Red Hat Projects Aim To Clarify The Cloud

Red Hat late yesterday unveiled two new projects aimed at increasing the ease of deployment and interoperability levels between computing clouds.

The software vendor has made a series of announcements at its annual conference this week aimed firmly at establishing its capabilities as a cloud computing technology provider.

“Open source [Linux software] has become the ‘de facto’ resource platform for cloud computing,” said Brian Stevens, Red Hat chief technology office and vice president of engineering. “Yet today, no two clouds are the same.

“There is near zero re-use for tools used in private clouds and compatibility between public and private clouds.”

In response, Stevens introduced projects ‘Hail‘ and ‘Delta Cloud,’ which he said would help developers “avoid re-inventing the wheel” every time they architect a cloud or develop and deploy applications to a cloud.

Project Hail is designed to provide developers with a set of basic, low-level services to streamline the development and migration of applications to cloud computing environments, including those to manage distributed storage, indexing and consensus algorithms, for example.

Project Delta cloud aims to develop a common, unifying application programming interface (API) for managing a variety of drivers, as well an end-user portal to access them through. “We think common APIs is important to allow for the seamless orchestration of applications in the cloud,” continued Stevens.

“This project aims to stitch together public and private clouds and shows the unification of Red Hat and JBoss coming together to solve a common problem, so we can get to a world that sees clouds seamlessly interoperate.”

By pointing to the open source nature of project Delta, Stevens also suggested this would give it an advantage over other, similar initiatives to standardise cloud APIs, like the one launched by hosting provider, Rackspace recently.

“Open source federates the technology, allowing users to not only fully access the technology, but also benefit from transparency and modularity,” he said. “That’s why the majority of clouds are built on open source infrastructures.”