Red Hat’s PaaS Play & the Future of Cloud

Last week, Red Hat Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT) announced that it had acquired platform-as-a-service (PaaS) software company Makara and was rolling it into its own PaaS offering. The deal is just the latest step by Red Hat in creating an open-source software stack for cloud computing.

If it lives up to its slideware, Red Hat’s PaaS will change the nature of how software developers and enterprises work with public and private cloud infrastructure — by creating an open, standards-based architecture that allows them to provision for, and deploy new, cloud applications on any cloud service without modification.

Red Hat’s Scott Crenshaw, VP and GM of the cloud unit, said that Red Hat’s PaaS offering is "deployable to any cloud," whether public or private, regardless of the underlying vendor technology.

Makara allows developers to build and deploy cloud applications with the open-source tools, PHP and JBoss. Makrara Cloud handles the management of the cloud infrastructure that the applications are deployed to as well, handling the provisioning and configuration of the virtual server cluster on which the application deploys, automatically scaling that cluster up and down as needed. And the software also adds a host of monitoring and logging capabilities that have often been lacking in cloud environments, through services that are integrated into the application when it is deployed. According to Makara CEO Issac Roth, "developers can write applications that can be deployed to any cloud" with the company’s platform as a base.

That stands in stark contrast to some existing PaaS offerings, such as Salesforce.com Inc. ’s Force.com, which are built to a specific set of proprietary application programming interfaces, or to roll-your-own deployments that offer little in the way of management interfaces and performance tuning. The Makara Cloud platform provides built-in management and security configuration as well, something not included in the generic JBoss configurations available from most cloud services.

The Makara Cloud would seem to offer an ideal solution for both individual developers and enterprises that want to be able to easily scale from prototype to production, and to not be locked into a particular cloud environment in the process. Certainly, that should pique the interest of those developing applications for what promises to be one of the biggest emerging customers for cloud applications — the US government.

On November 19, the federal government’s chief performance officer, Jeffery Zients, announced that the Office of Management and Budget would soon require agencies to take a "cloud-first" approach to new systems acquisitions: “What this means is that going forward, when evaluating options for new IT development, OMB will require that agencies default to cloud-based solutions whenever a secure, reliable, cost-effective cloud option exists," Zients told an audience at a Northern Virginia Technology Council event.

But the government’s own cloud infrastructure, Apps.gov, is still in its infancy. And many agencies, the Department of Defense included, want to host their own private clouds rather than share infrastructure with other agencies. Having the option of being able to certify an application once (for example, through the Federal CIO Council’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, FedRAMP), and then deploy it in different cloud environments based on customer need, will be a competitive advantage for any software provider going after government business — or anyone else’s business, for that matter.