Red Hat Acquires Cloud Platform Maker Makara

With the threat cloud environments pose to its traditional business, it's no wonder Red Hat has been very focused on virtualization and cloud platforms lately. And it's now acquired cloud specialist Makara, partly to get rid of what could have proven a big competitor, partly to integrate the technology the startup developed so far.

Red Hat will integrate Makara's Cloud Application Platform with its existing products, though it won't be making it available as a stand-alone offering.  Instead it will be integrating it with cloud solutions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, virtualization software and middleware like JBoss.

“Cloud Foundations is about enabling customers and developers to have an easy on-ramp to the cloud. With the addition of Makara, we aim to further simplify application deployment and management,” Paul Cormier, president of Products and Technologies at Red Hat, said.

“We welcome the Makara team and look forward to accelerating our delivery of PaaS solutions to the market,” he added.

The plan is to offer a simpler and smoother path for businesses wanting to move their applications to cloud-based environments. Red Hat offers a full range of products for clouds, from the underlying hypervisor for virtualization, to its Linux-based operating system, to the JBoss Platforl-as-a-Service middleware solution.

Makara's Cloud Application Platform offers a way for enterprises to run and manage PHP or Java applications regardless of the underlying cloud infrastructure.

This abstraction layer means that apps should run just as well on Amazon's EC2, Rackspace Cloud or Terramark vCloud. Cloud Application Platform can also be used with private clouds based on most popular virtualization platforms out there.

What's more, the Cloud Application Platform code, once it's integrated with the existing products, will be open source. Red Hat hasn't provided a timeline for when the integration will be completed but for the time being Cloud Application Platform is still offered as a free trial.