Cloud Solutions Made Simple

The recent release of Red Hat Cloud Suite marked a new milestone for Red Hat and our customers.  First, it is the first in what will become a family of suites. Second, it enables enterprise IT to transform their application development and operations toward an agile, innovation center based on hybrid cloud and devops technologies.  Curating a broad set of open source technologies, Red Hat Cloud Suite offers a turnkey Cloud solution with a container-based app-development platform, private-cloud infrastructure, and a common management framework.  Specifically, Red Hat Cloud Suite includes

Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and also management products such as Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Satellite. You can read the Red Hat Cloud Suite announcement here.

While all of this may sound simple, launching and supporting a complex set of infrastructure and developer offerings, and ensuring that they are all compatible and easy to use can be an ominous undertaking.  We have also seen that organizations not very familiar with the impact on processes, workflows and organizational responsibilities and eventually structure are challenged to integrate these technologies into their environment.

As such, the most basic question often emerges - how do I get started?  For this, we now offer two tools to streamline the journey.

In brownfield environments where incumbent technologies are prevalent, deploying any new technologies must be carefully scrutinized.  Given the complex interdependencies between each layer of technology, any new deployments done wrong could compromise the desired outcome and future productivity and stability.  Red Hat offers the Deployment Planner, a tool to help users to quickly navigate the feature set and complex interoperability and lifecycle information across different product versions.  It provides an intuitive web-based interface for users to browse compatibility information, providing clarity on how to take advantage of the vast Red Hat Cloud Suite capabilities.

Once users have determined the deployment plan, they are ready to start the actual installation of Red Hat Cloud Suite.  To facilitate the installation, Red Hat has developed a tool called the Quickstart Cloud Installer (QCI).  QCI drastically simplifies the deployment experience for Red Hat Cloud Suite users by orchestrating installation workflow across the constituent products to quickly deploy a cloud environment with pre-defined defaults for typical scenarios like a Proof-Of-Concept environment or small-scale private cloud to explore how to enable productivity for the users and operators of the infrastructure services in the cloud paradigm.  QCI provides an intuitive graphical user interface to provision using any combination of the  Red Hat Cloud Suite components, instead of installing the products individually separate from each other.  This reduces the time spent to deploy a functioning cloud from days to mere hours.  We are now inviting users to try out the beta (refer to the “Installation using the QuickStart Cloud Installer” tab.)

For the evolution of QCI, we aim to transform it into a multi-purpose solution deployment tool.  In addition to deploying Red Hat products in both greenfield and brownfield environments, it will also help users to integrate and deploy third party applications.  Moreover, the upcoming tool will support the deployment of advanced configurations including (but not limited to) High Availability, SDN, and DevOps.

As users continue to push the limits of cloud applications and infrastructure, we see the needs for more advanced capabilities.  Deployment Planner and Quickstart Cloud Installer are vehicles to enable users to realize their Cloud ambition.  We encourage you to try them out, and share your thoughts here!