ActiveState has released its Stackato 2.0 application platform for creating private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) builds with new support for the .NET environment. As well as offering web-based visual cluster management, ActiveState positions the platform as a “PaaS polyglot”.
The PaaS polyglot claim is justified by virtue of the fact that developers can now deploy .NET applications to Stackato via technology integration with the Iron Foundry platform. Plus, in addition to .NET, Stackato supports applications coded in enterprise development languages including Java, Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, Node.JS, Clojure, Scala, and Erlang.
“As PaaS platforms have become less constrained, offering more choice in the underlying technologies, interest in them has begun to accelerate,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst at RedMonk. “Enterprises, accordingly, are increasingly looking to incorporate PaaS into their long-term strategies to reduce their operational overhead and time to market.”
In addition to support for .NET applications and numerous under-the-hood performance improvements (like a faster app store and improved Heroku buildpack support), Stackato 2.0 introduces new product enhancements targeted specifically at the “real-world” enterprise.
New features include containerization technology to secure cloud apps, which also conserves scale and capacity — meaning, in theory, that the apps run better in less virtual real estate with multiple containers per VM. There is also an enhanced web management console to offer visual cluster administration. The idea is that DevOps can gain greater visibility into cloud applications deployment management with less administrative impact, meaning their developers can spend time coding instead of writing reports.
“Cloud solutions must do more than just scale with infrastructure requirements,” said Bart Copeland, CEO at ActiveState. “They must also be able to grow with business needs. With its customizable app-store framework, secure LXC containers, and .NET support, Stackato 2.0 is a PaaS game-changer. It can provide the scalability and flexibility that enterprises want with the security and control that they need, now and in the future.”
Stackato 2.0 is available in Enterprise and Micro Cloud editions.
