Red Hat said Tuesday that it’s bought Makara, a Redwood City, California start-up barely out of beta whose widgetry leverages the virtual layer and lets users deploy, manage, monitor and scale their Java and PHP applications on both private and public clouds like Amazon and VMware fluffery. Terms were not disclosed. It was rumored the pair had been talking. Makara was backed by Shasta Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz to the tune of at least $6 million. Once integrated with Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware infrastructure, Makara’s complexity-masking self-service, self-managing Cloud Application Platform is supposed to make Red Hat’s existing Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution more comprehensive and flexible, touted as the easiest, cheapest on-ramp to the cloud.

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