Makara, a two-year old cloud startup, reportedly met with VMware about the prospects of an acquisition, but the virtualization company turned them down, according to the report.  The Register is now reporting that Red Hat is talking with Makara about the possibility of a buyout, according to "a source familiar with the matter."

Makara came out of stealth mode not too long ago.  Their first major release, the Makara Cloud Application Platform, was released only seven months ago.  Their cloud app platform is "a self-service, self-managing web application capsule that provides onboarding, auto-scaling, and visibility for cloud deployments."  The portal enables IT teams and developers to provision and administer public (e.g Amazon) or private (e.g. Xen, VMware vCloud) clouds.  Makara's founders believe their platform finally solves many of the problems with moving your existing applications onto the cloud and managing them easily.  

Makara Dashboard


At JBoss World, Makara announced a partnership with Red Hat to make a Makara Cloud for JBoss to move and manage apps initially running on JBoss AS.  According to the Register, Red Hat declined to comment yet on the report and Makara hasn't responded.  

Red Hat has been heavily involved with cloud computing technology for years now.    One of the open source company's more recent stories was the s ubmission of their Deltacloud API to a cloud standards body.  Red Hat packages its Linux distro with virtualization and middleware packages so customers can build their own clouds.  

The addition of Makara's technology could be a boon to Red Hat for the simplicity it provides.   Through Makara you can drag and drop your applications into the cloud with features like auditing, log aggregation, elastic scaling, stack config, and cloud provisioning.  See for yourself:



This technology would probably increase the value of Red Hat's cloud offerings, and it would also be interesting to see what portions might be open sourced and injected into JBoss.org projects.