Think the cloud is all about hosting applications on a remote server? Red Hat sees it differently. The Linux vendor has taken the wraps off of several initiatives that take a more expansive view of the cloud environment.
Datamation has the story on Red Hat’s Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, where the company made a pitch for new projects to spur new cloud-based infrastructure and applications.
The cloud isn’t just another word for basic application hosting on a single remote server. The cloud involves the notion of distributed assets that are highly available and scalable. It’s a technical paradigm that has inspired Linux vendor Red Hat to launch new open source projects to develop novel infrastructure and applications for the cloud.
Today during Red Hat’s (NASDAQ: RHT) Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, software engineers from the company revealed a number of initiatives under development for application deployment, database scaling and storage that meet the distributed needs that cloud infrastructures demand.
On the application platform side of the cloud, Red Hat is developing the BoxGrinder project. JBoss Fellow Bob McWhirter explained during the forum that one of the goals of BoxGrinder is to make is easy to grind out server configurations for a variety of virtualization fabrics.
BoxGrinder grew of a need to produce cloud versions of JBoss projects, though the current project is not limited to building JBoss-related applications. Instead of having to configure and load an application platform on multiple servers or cloud environments, BoxGrinder would enable developers to build an application platform image that could then be deployed on any cloud, and be easily replicated.
Currently BoxGrinder is able to build Fedora-based software appliances for the cloud, though McWhirter noted that the plan for the future is to be able to build appliances based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well.