Red Hat is trying to make it easier to run applications under
Linux in the cloud. It's going to certify which partners are
competent at building cloud workloads to run with its Enterprise
Linux.
"Eighty to ninety percent of clouds are driven by open source
technologies," noted Michael Evans, Red Hat's VP of corporate
development, in a recent interview. Use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and JBoss middleware is a natural fit with such open source code as
the Apache Web server and ServiceMix enterprise service bus, or the
Eucalyptus cloud APIs. Red Hat finds its customers "want Red Hat
subscriptions that can be used with an external cloud provider" as
well as in-house, Evans said.
By working with independent application suppliers, it can
guarantee that Enterprise Linux packaged with a particular
application and converted into, say, Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
files, is ready to run in Amazon's EC2 cloud. Together, Red Hat and
the application supplier will come up with pricing by the hour or
week or month that fits the user's cloud computing style, said
Evans.
So Red Hat recently established what it calls its Premier Cloud
Provider Program. Existing Red Hat customers can move their
in-house applications to the cloud, certified by Red Hat that they
are ready to run. Or, independent software vendors can package
their applications with Red Hat Linux and have them certified to
run on various clouds.
The first Premier partner in the program is Amazon, which will
work with Red Hat to ensure that application suppliers that want to
run their software on EC2 produce the right combination of
application and Enterprise Linux in the virtualized, AMI
format.
The Amazon cloud started out running applications under Linux
only. It added Windows Server 2003 last October.
"We are expecting that our expanded Red Hat relationship will
help more customers take advantage of Amazon Web Services," said
Terry Wise, Amazon director of partner relations, in the recent
announcement.
Added Evans, "Cloud providers want end users to know that it's
safe to deploy their applications in the cloud." Red Hat will
expand its certification process to other clouds after getting
started with Amazon, he said.
"Cloud providers want every application in our catalogue running
on their set of resources. They want 'an Apple iPhone store' of
applications," he noted.
"We need to provide reasonable guarantees that it's safe to run
your application in the cloud," he said.