Stackato FAQ

Stackato is the application platform for creating a private PaaS. From the desktop to the datacenter, Stackato makes it easy to develop, deploy, migrate, scale, manage, and monitor applications - any language, any stack, any cloud. With Stackato, developers can simulate a production environment on a local machine, code, test, and then launch an application to any cloud. And Enterprise IT can achieve new levels of data security, reduce time to market, save money, ensure compliance, and gain greater control over the cloud.

Stackato sets up virtual application servers and deploys your applications to them. It automatically provisions and configures everything the application requires to run (a language interpreter, a web framework, prerequisite modules, a database service) and deploys the application to as many server instances as you require.

No. Stackato is software for creating your own PaaS - in a private cloud or with a public cloud hosting provider. The Stackato Sandbox is a PaaS test environment, but not a permanent home for production applications.

Stackato is a commercially supported PaaS solution built on the Cloud Foundry open source project. ActiveState has added features, improved security, and made numerous improvements to the open source code to make it enterprise ready:

• Commercial support
• Browser-based Management Console for admins and users
• Linux containers (via LXC) for each app instance, providing:
  • Improved multi-tennant security
  • Better enforcement of app quotas
  • Server-side commands - scriptable in post-staging and pre-running hooks
  • SSH access to all application instances
  • Application container customization
• Multi-cloud portability, with VM images for all the popular hypervisors and infrastructure (IaaS) providers
• The 'stackato' client - a single-file executable with no Ruby dependencies
• ActivePython and ActivePerl, our proven commercial language distributions
• Data migration tools to move existing applications to the cloud easily
• New Relic (Standard Edition included) for application performance monitoring
• Integration with Komodo IDE 7
• Cluster auto-scaling

The Stackato client is how most users will interact with the system. To use it:

• install the client
• set the 'target' URL of the Stackato cloud controller
• from the base directory of your application, run 'stackato push'

The stackato client bundles the application and pushes it to the server. Config files in the application directory tell the Cloud Controller what additional software is required for the application. The application environment is assembled, and the application is deployed to one or more worker nodes.

On the server side, Stackato could be a stand-alone "micro cloud" virtual machine, or a cluster on vSphere or Amazon EC2.

The Stackato micro cloud VM has all the components necessary for running a test environment in one instance. For use at scale, the Stackato VM is cloned and assigned specific roles: Router, Cloud Controller, or DEAs (Droplet Execution Agents - aka worker nodes).

The Stackato Sandbox is an easy way to try out Stackato for 45 days without having to run the Stackato VM yourself. The service allows you to test deployment and migration of your applications to our Amazon EC2-hosted systemfor.

The Sandbox is for testing purposes only, not for hosting production applications. At end of the 45 days, all containers and contents are permanently deleted. You may use up to 256MB of RAM running two applications and and two data services. Further details on quotas and usage terms are described in the Stackato documentation.

The Stackato client: available for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.

The Stackato VM: available for VMware Player, VMware Fusion or VirtualBox. For multi-server implementations, we recommend downloading the vSphere image or requesting access to the EC2 AMI.

Not all of them. As the Community Lead for Python, we have contributed Python support will be providing updates and ongoing support to Python users in the Cloud Foundry community. Other features and fixes may be contributed back from time to time, but many of the enterprise features will remain proprietary.