The OpenStack project was launched five years ago with the singular mission of making it easier to provision and scale on-premise infrastructure, but as adoption slowly started to gain steam, the need spread up the stack to the applications running above. That’s what ended up driving Red Hat Inc. to announce a rare strategic investment in Tesora Inc. this morning.

The Cambridge-based startup is the main backer of Trove, an emerging project in the upstream OpenStack that provides a framework for running databases on the cloud platform with the same flexibility afforded when managing the underlying hardware. Administrators can take advantage of its automation features to blaze through the initial configuration process with a few straightforward console commands.

But where Trove really shines is in simplifying the ongoing maintenance that has traditionally accounted for the bulk of the work involved in managing large-scale database deployments. The framework hides the complexity of provisioning resources and rolling out updates behind a programming interface that provides a consistent abstraction for carrying out administrative operations.

That also includes backups and monitoring in addition to the core management functionality, which are equally essential for running databases at the kind of scale in which the typical production-grade OpenStack cluster operates.  By automating those tasks, Trove not only makes the platform more wieldy for existing users but also more attractive to the majority of organizations that have yet to jump on the bandwagon due to the current complexity of the project.

That’s why Red Hat Inc., one of the leading distributors of OpenStack,  added support for the framework earlier this year and is now buying a stake in Tesora. The company has a special interest in automation, having released a new version of its distro only last week that packs another emerging sub-project called TripleO for automating the installation and configuration of the platform.

Tesora didn’t say how much Red Hat has injected into its coffers, nor the specific purpose. But it’s clear that the investment is meant to help cement their partnership, which dates all the way back to last February when the startup pivoted from its business of on MySQL to Trove.

Photo via Johanna84