Red Hat made its CloudForms, Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering generally available this week.
CloudForms was originally announced by Red Hat in May of 2011 as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) play. Bryan Che, Senior Director, Product Management and Marketing in the Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat, explained during a launch event today how CloudForms is a key piece of the cloud deployment strategy. With it, cloud automation can be achieved, enabling enterprises to manage and deploy across multiple clouds whether they are private or public.
At the heart of CloudForms are a number of open source projects that enable the multi-cloud access and control. The primary one is the Apache Deltacloud project that Red Hat began working on in 2009 as an abstraction layer for cloud management. With DeltaCloud at the core, any type of cloud deployment — be it on Amazon, VMware, OpenStack or otherwise — can be controlled.
Cloud control isn’t just about the cloud instances as pieces of infrastructure, though. With CloudForms there is application control across the infrastructure, which provides enterprises with the ability to manage application lifecycle in the cloud. For example, if a company has an application they need to patch that runs locally with on-site servers as well as in the cloud, CloudForms can be leveraged for that process.
Read the full story at ServerWatch:
Red Hat Debuts CloudForms for Cloud Management
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.