Today, Piston Cloud Computing announced the release of Airframe, a free OpenStack-based cloud management platform that allows users to examine a scaled down version of Piston’s Enterprise OpenStack product. Piston’s announcement represents the latest in a series of OpenStack-related announcements that began with Red Hat’s preview of its OpenStack distribution and Rackspace’s release of Alamo, its OpenStack product for Private Cloud Software. Airframe can be installed in under 10 minutes and includes all of OpenStack’s core components in the form of its compute, storage, networking and cloud management functionality.
Airframe allows enterprises to conduct proof of concept investigations and become familiar with the OpenStack installation and management process from a product that derives from Piston’s production-ready OpenStack configuration. Importantly, Airframe includes Cloud Foundry, thereby allowing enterprise users to experiment with hybrid private cloud IaaS and PaaS environments. Airframe boasts a push button upgrade to Piston Enterprise OpenStack and simplifies the overall OpenStack installation process as noted by Joshua McKenty, Piston’s CEO and co-founder:
OpenStack installers on the market today are either too complicated to deploy and manage, or just not a complete solution. We felt it was important to provide an ‘easy’ method of installing OpenStack that didn’t require sacrificing a production-class architecture. Users can upgrade from a pilot deployment to a fully-supported production environment without having to start over. We believe that’s a really significant difference. With Airframe we can give people a truly seamless experience from a free to paid and supported solution.
Airframe’s streamlined installation process preserves a “production-class architecture” and differentiates itself from other OpenStack downloads by its ease of upgrade to a production environment. Moreover, its bundling of Cloud Foundry renders Airframe one of the more extensible of the free OpenStack distributions on the market today. Expect users to choose Airframe over Alamo if they are seriously anticipating a quick transition from a proof of concept to a production-grade environment. Airframe will be generally available via download at http://airframe.pistoncloud.com on September 4, 2012.
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The goal, says McKenty, is to make the inevitable transition from a private cloud pilots to a full-blown production environments a seamless one. “Users can upgrade from a pilot deployment to a fully-supported production environment without having to start over,” he says.