Besides SUSE and its own brand of Linux, rPath is now supporting the Ubuntu and CentOS Linux operating systems as part of its rBuilder and rPath Lifecycle Management Platform.

The move broadens the start-up's options for deploying and managing applications in traditional, virtualized and cloud environments.

rBuilder is a build-and-release management system for creating virtual appliances and application images.

The Lifecycle Management Platform extends rBuilder with a system that's supposed to control the cost, complexity and risk of deploying, managing and maintaining application images in virtualized and cloud-based environments.

rPath's approach assembles and binds application functionality with an operating system, creating a self-contained application image that should be easy to deploy, manage and maintain.

The company describes this approach as freeing applications from the constraints and manual configuration of hardware infrastructure, so they can be instantly deployed, while giving IT a scalable platform for managing and maintaining images over time.

In virtualized and cloud-based environments, the operating system is split in two. Hardware-based services are handled by the hypervisor, and application-based services are attached to the application image, which becomes a self-contained and fully functioning set of virtual machines.

This approach is typically based on what is called "just enough operating system," otherwise known as JeOS, which assembles only the pieces of the operating system and other tooling needed to support the runtime requirements of a specific application. It's supposed to make the application simple to deploy, portable across runtime environments and more cost-effective to maintain.