Red Hat Introduces Cloud Suite, Its Take On End-To-End Cloud Stack

Red Hat introduced Red Hat Cloud Suite, its take on the full stack that includes Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and a unified management framework that supports a hybrid deployment model, called Red Hat CloudForms. The suite is a fully open source solution from bare metal to applications.

Red Hat is combining three of its popular offerings here in a bid for deeper integration and an easier, turnkey solution across the stack. The IaaS is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, the PaaS is based on OpenShift while management comes via Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Satellite.

“Not everybody know that we have products across the full stack,” said Rob Cardwell, vice president, Application Platforms, Red Hat. “This provides customers with more speed, agility and consistency.”

There is a convergence occurring, according to Cardwell. Infrastructure people want to move to the application layer in terms of what they’re provisioning and the application guys want to move down to the infrastructure layer.

“They’re certainly starting to overlap,” said Cardwell. “The reason for the third leg (unified management via CloudForms) is we want to make it easier for the Ops guy to handle Dev and vice versa.”

All three products do have out-of-the-box integration with the other layers, and there are reference architectures that describe how to go about deploying these three pieces. However, this is a tightly coupled combination.

Significant General Availability (GA) releases of each component are happening over the next several months. Each will have its own release cadence, but as the components go through major upgrades, the integration points become even better, according to Cardwell.

Those upcoming releases will include better support for Docker Containers and container management systems like Kubernetes.

The unified management piece, CloudForms, extends from the company’s acquisition of ManageIQ. Management capabilities extend across different layers – providing management, monitoring and deployment on-premises and off-premises. “We’re fulfilling our open hybrid cloud vision,” said Cardwell. “CloudForms is the central control point.”

Red Hat will continue to see competition at each point layer. In terms of IaaS, there are a multitude of OpenStack vendors and distribution providers. In terms of PaaS, OpenShift is most often compared to Cloud Foundry. There is also competition in terms of other vendors with their own combo, such as OpenStack and Cloud Foundry combinations like the recently announced Mirantis offering.

“We have customers using each of these pieces, but it’s also serving notice that Red Hat is serving the full stack,” said Cardwell. “What won’t be highlighted too much in this announcement, is our the middleware offerings. JBoss is available in OpenShift if you want to extend the cloud suite.”