What Does It Mean To “Ease Into the Cloud”?

A couple of weeks ago, we announced the availability of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 beta, a major milestone on our march to bring our next-generation platform to enterprises. In the blog post and during last week's webinar we mentioned an idea called “Ease into the Cloud,” but what does that really mean?

At Red Hat, we have been talking about cloud for years and how it is changing computing, especially enterprise IT. When we started working on cloud-enabling our platform, we had some concrete ideas on what the JBoss experience of “going cloud” should be:

1. Going Cloud Is Not A One-Way Trip – Often when we see a technology shift, the enterprise customer is forced down an irreversible path. In some cases this means re-architecting your apps, rewiring your integration and, with cloud, even potentially rethinking your approach to data, taking time and money away from innovation and results. But that's not how it should be with cloud. Organizations need to move workloads bi-directionally from the cloud to the enterprise, or from the enterprise to the cloud, quickly and easily in either direction. This is why organizations are increasingly specifying open, “hybrid” clouds as a core tenet of their enterprise architecture. There will be cases where organizations must move workloads between different cloud providers and technologies. Whatever the need, enterprises can use JBoss solutions to meet a broad range of needs. This could be based upon load, where you are in the application lifecycle or just to save money. In any case, an application on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) should be easy to run, on-premise or vice versa. Likewise, getting away from traditional data approaches and switching to, for example, Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6, should not mean replacing existing databases but complementing them for cloud-based applications.

1. Going Cloud Is Not Just About “A” Cloud – While we believe we have the best stack for cloud (from OS on up) we also know that people value the choice Red Hat provides. That is why we are planning to architect JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 to run well in a variety of environments (including OpenShift, Amazon and VMware). This design principle also extends to other Red Hat cloud efforts. Just as OpenShift seeks to provide a path to the cloud for all developers (Java, mobile, PHP, etc.), JBoss aims to be an application platform for all clouds.

2. Going Cloud Is On YOUR Terms – Not everyone will move to the cloud, or at least not immediately. As far as we are concerned, every organization should be able to choose their own path. One organization's cloud may be an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or basic stuff in a PaaS with everything else on-premise. As a result, we are working to make the technology more easily transferable and investigating how to make subscriptions to Red Hat JBoss Middleware Solutions cloud-ready as well. Last year, we created a new subscription pricing model that simplified the pricing for bare metal or virtualized deployments. In the future, we plan to make subscriptions for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform available as a part of other Red Hat offerings. We are providing customers the tools and flexibility to move into the cloud at their own pace.

That's how we're helping enterprises “Ease Into the Cloud.” And, again, please check out the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 beta – available now, and well worth a close look.