Modern Middleware for Modern Clouds: How Red Hat JBoss Middleware is Ushering in the Era of the Open Hybrid Cloud

For years, we’ve maintained our vision to enable any application to run anywhere, at any time. The mantra has influenced us both culturally and technologically. We’re committed to openness and flexibility that truly gives our customers choice over what they put in their IT environments, how they do it, and when they do it. Customers appreciate this and it’s generally the direction that we see the industry moving in.

At Red Hat, our view is that the open hybrid cloud will use open source, standardized technology to unify public and private clouds, as well as physical on-premise environments. The open hybrid cloud will provide workload portability and interoperability, avoid vendor lock-in, and enable new business capabilities. Tomorrow's applications will be driven by mobile computing, big data, and alternative data management solutions, as well as the heterogeneous nature of open hybrid cloud. The middleware that served companies and developers well for the past 10 years will not work as well in this new environment. Therefore, in the future, users will need a new form of middleware to fulfill the vision of open hybrid cloud. This is the mission of Red Hat JBoss Middleware - to fulfill the vision of open hybrid cloud.

This is a departure from what have historically been basic and binary conversations about the relationship between middleware and cloud technology. These conversations have been dominated by questions like, “Should I build my application on-premise or in a public PaaS? Should I try to build a private PaaS or just use single public PaaS? How should I address my legacy applications? How do I migrate data or processes from one environment to another?”

These debates miss the point. It’s not going to be an either-or scenario, but rather a multidimensional operating environment. In reality, we’ll probably see enterprises with a combination of these elements in active, simultaneous use. Users will use both public and private clouds and will need to move workloads from physical to virtual environments, and back again. And, the varying and disparate environments will all need to interoperate, with data and processes located in various locations. In addition to the infrastructure variability, the applications themselves will be varied in purpose and design. Modern middleware will have to play a more unifying role for businesses to succeed. Middleware will need to support multiple deployment models, be lightweight, flexible, and dynamic, and support the polyglot programming models that will drive these varied environments.

So, what does this mean for Red Hat? I think we’re already in a good position to help our customers meet these challenges. We’ve embraced polyglot programming in OpenShift and our JBoss Open Choice initiative, both in our products and upstream communities, which has helped set the stage for the compatibility needs of today’s IT realities. JBoss application platforms have supported polyglot, and projects such as Vert.x are taking it to the next stage. Vert.x is one of the latest examples of a polyglot application platform technology that has the market excited. Our application platform, as a part of OpenShift, is designed to be the lightest weight and most flexible Java platform in the market. And, we expect our lightweight integration technology based on Camel to lead the way for the integration of processes and data across clouds, making open hybrid cloud a reality. Our integration and business process management technologies will be the foundation for Red Hat OpenShift iPaaS and BPM PaaS services, making easier for developers and enterprises.

The signals are clear that applications and application environments will change, and this is as much a mindset shift as it is a development one. We’re at an inflection point with regard to open hybrid clouds, and it’s where Red Hat JBoss Middleware shines. Our technology provides an evolutionary path to open hybrid clouds that is designed to help enterprises create, integrate, deploy and manage applications, services and workloads easier and faster, in these rapidly changing hybrid cloud environments.

Enterprises need to understand the changes and challenges they will face as their IT environments become increasingly varied, and be vigilant in how they approach them to ensure that they are taking the most suitable course of action. As cloud can increase efficiency, it can just as easily create a new and more serious lock-in that will be more difficult to break. We believe Red Hat is in a good position to help enterprises navigate and succeed in heterogeneous open hybrid cloud environments, and truly benefit from the value of cloud.