ATLANTA, GA — Way back in December 2012, Red Hat acquired ManageIQ , a company with a proprietary cloud management program of the same name. Since then, Red Hat integrated ManageIQ into its CloudForms cloud management program , but it didn't make it open source — until now.

At the OpenStack Summit, Tim Yeaton, Red Hat's newly appointed senior vice president of the Infrastructure Group, announced that Red Hat was open sourcing ManageIQ. Sources close to Red Hat added that ManageIQ's code had needed a great deal of review and revision before it could be released as open source.

Yeaton added that while ManageIQ is being integrated into OpenStack, it — and its commercial big brother CloudForms — can be used to manage clouds of all types and descriptions, including Microsoft Azure.

In addition to its software contributions, Red Hat will also provide integration and orchestration content for lab automation. This platform and content pairing will help ease the building of development and testing clouds based on OpenStack. Red Hat is not the only ManageIQ contributor, however; additional content will be provided by such partners as Booz Allen Hamilton, CiRBA, and Chef.

Joe Fitzgerald, Red Hat's general manager of cloud management, added that the ManageIQ open source code isn't yet ready for the public. Fitzgerald said the full open-source project release, including source code and builds, will be out later this quarter.

Fitzgerald added that ManageIQ will also be a community project. Yeaton agreed, noting that just as Fedora provides the building blocks for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the ManageIQ community build will serve as the foundation for CloudForms.

Fitzgerald concluded: "Some industry players have focused on building an open-source cloud infrastructure with OpenStack and selling expensive, proprietary management software on top of that. We believe the entire cloud should be open with no lock-in, so we are contributing this valuable code base to open up the management stack for the first time.”

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