It announced that it’s going into both the Infrastructure-as-a-Service and the Platform-as-a-Service business, pushing past its year-old first-generation Cloud Foundations widgetry.

It calls the beta IaaS effort CloudForms and the not-yet-ready-for-prime-time PaaS solution OpenShift.

CloudForms is described as a collection of upwards of 60 open source projects that can be used to automate the creation of private and hybrid clouds and – thanks to built-in ALM – manage multi-tier applications across multiple clouds, virtualization platforms and heterogeneous physical servers because the widgetry exploits Red Hat’s Deltacloud APIs.

It supports Amazon, IBM and NTT Communications clouds along with Red Hat and VMware virtualization.

Taking a jab at VMware – and underscoring its implicit shift in focus – Red Hat claims CloudForms is “very different than cloud products from virtualization-only vendors, which focus on managing virtual machines, not applications, thus creating significant new complexity and costs. By allowing users to manage applications, not just VMs, Red Hat makes the promise of the cloud real by reducing management complexity and increasing IT agility and innovation.”

Guess we’ll see about that. For what it’s worth, it did get Cisco, VMware’s BFF, to call it a “game changer” even though Red Hat says that getting to the cloud is not dependent on “expensive migration from physical to virtual servers.”

Red Hat’s promising to extend CloudForms to include “a range of services to extend application portability from one cloud to another, including critical areas such as storage abstraction, messaging and high availability.”

Unlike CloudForms, OpenShift is not all open source – at least not yet – and owes its existence to Red Hat’s acquisition last year of Makara, the Java PaaS-on-EC2 start-up.

Typical of Red Hat the sales pitch will be that it’s “ending the lock-in of PaaS.”

Complements of those Deltacloud interoperability APIs again – and you can bet your sweet bippy there’s a standards war lurking around the interoperable API corner – developers are supposed to be able to move their apps around to any Red Hat-certified public cloud with the flick of a one-line command.

Currently Red Hat-certified clouds are kinda thin on the ground but open source developers will be able to build and host applications on Red Hat infrastructure or run on EC2. Red Hat’s infrastructure, by the way, is spread across multiple regions and countries.

OpenShift will be offered as a free multi-tenant Express edition, a dedicated Flex edition with built-in monitoring and a Power edition for large-scale Linux deployments on completely custom architectures or standard n-tiers.

Obviously it will compete with VMware’s recently unveiled and completely open source Cloud Foundry, Microsoft’s Azure, Google’s App Engine, Salesforce.com’s Heroku acquisition, even HP’s expected entry as well as start-ups like Engine Yard.

Red Hat figures what will distinguish OpenShift in this merry field is its JBoss middleware – with its transaction and messaging services and business rules – and its plethora of supported development languages and frameworks including Spring, Seam, Weld, CDI, Rails, Rack, Symfony, Twisted, Django, Zend, Java EE and Eclipse. Support for Java EE 6 is planned.

(Obviously we have now entered the macho realm of my cloud is bigger than your cloud.)

Express supports Python, PHP and Ruby apps; Java support is reportedly on the way.

Flex, deployable on JBoss or Tomcat and offering more control and automation than Express, supports PHP and Java EE apps as well as SQL and NoSQL data stores and a distributed file system. MySQL, MongoDB and Memcache are available.

Power, which isn’t available yet, is supposed to offer control down to the operating system configuration level, greater scalability and failover. It’s expected to have an image configuration system, a scripting template system, an image library for re-using templates, and a way to dynamically define multi-VM architectures that span clouds. It won’t demand a web front-end.

CloudForms is supposed to hit release in the fall. Currently Red Hat is offering no support or SLAs for OpenShift, which is still a developer preview that only supports one application per user with a limit of 128MB of disk.

Ultimate pricing wasn’t disclosed.

Red Hat has set up an OpenShift Partner Program to encourage third-party integration and fan its ecosystem. Third-party solutions can be packaged as pluggable modules called cartridges. Appcelerator is its first mobile development platform; OpSource, EnterpriseDB, Dyn, eXo, BitRock, Couchbase, Mu Dynamics, OpenCrowd and Cotendo have also obliged.

See http://openshift.redhat.com and http://openshift.redhat.com.

Red Hat has a lot of cloud ambitions and delivers the infrastructure but it doesn’t have a cloud platform.

Eucalyptus has an open source-based private cloud platform that does the heavy lifting and provides the cloud’s signature elasticity. It needs more exposure.

Practically speaking there aren’t a whole lot of horizontally integrated companies Eucalyptus can pal around with. Between Canonical, which it’s already got, and Red Hat, it’s got its two prime picks, according to CEO Marten Mickos, who discourages the inevitable speculation that maybe Red Hat will wind up buying Eucalyptus.

