Red Hat acquires Makara to strengthen cloud strategy

Open-source enterprise software specialist Red Hat has purchased Makara, makers of cloud-based application management products, the company announced on Tuesday.

Red Hat hopes that the deal — which was completed for an undisclosed sum — will allow the company to speed up expansion of its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) plans as part of its Cloud Foundations portfolio.

By integrating Makara alongside the JBoss application server, Red Hat said it will be able to offer a more comprehensive PaaS product for public and private clouds. According to Red Hat, the Makara tools allow users to easily undertake application scaling, rightsizing, rollback and monitoring tasks of running apps.

The Cloud Foundations platform, launched in June 2010, allows Red Hat customers to deploy their own private cloud environments using Red Hat Enterprise virtualisation or develop apps for use with public cloud products, such as Amazon EC2.

The acquisition of Makara provides Red Hat with a complete vertical open-source cloud stack that includes operating system, middleware and virtualisation. Red Hat said the integration of Makara's tools means applications do not need to be rewritten for new platforms, making them highly portable.

"Makara is a great match for Red Hat because our ambitions for the cloud are so amazingly aligned... Makara set out to revolutionise application management by building provisioning, deployment, management, monitoring and scaling right into the platform, thus allowing existing, unmodified applications to run on a cloud, fully managed," Tobias Kunze Briseno, chief technology officer at Makara, said in a blog post.

"To work this magic, our technology has to interface deeply with the virtualisation and cloud orchestration layers, Linux, and an ever-growing set of middleware components such as JBoss, PHP, Apache, MySQL and Memcached," he added.