Perhaps you will vaguely remember that a year ago CloudForms was supposed to be an infrastructure-as-a-service platform from Red Hat.

If you don't it's just as well because it's not anymore.

It had to give way when Red Hat officially embraced OpenStack as an IaaS platform in April and became OpenStack's single biggest contributor while it develops its own commercial OpenStack distribution.

That meant that Red Hat had to think up something else to do with CloudForms and so, when the widgetry hit GA Wednesday, it was recast as an open hybrid cloud management platform - largely, it appears, because it makes use of APIs in Deltacloud, the open source project Red Hat sent to live at Apache - that also happens to create hybrid IaaS resources in a corporate data center and on a public cloud like, say, Amazon or VMware

It treats them as a unit. Users don't have to worry about configuration issues despite underlying differences in technology and virtualization platforms.

CloudForms can deploy applications - well, one anyway - to multiple clouds and manage their lifecycle using blueprint template, move data around without being locked in, work with Red Hat's OpenShift PaaS, and of course support OpenStack.

It's been packaged as an infrastructure stack together with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat Storage and certified third-party applications.

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