The Role of IT in the Cloud Era
For some time now, Red Hat has been making the case that the pace of IT innovation requires an open approach to IT management. Given the rapid rate at which emerging technologies are being adopted across the enterprise, Red Hat contends that IT organizations more than ever need the flexibility to extend their management platforms in any direction they see fit.
As an example of that extensibility, Red Hat this week announced that version four of its open source CloudForms management software now supports containers regardless of where they are running. In addition, in accordance with its recently formed alliance with Microsoft, CloudForms now supports the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform.
Joe Fitzgerald, vice president of management for Red Hat, says that enhanced dashboards not only give IT organizations more visibility into what is happening inside their environment, but IT organizations can use a common management framework to manage both legacy and modern applications based on  microservices architectures made up of containers such as Docker.
In general, Fitzgerald notes that as an open source project, IT organizations can extend CloudForms in any direction they like or work with Red Hat to accomplish a specific goal. Case in point, Fitzgerald notes that Booz Allen Hamilton is working with Red Hat on a Project Jellyfish initiative that connects CloudForms to an open source cloud broker originally developed by the consulting firm.
These days, no one in IT can be entirely sure what they may be asked to manage next. The rise of the Internet of Things, for example, would suggest that IT ecosystems continue to expand at a rapid rate. Red Hat is making the case that an open source management framework is by definition more extensible than commercial management software owned by a single vendor. As such, Fitzgerald posits that the CloudForms open source community as a whole is always going to be able to bring CloudForms forward into new realms of computing long before any commercial platform could ever hope to get there.
