Red Hat Acquires Makara To Build Cloud Platform Services

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 12/02/10

Red Hat this week said it has acquired Makara, a provider of software that will help the open source software provider accelerate the build-out its cloud services. Terms were not disclosed.

Makara's software allows organizations to deploy, monitor, manage, and scale existing enterprise applications on both public and private clouds. It is intended for applications built on the LAMP stack--notably those built on PHP--or those specifically targeted at Red Hat's JBoss middleware. Representatives at Red Hat said the company will incorporate Makara's Cloud Application Platform into JBoss.

The resulting infrastructure will let Red Hat offer platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud offerings, company representatives said on a Webcast announcing the deal. "Red Hat's Cloud Foundation PaaS Architecture includes the proven JBoss Operations Network, and upcoming cloud administration portal to provide monitoring, scaling, control, security, updating and provisioning," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of Red Hat's cloud business unit.

"We will also deliver an application engine to automate application deployment, configuration and rollback, and the cloud user portal, and cloud extensions to JBoss Developer Studio, making it seamless and simple for developers to develop their applications, configure them, deploy them, define and monitor them in the cloud."

The upcoming PaaS Automation Engine will provide automatic scaling, monitoring and high availability, he added. Red Hat announced its intention to offer infrastructure-based cloud services, called the Red Hat Cloud Foundation, back in June. Delivering a PaaS infrastructure is key to that strategy, Crenshaw said.

"PaaS can do for application development and deployment what the Internet did for communications, leveling the playing field and providing an open way to develop and deploy applications on a global scale, quickly easily, and a low cost," Crenshaw said.

The acquisition of Makara will let Red Hat offer a complete PaaS portfolio, which Crenshaw compared to Microsoft's Windows Azure platform.

"Red Hat today is one of only two vendors in the software industry who can provide a comprehensive cloud stack from virtualization to the operating system to middleware and management," Crenshaw said. "Unlike the other vendor, Microsoft, our architecture delivers portability and flexibility. It isn't designed to lock customers in."

Crenshaw said Red Hat does not plan to offer public cloud services like Microsoft or Amazon. Rather, Red Hat offers the software and consulting services for third-party cloud providers to build their services. Applications can be built in a variety of environments, including Java, Spring and Ruby, among others, Crenshaw said. However, the services must be deployed on Red Hat Linux and JBoss.

The company did not give a time frame or pricing for the new PaaS offerings.