ActiveState Stackato PaaS Hits Version 1.0, Enters GA

ActiveState has announced that Stackato, its language-agnostic, provider-agnostic private PaaS platform, has left beta and entered general availability with the release of version 1.0.

The technology brings a new, web-based management console, an app store for easy install of common applications, a persistent file system service (for integration with, say, Drupal) and integrated application performance management from New Relic. But understandably, ActiveState is focusing on its overall value proposition with its commercial launch, rather than a handful of features.

That value proposition, said ActiveState CEO Bart Copeland in a prepared statement:

“Developers have the freedom to work with multiple stacks; use the best-suited tools; configure, test, and deploy faster; and ultimately build more apps. IT managers get control: They can create new apps and migrate existing ones; eliminate the risks of data silos or rogue clouds; ensure tighter security and compliance; and deploy to the cloud model that’s right for their enterprise, whether that cloud is public, private, or a hybrid of both.” 

For CIOs, that can translate to a faster-time-to-market, Copeland went on to say — and since ActiveState can be deployed anywhere, it guards against vendor lock-in. ActiveState Stackato is built on the VMware Cloud Foundry platform and shares many of the benefits.

As for deployment options: Stackato Enterprise, the main offering, is priced per-VM-per-year based on the size of the deployment; Stackato Micro Cloud is free for a single node on a desktop client; and Stackato Amazon Machine Image (Stackato AMI) makes it possible to deploy the PaaS on the Amazon EC2 without needing to download a virtual machine of Stackato.

We’ve been tracking ActiveState Stackato for some time now. And now that it’s ready for the market at large, we’ll continue to track its progress. I continue to worry, though, that the abundance of PaaS vendors in the market will lead to a flood and a commoditization in the space.