Booz Allen Hamilton open sources its cloud broker project to Red Hat’s ManageIQ Community

Booz Allen Hamilton announced on Oct. 22 that it has made its entire open source cloud broker project – which includes custom code, documentation, processes and best practices – publicly available via Booz Allen’s Github.

The cloud broker project, codenamed “Project Jellyfish,” provides a framework and platform for organizations to act as internal or external brokers of cloud services. Project Jellyfish adds a layer of core broker-type functionality to cloud management, such as advanced catalog search and compare, project-based workflows, collaboration, dashboards, quotas and service blueprinting.

Project Jellyfish leverages Red Hat’s cloud management platform, ManageIQ, with the goal of fostering open source collaboration and greater cloud management capabilities, thus enabling true “cloud first” and “open source first” initiatives among federal and commercial clients.

“When we launched the ManageIQ community earlier this year, we did so with the goal of bringing together developers, system integrators, service providers and users to create an industry resource of best practices and sharing”

Today, CIOs and IT teams are being asked to offer a self-service catalog of virtualized, data and infrastructure services across multiple public, private and hybrid cloud environments. It is a labor-intensive process and one that is, inherently, disjointed.

Booz Allen’s Project Jellyfish addresses this challenge by creating a cohesive e-commerce solution for all on- and off-premise cloud services, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). The initial release of Project Jellyfish is comprised of an extension to ManageIQ’s user interface using Drupal and an ability to scale beyond infrastructure through integration with an enterprise service bus.

Release 2, which is scheduled to be released in early 2015, further enhances ManageIQ’s capabilities with additional robust cloud broker features, such as enhanced user interface (UI) and experience (UX), new broker function modules, an advanced cloud service deployment wizard and a mobile app.

In this effort, Booz Allen is partnering with Red Hat, a leading provider of open source solutions. “As a leading member of the ManageIQ community, we are excited to have the opportunity to upstream our open cloud broker project,” said Jarid Cottrell, senior associate at Booz Allen Hamilton. “The Federal Government is looking to open source more and more – indeed, we expect to see Agencies and programs quickly requiring open source to facilitate reuse, improve cycle time, increase quality, and reduce cost. In fact, Booz Allen is at the forefront, helping clients such as the General Services Administration (GSA) realize this value through deployment of our open cloud broker solution within their agency.”