Red Hat was one of the busier participants during day one of the OpenStack Summit 2014 in Atlanta yesterday, rolling out new code it hopes will drive adoption of OpenStack and advance cloud management.

The company said it’s willing to contribute its ManageIQ platform to OpenStack, in the hope it can help to govern and automate open-source clouds. The ManageIQ code underlays Red Hat’s CloudForms open hybrid cloud management technology, and is said to be its largest-ever contribution to OpenStack. As part of the deal, Red Hat says it’s also willing to provide integration and orchestration content for lab automation. It hopes this will simplify the development and testing of OpenStack clouds.

“While some industry players have focused on building an open-source cloud infrastructure with OpenStack and selling expensive, proprietary management software on top of that, we believe the entire cloud should be open with no lock-in, so we are contributing this valuable code base to open up the management stack for the first time,” said Joe Fitzgerald, general manager of cloud management at Red Hat.

Minding cloud management

Red Hat said it’s going to launch a new open-source ManageIQ community in the next few weeks – bringing together developers, system integrators, service providers, users and researchers willing to collaborate on OpenStack management and drive innovation in hybrid clouds.

The way Red Hat sees things is that, as more developers look to OpenStack for building and integrating their private cloud deployments, lab automation becomes increasingly important to the success of these projects. It believes that ManageIQ can give developers the management capabilities they need, allowing them to easily integrate numerous OpenStack projects and technologies like Ceilometer, Glance, Heat and Nova.

“OpenStack has been evolving at breakneck speed and it’s clear that proper monitoring and management is needed,” said Michael Coté, research director of market research firm 451 Group’s Infrastructure Software sector. “As the OpenStack infrastructure layers build out, it’s encouraging to see people like Red Hat focusing on solving these cloud management problems, and open sourcing ManageIQ will help provide an interesting, mature code base to the community, not to mention the product itself.”

Fueling deeper integration

ManageIQ, acquired by Red Hat in December 2012, gives developers a range of operational and management functionality for cloud deployments, including capacity management, tag-based policies and orchestration. Enterprises and services providers will be able to build OpenStack cloud infrastructure using ManageIQ as a tool to manage those environments, Red Hat said.

“We believe that a multi-cloud environment should leverage deep integration across domains and processes, and we have developed rich content that leverages the strength of the ManageIQ platform to do just that,” said Michael Farber, executive vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton. “By actively participating in the community, we will be focusing on advancing the key integration aspects of the platform.”

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