Red Hat Acquires Makara in Cloud Dev Tools Play

Red Hat is acquiring cloud tools vendor Makara in a bid to expand the Red Hat Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud strategy. Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager cloud business unit at Red Hat, told InternetNews.com that the acquisition is not material to Red Hat’s business, so the financial terms will not be disclosed.

With Makara, Red Hat is acquiring technology that will enable to developers to deploy applications to the cloud that can scale up or down as demand warrants. The Makara technology is set to be integrated into Red Hat’s Cloud Foundations strategy, which was announced earlier this year.

"Applications deployed in data centers are not designed to auto-scale and applications are normally over-provisioned to account for peak loads or reactively provisioned when capacity problems occur," Isaac Roth, Makara CEO and co-founder said during a web cast press conference announcing the acquisition. "As Makara enables applications to automatically scale down and up, the consumption of resources happens in an on-demand fashion."

Roth commented that Makara makes it easy to provision cloud resources, public or private as well as onboard new or existing JBoss or LAMP applications with versioning and capabilities. Additionally Roth noted that Makara can monitor performance for the complete stack including the network, web, app and database tiers as well as perform log management.

Makara’s technology is not currently open source, but that could be changing in the future.

"With every acquisition that Red Hat has done in the past, it has been our practice to open source the technology,"Crenshaw said. "It’s our intention to do the same thing here with Makara."

The amount of time it takes for Red Hat to fully open source acquired technologies has varied over the years. Red Hat acquired Netscape Enterprise Directory business back in 2004 and open sourced the technology in 2005. In 2007, Red Hat acquired and open sourced developer tools from Exadel. More recently, Red Hat acquired Qumranet and its server virtualization assets in 2008. Not all of the former Qumranet code has yet become fully open source, or even available for Linux at this point.

It is Red Hat’s intention to integrate the Makara technology into the Red Hat Cloud Foundations PaaS solution which is currently in development. Red Hat Cloud Foundations is a set of technologies, services and solutions that are targeted at enabling developers and enterprises build and deploy cloud applications and infrastructures. "We plan a public beta of Red Hat Cloud Foundations PaaS in the new year," Crenshaw said. "The Makara technology is available for evaluation via the free online trial available at makara.com."