecosystem of partners that ManageIQ and Red Hat have built are also investing in the ManageIQ community and providing complementary integrated solutions to the greater project.

"Success in today's digitally-driven economy means delighting customers, which is only possible by using web-scale IT to move at extreme speed and scale," Ken Cheney, vice president of business development at Chef, said. "Red Hat's ManageIQ Community brings together best-of-breed open source, cloud computing and IT automation technologies  – all core components of web-scale IT – and offers them on a single, open platform."

Red Hat expects to launch the new ManageIQ open source community in the coming weeks.

Corrected: This article has been corrected from the previous version, which erroneously stated that Red Hat had contributed ManageIQ code to the OpenStack development community. Data Center Knowledge regrets the error.