Stackato free for 'micro clouds'

ActiveState Software today announced its commitment to make its infrastructure-agnostic, polyglot private platform-as-a-service (PaaS) Stackato available free for use with micro clouds.

Stackato is a private PaaS for deploying enterprise Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Node.js, Scala and Clojure applications built on the Cloud Foundry open source project that was released in public beta earlier this month.

The ploygot software platform developer said that Stackato Micro Clouds could continue to be used free as a single node for internal or non-commercial use after the PaaS becomes generally available early in 2012.

“In the spirit of supporting developer communities, ActiveState has determined that Stackato Micro Cloud will always be freely available to download, install and use for your development projects and internal deployments,” said Bart Copeland, president and chief executive of ActiveState.

He added that the interest from large enterprises and from developers around ActiveState Stackato had been “astounding”. But committing to free micro cloud implementations is designed to woo large-enterprise developers hesitant to try them because of potentially hidden future costs.

Stackato customers can deploy an application to either a private internal cloud – powered by VMware vSphere, which Cloud Foundry is based on, or another hypervisor – or one hosted with a third-party infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider such as Amazon EC2.

Although technical support will not be included with free Stackato Micro Cloud implementations, the company said developers could still participate in ActiveState’s community forums and access its technical documentation.