Red Hat's repositioned CloudForms now available

Red Hat has announced that it is now shipping its CloudForms cloud management platform. Originally positioned as an open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform, CloudForms has been refocused on being an open hybrid cloud management platform for automating other IaaS systems.

When Red Hat announced CloudForms in May 2011, there were few open source cloud platforms that had come to market; since then, both OpenStack and CloudStack have emerged. Red Hat has already joined the OpenStack Foundation and it is one of the top contributors to the open source IaaS system.

With that in mind, Red Hat are presenting CloudForms as a way to manage platforms like OpenStack and give them extended automation functionality and capabilities such as creating hybrid clouds which can mix an in-house cloud with, for example, Amazon or RackSpace's public clouds.

Red Hat admits that the shift in focus does mean that some of CloudForms' functionality, including self service and basic automation, does overlap with the underlying platforms it is aimed at, but hopes that its higher level, across-cloud management capabilities will win over customers. CloudForms will become part of the company's IaaS stack based around Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

(djwm)