ActiveState today announced the release of Stackato 3.4, the polyglot platform as a service based on Cloud Foundry. Key features of the release include advanced version control functionality that allows customers to roll-back an application to a previous version with zero downtime. Version 3.4 also features enhanced audit controls that give administrators streamlined visibility regarding user access to the platform. Today’s release also contains enhancements to Stackato’s quota usage dashboard in conjunction with more granular application monitoring and management functionality. Moreover, Stackato 3.4 contains notable upgrades to its system upgrade functionality that facilitate upgrades from one version of the platform to another. Like all Stackato releases, Stackato 3.4 features an upstream merge with Cloud Foundry to ensure ongoing compatibility with Cloud Foundry code. Altogether, this release renders Stackato even more suitable for enterprise-grade platform as a service deployments by building upon Stackato 3.2’s enhancements related to security, scalability and ease of management as evinced by version 3.2’s introduction of single sign-on and auto-scaling.
As a hardened, enterprise-ready version of Cloud Foundry, Stackato 3.4’s simplicity and depth of PaaS functionality constitutes a refreshing alternative to the complexity implicit in deploying an IaaS infrastructure from scratch as illustrated by the emerging proliferation of managed cloud services for IaaS. Moreover, its broad range of support for languages and database platforms sets it apart from competing PaaS vendors such as Apprenda and Engine Yard that specialize in a more narrow subset of scripting languages and frameworks. In conjunction with today’s release, ActiveState will be offering users with a free license the ability to spin up a Stackato cluster with up to 20 GB of RAM that runs either on customer infrastructure or a public cloud. The industry should expect Stackato to continue gaining traction in the PaaS space and deepening its relationships with IaaS infrastructures such as the AWS Marketplace and the Citrix Marketplace that variously provide opportunities to extend the reach of the Stackato platform even further.
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