Red Hat, the hidden cloud company

Red Hat is bullish on cloud computing. That’s no surprise: Its version of GNU/Linux has been a driving force behind the last decade’s infrastructure revolution, from which the idea of cloud computing arose.

What might surprise you is how much open source work Red Hat has initiated to create this opportunity. I’d expected Red Hat to be involved in Linux virtualization, but it has a range of component parts for virtualization, is participating in private cloud initiatives, and has just announced pricing for a public cloud offering. Here are some samples of the many sponsored projects.

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Red Hat is of course a big proponent of the Linux-centric KVM hypervisor, but its activities extend to other hypervisors. To assist with the easy deployment of virtualization envronments, Red Hat is working on Libvirt, an open source tool for managing platform virtualization, providing a management daemon and a control API with bindings for a variety of languages, including Java and Python. It’s able to manage a wide range of hypervisors in addition to KVM, among them Xen, VirtualBox, VMware, and Microsoft’s Hyper-V. It’s used by a range of applications to control virtualization environments, including from the Jenkins coninuous integration server. There’s plenty of information in the interview with the developers of libvirt from the start of June.

Red Hat is also involved in the oVirt project, which provides a suite of tools delivering a virtualization management system for hosts and guests. It enables live migration of instances, storage management, system scheduling, and other capabilities that simplify data center virtualization management. There’s more in the Floss Weekly interview of the team from March.

Red Hat is a significant supporter of Deltacloud at Apache, which I’ve mentioned previously. It offers an abstraction layer for cloud APIs, so your cloud applications aren’t locked in to a single provider such as Amazon Web Services. It supports every significant cloud provider and has a straightforward REST API that allows for simple deployment of cloud applications. You may want to check out my interview with Deltacloud developer David Lutterkort from March of this year.

You’ll recall that Red Hat joined the OpenStack Foundation back in April. OpenStack is a complex set of building blocks for creating public and private clouds. While Red Hat has not announced a product based on OpenStack, the company has indicated its intent to do so as the project matures. This is a different scale of project to the previous two. It’s large, political, and in my view unsuitable for most enterprise use at this stage. However, it’s worth watching as it will shape the offering Red Hat and its competitors introduce to the market.

The significant news this week involves pricing for a Red Hat-managed cloud PaaS (platform as a service) offering using the OpenShift project. It’s a full-featured and fully open source application platform in the cloud, based on software Red Hat acquired with Makara in November 2010. Red Hat has been running a developer sandbox called OpenShift Origin on Amazon Web Services since this spring, but this week announced it will soon be renamed FreeShift and paired with a complementary commercial service called MegaShift with a range of support, compute, and storage options for deployed production applications.

The capabilities offered by OpenShift are very much like those of the earlier and better-known Heroku, but because it’s open source, OpenShift can also run on your in-house systems. Red Hat’s Mark Atwood casts futher light on the remarkably open approach the company is taking as it enters the PaaS market.

There’s more that I could cover. In addressing the emerging opportunity of the cloud market in all its forms — especially IaaS and PaaS — Red Hat has appeared to dabble in a wide range of technologies, gradually assembling a strategy from the parts as it sees the market and the projects evolve. This experimentation presents in-house enterprise developers with a wealth of opportunities to use mature open source technologies as the basis for their projects, with the assurance that Red Hat’s money drives community innovation and commercial support offerings are emerging. That’s something that never happened in the old world of proprietary software.

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