RightScale Trends Right With Hybrid Cloud Support

Cloud computing management company RightScale, whose services companies use to manage and deploy resources in Amazon Web Services and other clouds, aims to be able to manage private and hybrid public-private clouds, starting with support for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.On Monday, RightScale announced that the RightScale Cloud Management Platform will help companies manage and deploy servers with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, a feature developed by Eucalyptus that is a part of a new Linux server release, Canonical's Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition also known as "Jaunty Jackalope."

The company's expansion into environments that don't rely entirely on public, Internet-based computing resources serves as recognition of an important distinction: outside of the start-up realm, companies aren't likely to move all of their resources to the Web anytime soon, and many will indefinitely want to have a mix of resources on premises and online. For example, a media company might want to have Web servers on premises, using the cloud to quickly scale when a popular video gets posted online.

Private clouds, meanwhile, act similarly to Internet-based clouds, in that their goals include letting companies deploy and manage computers as an efficient, flexible, scalable pool of resources. Among those already beginning to deploy private clouds are GE and the Department of Veterans Affairs, while Microsoft is also looking to put more private cloud features into future versions of Windows Server.

"Customers want to avoid lock in," RightScale CEO Michael Crandell said in an interview. "They want to be able to leverage their own resources and public cloud resources. Where we're headed is toward having cloud architectures begin to spread more and more across more and more providers of infrastructure externally."

RightScale Cloud Management for Ubuntu will be free at first, and "won't have support for ServerTemplates and automation available at the initial release," according to a blog post on RightScale's Website, but a fully-supported, fully-functioning paid version is on the way, and RightScale has big plans for hybrid cloud management going forward.