Red Hat aims for enterprise OpenStack deployment dominance

Red Hat’s long been one of the big go-to outfits for deploying Linux in the enterprise. Now, after its announcements at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong this week, it’s angling to move up a level and become synonymous with deploying OpenStack in the enterprise, too.

OpenStack, an open source infrastructure for creating private cloud environments, has much of the same aura of an open source success story as Linux did. Its major corporate backing distinguished it from the competition posed by rivals (in this case, CloudStack and Eucalyptus), and it enjoyed the release of a new major point revision of the product earlier this year.

But OpenStack is still a sprawling, complex product that takes patience and hard work if you want to wring results from it. It doesn’t offer the kind of out-of-the-box cloud experience the likes of Amazon have striven to deliver, which has translated into a good deal less corporate adoption than its developers and boosters (who are often one and the same) would like. Still, those difficulties have only encouraged Red Hat to double down on its efforts to get OpenStack into the enterprise.

Red Hat’s plan to tame OpenStack

Could Red Hat tame OpenStack in the way it made Linux into a genuinely deliverable product, not just a technology with a fun name? Its Hong Kong announcements make it sound that way, as it described several steps toward making OpenStack more of an integral part of Red Hat’s existing product family.

First step: Provide better management tools. To that end, Red Hat’s integrated OpenStack with the new version of Red Hat CloudForms (3.0), its system for managing public, private, and hybrid clouds. Setup and deployment of OpenStack resources can be done automatically through CloudForms, meaning there’s one less command line to monkey with when you want to provision or retire instances.

Second step: Do something about the way OpenStack handles storage. OpenStack has three distinct storage components: one for managing system images (Glance), one for block storage (Cinder), and one for object storage (Swift). Red Hat has consolidated management for all of those under Red Hat Storage Server, so you can now treat them as you would any other storage object managed by Red Hat Linux. (Red Hat’s Unified File and Object Storage technology for Storage Server was actually already built on top of OpenStack’s Swift.)

Third step: Make deployment more automatic. Hence, support for Foreman, a Puppet-based tool for managing the lifecycles of virtual servers. Puppet and Foreman are both third-party open source products with existing user bases, not new tools, so all the expertise and scripting already created for them can be put to use.

Fourth step: Nitty-gritty. Red Hat is adding support for other OpenStack components, including Heat for launching application stacks, Neutron for networking, and Ceilometer for instrumentation and monitoring.

One OpenStack to rule them all?

Does all of this together make for a thing — let’s call it “Red Hat Enterprise OpenStack” — the way it does Red Hat Enterprise Linux? That’s the ambition and the direction, anyway — to make the whole thing into a single deliverable product, not just a bag full of tools.

Though Red Hat’s work in this area is ambitious, it’s likely to run into two issues.

First is the tension that could be felt between Red Hat and all the other OpenStack partners. The more OpenStack becomes synonymous with Red Hat, the more it’s likely to be seen as being co-opted by Red Hat for its own ends. Most any name-brand-backed incarnation of a major open source project has been racked with this tension before. Look at the way Canonical’s stewardship of Ubuntu has created as many rifts and divisions as it has partnerships and alliances, or how Google’s end-user editions of Linux (Android, Chrome OS) have been accused of being mere ad-pushing and metrics-harvesting tools.

Second is how the competition in this space, outside of OpenStack and its partnerships, isn’t standing still for a second. Microsoft is charging ahead with both Windows Server and Windows Azure as a unified and consistent way to create public, private, and hybrid clouds. And Amazon — whose APIs CloudStack supports — still reigns supreme for easy public cloud creation despite all its quirks (low granularity of instances, unpredictable service).

Perhaps with Red Hat at its back, OpenStack will finally start showing the kind of broader adoption that Enterprise Linux itself enjoys. But it’s more likely that OpenStack will remain a technology for a small, self-selecting crowd: those who have no choice but to build their cloud from scratch.

This story, “Red Hat aims for enterprise OpenStack deployment dominance,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.