With the multitude of PaaS vendors that now exist, most providing an all-things-to-all-people polyglot solution that is (in my view at least) largely undifferentiated from their competitors, there is an increasing focus on vendors making partnerships that allows them to build both mindshare and market penetration.
The latest is ActiveState who has announced that their PaaS, Stackato, is supported on HP Cloud Services. Stackato is a private PaaS that enables deployment, scaling, and management of Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Node.js, Scala, and Clojure applications. With Stackato, customers can deploy an application to either a private internal cloud or a third party cloud. Stackato is built atop Cloud Foundry and is already supported on vSphere and EC2 and is soon to roll out OpenStack support.
The HP announcement is interesting as, while the HP Cloud Service is still in private beta, cloud pundits watch and wait with interest to see how these offerings from “traditional” vendors play out. The HP solution is a combination of HP hardware and services built on top of OpenStack. So in a roundabout way, with this announcement Stackato gets both the credibility of the HOP angle, but also arguably the greater benefit of the OpenStack support which enables a wealth of new partnerships.
This is a good partnership (with the usual limitation that it’s hard to make totally definitive statements about the support for what is still a beta product. PaaS vendors need to broaden what they do, as Bare Copeland from ActiveState says;
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for enterprises that are demanding different options for their cloud infrastructure, adding support for HP Cloud Services to Stackato reinforces our vision of providing the PaaS layer in the cloud that supports any underlying infrastructure, which will greatly benefit enterprise developers and IT/DevOps by giving them the options and flexibility they want.
Now the challenge that ActiveSteate, and other vendors have is to articulate their offering in a differentiated and consistent way. But that’s a challenge for another day.
(Cross-posted @ The Diversity Blog – SaaS, Cloud & Business Strategy)
As the only Secure Multi-tenant PaaS, Stackato is easily differentiated from other Cloud Foundry based offerings. Early on in the development of Stackato, ActiveState made the decision to extend Cloud Foundry to take advantage of Linux technologies to provide better security.
The Stackato team has extended the Cloud Foundry architecture with secure lxc containerization, ssh support, and added application lifecycle support features to ensure exisiting applications can deploy as easily as new/greenfield apps
Stackato creates isolated, lightweight containers known as “lxc containers,”. Conceptually, the containers are built atop several Linux technologies which provide each guest-application container with a segregated file system with web and ssh services.
The containers are protected from each other: a guest application in one container cannot read files owned by another container, or kill its tasks. With the Stackato-container approach, the outside world can still reach web servers and ssh servers on the containers and, more importantly, the hosting PaaS can protect its key files from guest applications and users in the containers.
The containers effectively allow Stackato to partition the resources into isolated groups to better balance conflicting demands on resource usage between the isolated groups. Stackato’s innovative containerization approach has the dual benefits of running applications on a seemingly separate machine while still leveraging many of the underlying resources. As far as the guest application is aware, the PaaS has provided a private Playground.
The architecture makes Private Cloud even more “private.”
For enterprises, the operational and security advantages of sharing these resources while isolating the guest applications can also lead to significantly lower overhead than true virtualization.
You can test it out yourself at http://community.activestate.com/stackato