ActiveBlog

ActiveState has long been at the forefront of helping enterprises to develop and deploy Python applications on production servers and in their mission-critical applications. Our Python distributions are used by millions of developers around the world and by companies like Bloomberg and Boeing.

When we developed Stackato, ActiveState's new cloud platform for creating a private platform-as-a-service ("PaaS"), the first thing we added from the Cloud Foundry base was our world-class Python distributions along with access to our Python code repositories and Python Package Manager (PyPM). Python is a growing in popularity as a web and cloud application language, and with our expertise, this was a natural extension for us. Python is available in our Micro Cloud and Private PaaS offerings, and has been contributed back to the Cloud Foundry open source project.

We added Python 2.7 and 3, full Django deployment and adminstration support, full dbshell support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis and MongoDB databases, enhanced security with https, and delivered it in secure containers. Stackato deploys each application to virtual servers, automatically setting up everything an application requires to run - web servers, databases, web frameworks, language  - virtually eliminating IT configuration time.  

Optimized to run on vSphere

ActiveState has added a full feature set required for enterprise production deployment, added a secure containization mechanism and rigourously tested Stackato on VMWare's Cloud Infrastructure: running it on our own internal vSphere deployment and continously monitoring performance with vCenter.

Beyond the MicroCloud: Stackato vSphere cluster deployment

The Stackato micro cloud VM, which is used easily on developer desktops, can be easily cloned, then assigned to various roles to make a Stackato vSphere cluster. Role assignment is done using the stackato-admin utility.  vSphere has tools to help with the cloning of virtual machines. Instead of manually configuring the hostname for each Stackato VM, you can create a Customization Specification. 

Stackato VMs can take one or more of the following roles:  Cloud Controller, Router, Droplet Execution Agent, or Data Services for mysql, postgresql, redis, or mongodb. The key is that every component in this system is horizontally scalable and de-coupled.  You can add as many copies of each component as needed in order to support the load of your application on the cloud.