As Red Hat closes in on becoming the first billion dollar Commercial Open Source Software Company, they haven’t lost sight of the next billion dollar opportunity; Cloud Computing. Looking beyond Red Hat’s brilliant acquisition of Gluster, let’s explore three quiet projects that are potentially industry game changers.
OpenShift is Red Hat’s platform-as-a-service solution that offers support for Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby. Red Hat recently upgraded OpenShift to include support for Maven (build manager), Jenkins (automated build/test) and JBoss IDE (eclipse based). Red Hat has a vested interest in accelerating Java in the Cloud via JBoss, however they have resisted the vendor lock-in temptation.
CloudForms is Red Hat’s infrastructure-as-a service solution that combines application lifecycle management with the ability to leverage physical, virtual, or Cloud resources. In addition to application lifecycle management, CloudForms includes compute resource management and infrastructure services. In the end, CloudForms has a chance to accelerate the adoption of Private Clouds while leveraging Public and/or Hybrid Cloud models.
Aeolus is an Open Source Cloud Management software project sponsored by Red Hat. Interestingly enough, Aeolus isn’t written in Java; it is predominantly Ruby. Aeolus looks to bridge the gap between Private and Public Clouds by providing a unified set of tools to build and manage virtual servers across various Cloud providers. It’s comprised of 4 main components; Conductor, Composer, Orchestrator, and HA Manager. Red Hat is putting the power of Fedora behind Aeolus as Conductor is a feature of Fedora 16.
In the end, I expect great things out of Red Hat and the Open Source Community as a whole. What about you?
Image thanks to Wayne Sutton
