It’s the week of the app store in the public cloud. On Monday, IBM pulled the curtains back on an online service marketplace for its SoftLayer infrastructure-as-a-service platform that brings together its previously largely disparate lineup of management solutions  in a cohesive portfolio modeled after AWS.

Announced at Big Blue’s annual Impact conference in Las Vegas, the store aims to strike just the right balance between flexibility and control, allowing users to consume technology on-demand while still keeping the CIO in the loop.  The catalog features role-specific solutions for business users and IT managers, including a set of analytics apps, as well as a collection of developer tools underpinned by  BlueMix, a platform-as-a-service stack based on the open source Cloud Foundry project.  The latest release packs 30 new capabilities for processing information, managing connected devices in the Internet of Things and enabling collaboration between developers and IT operations professionals.

A couple days after the IBM Cloud Marketplace made its debut, ServiceNow introduced Share, a similar cloud app store that places a particular emphasis on the community. After receiving approval from the IT automation provider, partners and  users can submit custom solutions they have built on its platform to the catalog for other members of the ecosystem to use free of charge.

A few hours later, Red Hat expanded its own community footprint with the acquisition of Inktank, a venture-backed startup launched in 2012 by the developers behind the Ceph software-defined storage component of OpenStack to commercialize the project.  The deal is valued at $175 million, making it the Linux distributor’s largest since 2006.

Inktank’s flagship platform provides object and and block storage capabilities that complement Red Hat’s GlusterFS file system, which it obtained as part of the 2010 purchase of scale-out system maker Gluster. The vendor intends to combine the products into a universal abstraction layer for software-defined storage environments.

photo credit: kevin dooley via photopin cc