CloudForms is in beta and will be generally available by the end of 2011.

Red Hat also unveiled , an online-only platform-as-a-service offering that lets developers build and host applications on Red Hat infrastructure. The service, a competitor to Windows Azure, builds upon , expanding it with JBoss tools and other Red Hat software, and supporting Ruby, Rails, Python, Java, PHP, MySQL and more. Red Hat claimed OpenShift "redefines the PaaS market by providing a new level of choice in languages, frameworks and clouds for developers to build, test, run and manage their applications."

OpenShift is going into beta today and currently runs on top of Amazon EC2. When asked whether the service was affected by last month's , Cormier said, "Not really. Not really." But Red Hat will add more cloud providers on the back end so customers can have their choice of clouds beyond Amazon, he said. Red Hat is also supporting the Deltacloud API to let customers run applications on multiple cloud services.

The Amazon outage puts a spotlight on the need for more stable enterprise cloud technologies. Red Hat's not the only one working on this problem, Bozman said, also mentioning VMware and IBM. Public clouds are good for basic file storage and application development, but may not meet the mission-critical standards of many organizations.

"When you start applying an enterprise IT sensibility, is important, SLAs are important, and availability is important," Bozman said.