I attended the Red Hat summit this week in San Francisco.  Vendor events are always a bit of a hit or miss for me.  Either it’s, “Don’t pay attention to the man behind the curtain,” or some serious and interesting stuff goes down.  Fortunately, this week it was the latter.

My take on Red Hat is that their open source roots provide a loyal following of enterprise users who are very happy with the technology.  Moreover, they have a robust partner network, most of which have been partners for years, and they have, in essence, created an ecosystem around Red Hat.

However, their movement toward the world of cloud computing has been somewhat confusing to me.  What do they offer in the cloud, and what’s real and what’s not?  Most importantly, what will actually sell in a space dominated by much larger and better-funded players, such as Microsoft, Google, and AWS?

The reality is that Red Hat is no “shrinking violet.”  Indeed, in a world where the cloud technology providers are either too big or too small, Red Hat is perhaps just right.  Red Hat is big enough to make major investment in R&D to provide some pretty innovative technology, but they are small enough to drive agility and innovation.

What’s more, they are big enough to purchase the technology they need, as well as make mega-deals, such as the one announced with Dell this week (see below).  The addition of a new marketplace was also announced this week, which will provide a place to pick Red Hat partners, and buy stuff known to work with the Red Hat platforms, including Red Hat’s cloud-based platforms.

OpenShift is Red Hat’s best cloud product.  This PaaS offering allows developers to leverage Git (a distributed revision control and source code management system) to deploy applications in different languages.  It’s possible they do this better than the other PaaS players out there, as their competitors seem to focus on only one or two primary languages.  OpenShift language support includes Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Java.

One of the unique aspects of OpenShift is support for binary programs that can execute on RHEL Linux, which means OpenShift supports the use of many languages and frameworks.  OpenShift is a strong contender for existing Linux shops that want a PaaS offering that layers nicely into their existing application inventory.

For the most part, Red Hat has all of the bases covered, including mobile development using Titanium Studio for use with the OpenShift PaaS.  This mobile development platform supports both iOS and Android, and is well integrated into the Red Hat offering.  On the DevOps side, OpenShift supports the usual suspects, including Jenkins, Chef, and Puppet.

Announced at the conference was the news that Dell and Red Hat have co-engineered OpenStack-based cloud solutions to address enterprise customers, “including mobile, social and analytics – and dev/test environments.” You can buy these platforms now, and they come in a few configurations that include:

• Proof of Concept Configuration – Designed for customers that want to leverage OpenStack capabilities, research deployment options, pilot application deployments, and begin the development of an OpenStack cloud environment.
• Pilot Configuration – Designed for testing cloud applications, and for customers who are beginning a production environment. The pilot configuration can be expanded with pre-configured compute, storage and infrastructure blocks.

So, the Dell Cloud Services, powered by Red Hat, will engage with customers to design and architect OpenStack-based clouds.  This is a bit of a risky deal, if you ask me.  However, were I working at Red Hat, I would have suggested the same thing.  If Dell could afford it, perhaps a buy out of Red Hat would not be a bad idea at this point.

While I’m not a big fan of these kinds of deals, both Red Hat and Dell are clearly trying to gang up on the larger cloud providers out there.  Moreover, Dell needs a solid cloud story, and Red Hat was perhaps the only one that returned their calls.

Other news this week out of the summit includes better use of Docker, and an emerging OpenShift on-line marketplace.   The marketplace sends a clear message that indeed OpenShift continues to be the direction of Red Hat, not Cloud Foundry.   The larger news is that Red Hat is moving quickly to dominate OpenStack, to a point that it’s causing a stir among the OpenStackers out there.

Is Red Hat relevant in the cloud?  The answer is “Yes.”    While they don’t make as much noise as others in the emerging cloud computing space, they are one of the more rock solid players.   That may make all of the difference.