Mickos, the guy who sold MySQL to Sun for a breathtaking billion dollars, has been working on the deal since he got to Eucalyptus, picked up the phone and called Red Hat in March.

It’ll get Eucalyptus in front of a lot more people and presumably give it more feet on the street. It should help Red Hat peddle more virtualization in competition with its great bête noire, VMware. Try getting to the cloud without virtualization.

The pair quotes the 451 Group’s prediction that the market for cloud computing will grow from $8.7 billion in revenues this year to $16.7 billion by 2013. They are also warmed by the Yankee Group survey that found that two-thirds of the IT decision makers prefer the private/internal cloud model over public or hybrid clouds though Eucalyptus can rig up a hybrid cloud if you like.

What with testing and all, it’ll take until round about the middle of next year for Eucalyptus to support the framework-y Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and be compatible with the Red Hat-sponsored Apache Deltacloud API.

Once that’s accomplished, users should be able to transform virtualized Red Hat environments into secure Eucalyptus private clouds while advancing the Deltacloud interoperability goal of a single unified REST-based API used to manage services on any cloud.

Users will be able to run applications and workloads on Eucalyptus or the public clouds Deltacloud supports. By then that should include Terremark and VMWare vCloud as well as the currently supported EC2, GoGrid, OpenNebula, Rackspace, RHEV-M and RimuHosting.

Eucalyptus already supports Amazon’s API and claims it’s the only cloud software that can deliver all the benefits of industry-standard public clouds such as Amazon Web Services on private IT infrastructure.

Maybe it’ll try Xen next. Meanwhile, Eucalyptus has something to stick up the nose of Rackspace and its OpenStack effort.

In other words, they’re free to move their supported RHEL widgetry between traditional on-premise servers and Amazon Web Services via EC2. Other Certified Cloud Providers will follow in due course.

Red Hat’s been beta’ing RHEL on Amazon for two-and-a-half years now. Product strategy director Mike Ferris called it a beta as in business model.

A couple of strings with the Cloud Access program though. The fine print says to qualify customers need a minimum of 25 “active, unused” subscriptions and a direct (L1-L3) relationship with Red Hat support. Third-party support makes them ineligible. Red Hat Academic Program and desktop customers can’t cut it either.

Red Hat will be keeping tabs on the number of subscriptions that are used in the cloud and says “once subscriptions are moved to the cloud, they must remain there for a minimum of six months.”

The companies say they’re going to support each other’s operating systems as guests on each other’s current virtualization schemes. Windows Server will be supported on Red Hat’s transient Xen virtualization and Red Hat 5 will be supported on Microsoft’s Hyper V widgetry.

What happens when Red Hat moves on to its own Qumranet-derived KVM hypervisor when it gets to RHEL 6.0 is unclear.

The way the détente works each company will join the other’s virtualization validation/certification program and test and validate each other’s operating systems on each other’s hypervisors so customers can get the mixed virtualization support they want.

It will take until sometime in the second half for all the work to be done and for Red Hat to produce the necessary drivers. Microsoft will also have Linux physical and virtual management tools.

The key point for Red Hat is that this interoperability deal contains no embarrassing patent or open source license concessions, like the two-year-old Microsoft-Novell deal that plucked Novell’s chestnuts out of the fire but made it something of a pariah with the open source set, a proviso that may or may not explain why it took the Microsoft and Red Hat eight months, as they admit, to negotiate the arrangement.

There are also no financial terms beyond the usual certification testing fees.

Microsoft’s IP demands supposedly short circuited other Microsoft-Red Hat interoperability discussions. There’s no IP sharing in this arrangement, according to Microsoft, so no patent licensing. It’s not giving anything up.

Red Hat’s VP of its platform business unit Scott Crenshaw calls the deal a “major step forward for the industry” while acknowledging that it is “rare that these two companies publicly work together.”

Microsoft and Red Hat are supposed to represent 80% of today’s virtualized operating systems according to IDC’s numbers, which is what makes the truce important.

The deal will cover folks with valid support agreements or current RHEL subscriptions who will be able to go to either company for support. Otherwise they can arrange per-call support.

Red Hat has a deal with VMware that validates RHEL on ESX but not with Citrix, which competes with Red Hat on XEN. Microsoft currently supports VMware, Novell, Citrix and Cisco.

EUS is an add-on subscription available to customers with over 100 RHEL servers.

Red Hat says it’ll reduce testing and revalidating software stacks, and reduce risk since critical systems would be stable longer. It says some customers asked for an EUS-like program.

It means ignoring the update releases that happen about twice a year and roll up the important bug fixes and security patches and support the latest hardware.

Some customers reportedly want to synchronize new hardware roll out, application stack updates and operating system upgrades at the same time instead of doing them independently.

For up to 100 machines, EUS starts at $60,000 a year. For up to 500 machines, it starts at $80,000 a year.