Makara

Red Hat is going to enter with own offer the PaaS market (Platform as a Service), and the Makara platform which was developed by the startup of the same name which recently was a part of Red Hat will become the first public cloud service of the company. At the time of acquisition the number of Makara developers was 15 people, and now their number already increased three times, – reports the Network World edition.

Makara is a platform for development of web applications based on Java Enterprise Edition. Though service was started all for pair of months before Red Hat sale, several thousands of developers already used it, and the American aerospace agency NASA uses it for modeling of climatic processes. At the moment service works based on the Amazon EC2 and Rackspace IaaS-platforms in the fact-finding mode for developers. Technical support is available in the limited mode.

One of priority tasks of Makara developers — integration of service into the JBoss application server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS belonging to Red Hat. Attention is paid also to integration into the Deltacloud project which allows to start software without changes on different cloud platforms, whether it be Amazon EC2, RackSpace or the private cloud constructed on the basis of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

Red Hat is going to publish details of the future PaaS-strategy for Red Hat Summit which will pass in Boston from May 3 to May 6. Still the staff of the company avoided direct answers to questions of terms when Makara becomes available to commercial operation.

The new offer of Red Hat should face quite fierce competition. Microsoft already offers the PaaS-Windows platform to Azure. The App Engine service from Google also allows to solve the problems connected with development of scalable web applications. But the most serious competition for Red Hat is the Cloud Foundry platform announced the other day from VMware. As well as Makara, Cloud Foundry allows to create applications on Java (and also on Ruby and JavaScript). Besides, source texts of Cloud Foundry will be available on the terms of free licenses - it is already direct invasion into the fiefdom of Red Hat from VMware.