Introducing Red Hat Cloud Suite for Applications

On Monday, Red Hat announced an early access program for Red Hat Cloud Suite for Applications - the industry's only fully open solution for organizations looking to develop applications faster, at scale combined with the enterprise management features IT needs. We are excited to formalize the progress that has been taking place with partners, customers, and the open source community around meeting IT organizations' needs to deliver services faster for businesses and enable their transformation to digital businesses with this new offering.

Limited Choice: Do-It-Yourself or Proprietary
Prior to Monday's Cloud Suite announcement, IT organizations had two choices if they wanted to combine accelerated application delivery through PaaS, massively scalability with IaaS and unified management.

First, they could build it themselves, either by purchasing and integrating several commercial tools, or by combining leading open source projects in the spaces of IaaS, PaaS, and Management. However, the approach of buying from multiple proprietary vendors and integrating those products has disadvantages. The costs associated with integrating the various layers and management tools can be enormous, and it is also difficult for each vendor to keep pace with the rate of change happening in the different worlds of IaaS, PaaS, and management. Similar to buying multiple proprietary products and integrating them, integrating leading open source projects can be difficult and time consuming as well, even though it can also open the possibility for organizations to leverage a broader source of innovation. However, using open source projects without enterprise support adds to the investment required to build and maintain the solution, something most organizations would rather avoid – focusing instead on their core business.

Red Hat has long been known for its commitment to open source. Whether it's being a leader in contributions to the Linux kernel, the many projects within the OpenStack community, founding the world's first open cloud management community in ManageIQ, or working on Docker and Kubernetes for container based workloads in OpenShift Origin and Project Atomic – Open source is in Red Hat’s DNA. This commitment to open source has allowed Red Hat to stay on the forefront of innovation. The open source development model coupled with years of experience in testing, hardening, integrating, and supporting enterprise products based on upstream projects is unique to Red Hat and is evidenced in Red Hat Cloud Suite for Applications components. Here is a brief summary of how the team at Red Hat has integrated these technologies to make organizations’ lives easier.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform: A massively scalable infrastructure platform powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The team at Red Hat has worked on the recent Kilo release to incorproate new APIs and information into projects such as Ironic so that our hybrid cloud management tools could deliver greater value to operators like automatically scaling OpenStack based on utilization.

OpenShift Enterprise: OpenShift Enterprise accelerates application delivery by providing an industry leading PaaS. OpenShift Enterprise provides heat templates to ease the deployment and scaling of OpenShift infrastructure on OpenStack. OpenShift v3 is currently in beta and will include support for the Docker image format and Kubernetes.

Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Satellite: CloudForms and Satellite provide consistent management for hybrid deployments as well as hybrid service models within the components of Red Hat Cloud Suite for Applications. CloudForms provides automated deployment of OpenShift Enterprise and key operations aspects for OpenShift’s infrastructure such as capacity and utilization, alerting, and reporting. It also provides deep insight for both tenant and operator into Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. Finally, Red Hat Satellite provides content distribution, such as security updates, and configuration management consistently for both Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and OpenShift Enterprise running as a tenant.

You can learn more about how the products within Red Hat Cloud Suite for Applications integrate by reading this reference architecture.

Services and Support
With Red Hat's award winning support and growth in services both organically and through acquisition of leading providers of services such as eNovance we are ready and able to assist customers in the implementation of cloud solutions while simultaneously helping them adapt their processes to more efficiently deliver services to their end users.

Join Us
We are excited to take this journey with our customers, partners, and the community and look forward to providing more updates on our progress over the coming months. If you are interested in learning more or getting involved in the Early Access Program please visit the Red Hat Customer Portal page for Red Hat Cloud Suite.