As allies and competitors line up behind the hot Cloud Foundry Foundation, where does that leave Red Hat and its support of OpenStack and Project Solum?

There’s a fight brewing over which kind of open-source platform-as-a-service should command developer loyalties and function the foundation for future cloud applications.

Should or not it’s native to the major open-source cloud project, OpenStack, and work closely with OpenStack components?

Or is it more than enough that it runs on top of OpenStack but has a broad mixture of powerful backers to sponsor its development?

Red Hat was depending on the previous and dealing to mix its OpenShift PaaS and a brand new OpenStack project, Solum, to form a formidable new PaaS platform. Red Hat is a number one contributor to OpenStack, and a collection of Red Hat engineers jumped into Project Solum within hours of its announcement by Rackspace. The mix of OpenShift and Solum was a thrilling prospect, wrote Red Hat’s OpenShift guru Matt Hicks back on Oct. 24.

“While OpenStack is a quick moving space, we have now a number of experience with it and believe that there’s tremendous potential to align our PaaS approach with this project,” he wrote in that blog post. Red Hat would provide development tools and Linux container expertise; Solum would offer application deployment and lifecycle management. It seemed an excellent marriage. But that is not how it’s figuring out.

Rackspace’s principal architect, Adrian Otto, launched Project Solum and likewise posted a complimentary blog Oct. 24 at the Rackspace website. He said, “We feel very fortunate to be working with eBay, RedHat, Ubuntu/Canonical” and others in forming Project Solum.

That mutual admiration makes it difficult to give an explanation for why, after just four months of collaboration, Rackspace appears to have changed its mind and is now a sponsor of Cloud Foundry, the competing open-source PaaS. It is not just contributing code but ponying up big bucks to launch a Cloud Foundry Foundation and sit on its board of directors as a platinum sponsor. Red Hat’s other erstwhile ally, Canonical, is sitting at the community advisory board of the brand new foundation, on account of appear this summer, in keeping with a press release Feb 24.

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Cloud Foundry is open-source PaaS, started by VMware and spun out with other VMware-owned open-source code into EMC and VMware’s Pivotal Software subsidiary, headed by Paul Maritz. Maritz sensed Pivotal had a successful open-source project on its hands that already enjoyed broad backing and the activity of 750 developers. It might be more successful, he and others concluded, if it is usually free of what many viewed as VMware and Pivotal’s dominance of the project.

“Cloud Foundry … has evolved into the idea for a real open platform ecosystem,” Maritz wrote in a Feb. 24 blog at the Pivotal site. PaaS is without doubt one of the primary styles of cloud computing, probably second to infrastructure-as-a-service (characterized by Amazon Web Services). With PaaS, developers get a broad set of tools and development help on the fundamental plumbing of an application, permitting them to produce end results faster. PaaS also looks to aid the time-consuming task of preparing a brand new application for deployment.

Both Cloud Foundry and OpenShift look to assist developers produce applications after which give them several cloud-deployment options. Maritz’s comments mirror an ongoing debate in the cloud community over how effective PaaS could be on its own. Isn’t it really only a feature of excellent IaaS? His answer was no, it will be important by itself, and Cloud Foundry will prove it.

To a still-unknown extent, that’s newly hatched competition and potential bad news to Red Hat, which was hoping on the “native to OpenStack” Solum, combined with Red Hat Linux and Red Hat OpenShift.

Red Hat is a dominant player in its own right in the case of the Linux operating system. Workloads that enterprises send into the cloud, once they run under Linux, are overwhelmingly running under Red Hat Enterprise Linux, owing to Red Hat’s extensive testing of the system. By linking OpenShift to OpenStack, Red Hat had a shot at capturing more developers and tying them more closely to its growing catalogue of Red Hat middleware and virtualization software.

Key industry players do not want to move together with it on that path. IBM and HP are backers of OpenStack, but they’re also platinum sponsors of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, such as SAP, EMC, VMware, and Rackspace. Platinum sponsors decide to support the inspiration with paid developers and financing. (In relation to OpenStack, platinum sponsors pay $500,000 a year and get a guaranteed board seat.) CenturyLink and ActiveState also will join the hot foundation as gold sponsors. They can contribute a lesser amount and nominate a candidate for the board, with a limited variety of seats drawn from all gold sponsors.

Red Hat could only have watched in dismay as Pivotal’s moves shifted the terms of dialogue over open-source PaaS. Not just were among the early and savvy backers of the Apache Web Server and Linux, resembling IBM, lining

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Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week. He’s a graduate of Syracuse … View Full Bio

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