Red Hat's first shot at cloud computing was too painful for
customers, needing either deep open source expertise or a
consulting contract with Red Hat. Now, Red Hat's coming out with
something more promising, a platform-as-a-service called OpenShift
that uses tools familiar to many open source developers.
It's an approach that has a chance--with some important caveats.
Among other things, it's taking on platforms from Microsoft and
VMware.
In addition, Red Hat said at its annual user group Summit in
Boston Wednesday that it is not trying to target one type of cloud
but produce standardized workloads that can be exported to either a
company's private cloud or a variety of public clouds, including
Amazon Web Service's EC2. In another departure, it's trying to
shift the focus of cloud building away from creation and management
of virtual machine workloads to the creation and management of
cloud applications that endure for a long lifecycle. That lifecycle
would include frequent alterations to match changing business
needs.
With these moves, Red Hat is trying to differentiate itself from
VMware and Microsoft. It's trying to offer a more open development
platform compared with those two vendors, which are the leading
contenders for companies building private and hybrid cloud
architectures. VMware and Microsoft have each provided extensive
platforms to support their virtual environments. Each results in
some degree of lock in.
Red Hat is one of the few companies that could bring this
combination of elements to do-it-yourself cloud building. It has a
backbone constituency of Enterprise Linux users throughout the
corporate world and is the only open source company with revenue
that are expected to cross the 1 billion dollar mark for the first
time this fiscal year. Perhaps the second most successful open
source company is MySQL AB, which was sold in 2008 to Sun
Microsystems for 1 billion dollar, and its annual revenue was less
than 200 million dollar, by most accounts.
Red Hat is moving far beyond its previous "support" for cloud
builders, represented by its announcement of Cloud Foundations at
last year's Red Hat Summit in Boston. Cloud Foundations was a stack
built on Enterprise Linux and JBoss middleware but, like other
cloud products, was focused on building virtual machines suitable
for Amazon or other targeted VM environments.
OpenShift provides an application development environment
initially hosted on Amazon's EC2 cloud. Developers may work there
in a variety of open source languages, including Ruby, Python, and
PHP, and then target the application for deployment in the cloud.
For now, the default deployment environment is also EC2 or an
organization's internal cloud data center.
But in talking to Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, he says that
OpenShift environment supplies standardized APIs for cloud
services, and "with a one line command," the application can be
deployed to a different cloud "without figuring out all the
nuances" of the target environment. This approach hinges on
developers adopting Red Hat's recommended Deltacloud APIs, and at
least some public cloud suppliers supporting them. More typically,
a developer would need to master the details of a target's API
set.
Red Hat has been an advocate of its Deltacloud interoperability
API standard and has submitted it to the DMTF standards body. But
Red Hat hasn't published even a short list of cloud environments
that support Deltacloud. In addition, there are competitors with
open APIs, such as Simple Cloud API sponsored by Zend Technologies,
IBM, and Microsoft; or open source versions of EC2's APIs, supplied
by Eucalyptus. The OpenStack project is creating another set of
open source cloud APIs and has submitted them to DMTF as well.
Red Hat is making a bet on Deltacloud APIs, saying that by
building services calls to its neutral Deltacloud APIs, cloud
developers at least have the option of finding conversion services
to a cloud of choice or using those clouds that have chosen to
recognize it.