Over the years both Red Hat and JBoss have a history of making good strategy acquisitions including, but not limited to, the Arjuna Transaction Service, Metamatrix and, of course, JBoss itself. Well I'm pleased to be able to announce that today we've done it again, this time in the Cloud space with the acquisition of Makara! Makara, if you don't already know, have been doing some great work with JBoss technology in the Cloud for a while now and has a great presence at JBossWorld and Summit earlier this year. To put what they do currently in a nutshell it's provisioning of JBossAS into public and private Clouds, with monitoring and management to enable auto-scaling.

Now obviously there's some overlap with projects we've been doing in JBoss and Red Hat, such as SteamCannon and CloudEngine, as well as obvious areas of synergy like DeltaCloud. Plus Makara's technology isn't open source. So that's why the engineering teams across the board have been talking about how best to drive the integration forward and ensure that the considerations of our communities are taken into account. Over the past 10 years I've been "acquired" many times as well as being involved in acquisitions. I've also helped open source a number of previously closed source technologies. To do this right will require time and doing is right is very important for us. So please don't expect to see code appearing immediately, but you will see the Makara team appearing in the forums, IRC and elsewhere to answer any questions that our JBoss.org developers and community may have.

So with that, I'll just say a big welcome to the Makara team! It's going to be a great adventure over the next weeks, months and years.