Red Hat has acquired Makara, a developer of deployment and management solutions for applications in the cloud. With this acquisition Red Hat wants to accelerate the development of their Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution called Cloud Foundations. Red Hat didn’t disclose what they paid for Makara.
Makara’s Cloud Application Platform provides solutions for deploying, managing, monitoring and scaling applications in the cloud. It includes an infrastructure management component to provision and automatically scale virtual machines.
To do so, it leverages the capabilities of enterprise-class hypervisors Xen and VMware ESX hypervisors. and, oddly enough, of hosted virtualization platforms like Oracle VirtualBox and VMware Workstation. Most probably in the future the platform will be extended to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) which leverages the KVM hypervisor.
For each deployed cluster, Makara includes a specific virtual machine that hosts its Application Control Portal, which provides the self-service provisioning and monitoring capabilities.
Specifically, the product can provision VMs and build clusters, fill them with a predefined LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) available from a library, track configuration changes, monitor performances (without agents) and alert on performance degradation, and even scale the VMs according to workloads demand thanks to configurable thresholds.
Rad Hat will integrate the JBoss component library from Makara’s Cloud Application Platform with the JBoss Java EE Enterprise Middleware infrastructure which is part of Red Hats Cloud Foundations portfolio.
Currently the Cloud Application Platform is available in three editions: On-Demand Edition, which is just for public PaaS powered by Amazon EC2, while the other two, Enterprise Edition and Service Providers Edition, can be used to build private or public PaaS clouds.
Currently supported public cloud providers are Amazon (with both EC2 and Virtual Private Cloud) and Terremark.
Its still unclear what Red Hat is going to do with the current Makara offering and how other vendors which are not part of the Red Hat solution will be supported in the future.