Red Hat rolled out something called Cloud Foundations the other day, claiming it put Red Hat in the same league as Microsoft, the only other company with a comprehensive cloud solution.

Of course, Microsoft Azure isn't open like Red Hat and God forbid Microsoft can't deliver what's needed down the road and you're stuck, locked in.

Cloud Foundations, which is supposed to make "cloud computing consumable for the enterprise," is a bunch of solutions for planning, building and managing Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service private and public clouds: products, implementation cookbooks and reference architectures, professional services and training.

It's supposed to mean less risk and simpler implementation, deliver consistency between the data center and public clouds and boost cloud adoption. It's supposed to manage Windows and Red Hat as one cloud and use Red Hat, VMware and Microsoft virtualization.

Cloud Foundations Edition One, available now, is for deploying private clouds and includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise MRG Grid. A reference architecture is supposed to have step-by-step instructions, scripts and settings for creating and configuring a private cloud. And of course there are consulting services.

Meanwhile, IBM, NTT Communications and Savvis have joined Amazon Web Services in Red Hat's Certified Cloud Provider club, which mean it has secure, pre-configured images for them at "attractive" prices and a sure fire way to get to a public cloud.

Red Hat has worked out a way to transfer its subscriptions between in-house servers and these public clouds.

These guys will also have some new exclusive Red Hat Linux offerings for SaaS developers. Apparently they'll be selling RHEL and JBoss by the hour.

Red Hat's PaaS roadmap describes a way to bridge its on-premise application environments to the cloud. It will be based on JBoss middleware and become part of the Cloud Foundations family.

Red Hat means to leverage JBoss Open Choice, an application platform approach for supporting virtually any programming model and language. Red Hat PaaS will support Java, Ruby on Rails and the Spring Framework, as well as other languages and scripting environments.