Piston and ActiveState Pitch Instant Private PaaS

Piston Cloud Computing has teamed up with ActiveState Software to sell a full-package private Platform-as-a-Service solution that combines OpenStack at the infrastructure layer and Cloud Foundry PaaS. The companies are promising they can deploy the entire environment in less than one day.

Piston’s core business is standing up Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds for customers based on OpenStack, the popular open source cloud architecture. ActiveState’s product is called Stackato, based on Cloud Foundry and Docker application containers, both also open source.

Piston has strong ties to both OpenStack and Cloud Foundry. The company's founder Joshua McKenty was one of the original developers of OpenStack. He left Piston in September 2014 to join EMC-controlled Pivotal, the company behind Cloud Foundry, to lead its Cloud Foundry business as CTO.

The point of a private PaaS is to enable agile development teams to quickly and constantly build, test, and deploy software on secure in-house infrastructure than can scale.

Stackato has features to make both developers and IT happy. It combines built-in languages, frameworks, and application services for developers. It has robust “enterprise-level” security and support.

The companies say the private PaaS will be deployed faster and cost less than alternative private clouds, such as Amazon Web Services, VMware, or DIY solutions.

“Customers will not only have access to a scalable PaaS environment enabling easy deployment of web and mobile apps, a flexible IaaS solution ideal for continuous development and delivery, but they'll be able to deploy the entire environment and be up and running in less than a day,” ActiveState CEO Bart Copeland said in a statement.