Apprenda, Piston Partner on Joint Turnkey Private PaaS

Platform-as-a-Service provider Apprenda is partnering with Piston Cloud Computing, a web-scale infrastructure and automation company to provide the technology necessary for companies to stand up private PaaS. The two are delivering an integrated solution for a turnkey cloud for building Java and .NET cloud applications and microservices. Piston provides the OpenStack private cloud, while Apprenda provides the PaaS for app development.

Both companies have focused on on-premises cloud enablement. Combined they form a turnkey private PaaS with policy-based access to OpenStack APIs. Enterprises use the two in conjunction to develop and launch cloud apps or for modernizing on-prem applications for SaaS.

Piston provides enterprise grade Infrastructure-as-a-Service private clouds. It integrates several technologies into the standard, open-source OpenStack framework to provide a more complete and easily deployable private cloud solution.

Piston was founded in early 2011 by technical team leads from NASA and Rackspace. Co-founder Joshua McKenty, who is now with Pivotal, was an OpenStack founding father.

Piston was early to market with its first commercial OpenStack product in 2012 and raised $8 million in 2013. CEO Jim Morrisroe recently commented on what he said was negative influence of legacy vendors on the open source cloud project.

"From day one, Piston set out to build a product that would eliminate the complexity associated with managing and deploying a traditional on-premise environment,” Morrisroe said in a joint release. “And together with Apprenda, we provide customers additional freedom from dat acenter complexity by delivering a scalable turn-key IaaS and PaaS solution, out of the box.”

Apprenda PaaS provides policy-based access controls to make the PaaS suitable for enterprise. Its enterprise customers include AmerisourceBergen, JPMorgan Chase and McKesson. Apprenda added Java and .NET support early this year.