Red Hat Inc. has updated its hybrid cloud management platform CloudForms to provide enhanced capabilities for users of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, as well as Red Hat’s OpenStack platform.

CloudForms is software that enables organizations to manage multiple cloud deployments, including both private and public clouds and software container-based platforms. The platform allows information technology organizations to provide composable services via a self-service portal, and it manages the entire service lifecycle from provisioning to retirement.

The latest CloudForms 4.2 release is based on the open-source ManageIQ Euwe release, which became generally available on Dec. 20. Red Hat became the lead developer of that project in 2012 when it acquired ManageIQ for $104 million.

There are several differences between Red Hat’s commercially supported CloudForms and the ManageIQ release, the company said. For instance, CloudForms is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux rather than CentOS, and it contains a commercial PDF generation library that doesn’t exist in ManageIQ. The software lifecycle is also different, with each CloudForms release backed by three years of support under Red Hat’s subscription model. In contrast, ManageIQ immediately becomes unsupported when a new version is released, approximately every six months.

CloudForms 4.2 comes with improved metrics and events features for Microsoft’s Azure Cloud and Google’s Cloud Platform. With Azure, metrics including memory, disk and network I/O are now collected from the Resource Manager API. With Google Cloud Platform, the Google Cloud Monitoring API has been implemented to provide metrics on resource usage. For container platforms, CloudForms 4.2 adds additional chargeback reports and filtering capabilities, including the ability to leverage tabs and labels synced from Red Hat’s OpenStack platform.

“There is no longer a ‘one-size-fits-all’ IT environment, as many organizations are seeking to leverage the best benefits of physical, virtual and cloud-based technologies,” said Joe Fitzgerald, vice president of management at Red Hat. “Coupled with Linux containers, only managing one or two aspects of these hybrid computing environments can lead to downtime or outages. Red Hat CloudForms provides a flexible, open management platform to oversee these disparate resources.”

Red Hat said CloudForms 4.2 is available immediately from its Customer Portal.

Image credit: harrivicknarajah0 via pixabay.com