Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat CloudForms 4, the latest version of its award-winning hybrid cloud management solution. Built on an open platform, Red Hat CloudForms 4 goes beyond self-service, offering a consistent experience and comprehensive lifecycle management across platforms spanning virtualisation, private cloud, public cloud and containers.
Support for Microsoft Azure and expanded container management
The release of Red Hat CloudForms 3.2 debuted the industry’s first open source cloud management platform to manage OpenStack infrastructure and workloads from a single platform, and with CloudForms 4, Red Hat continues to add functionality for the platforms and tools that developers and operators demand.
- Support for Microsoft Azure – Following Red Hat and Microsoft’s recent partnership announcement, Red Hat CloudForms now expands its collection of managed platforms to include Microsoft Azure, enabling Azure customers to manage those workloads and resources within CloudForms.
- Support for containers – As more enterprises plan to run their workloads inside containers, they want introspection into these new configurations. CloudForms 4 adds management for container architectures, giving customers visibility into workloads running in OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat and the infrastructure hosting OpenShift. In this manner, CloudForms can manage the relationships from the container through the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) layer to the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer or the physical host.
- Improved self-service and operations – Improved dashboards and charts within CloudForms enable users to better see the relationships between different cloud platforms and container hosts running in production.
Red Hat CloudForms continually discovers and automatically inspects new resources, providing operational insight into platforms including: Amazon Web Services; Hyper-V; Microsoft Azure; OpenShift by Red Hat; OpenStack; Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation and VMware. Red Hat CloudForms also applies automated policy to manage corporate compliance and governance of resources from a single operational interface.
ManageIQ community momentum
Red Hat CloudForms 4 is the third release based on the ManageIQ open source project, which was launched in June 2014 by Red Hat based on the code from the acquisition of ManageIQ, Inc. The ManageIQ community brings together developers, service providers, systems integrators, researchers and users to collaborate and drive innovation in the unified management of hybrid cloud environments. Since the last release of CloudForms, the community has gained significant traction, with contributions from:
- Booz Allen Hamilton, who contributed code to integrate Project Jellyfish, its open source cloud broker,with ManageIQ. Booz Allen launched Project Jellyfish in 2014 with the goal of making smarter, more intuitive cloud service management and brokering more readily available. Project Jellyfish forms the basisfor the new self-service user interface in Red Hat CloudForms 4.
- Nuage Networks, who is building a provider for CloudForms to manage software-defined networking (SDN), planned for inclusion in a future CloudForms release.
- Produban, the IT organization of Grupo Santander, is contributing improved chargeback and billing support to the ManageIQ project.
Availability
Red Hat CloudForms 4 is immediately available for customers with a subscription to download.
“CloudForms 4 marks a milestone in hybrid cloud management. The addition of container management will enable CloudForms to provide a unified management experience across a wider variety of cloud platforms. We are also pleased to both continue building Red Hat’s strategic relationship with Microsoft and meet customer requests by adding management capabilities for Microsoft Azure. With Red Hat CloudForms 4, customers can find the industry’s broadest hybrid cloud management solution built on open source technologies,” said Joe Fitzgerald, vice president, Management, Red Hat.
