Stackato Private PaaS for the Agile Enterprise

Private PaaS for the Agile Enterprise
Empower your Cloud with Private Platform-as-a-Service Technology from ActiveState®

www.activestate.com
Stackato®: Private PaaS for the Agile Enterprise
© ActiveState Software Inc. Published in 2013. Originally published in 2013
2
Stackato®
: Private PaaS for the Agile Enterprise
Empower your Cloud with Private Platform-as-a-Service
Technology from ActiveState®
If you already use virtualized infrastructure, you are well on your way to leveraging the power
of the cloud. Virtualization offers the promise of limitless resources, but how do you manage
that scalability when your DevOps team doesn’t scale? In today’s hypercompetitive markets,
fast results can make a difference between leading the pack vs. obsolescence. Organizations
need more benefits from cloud computing than just raw resources. They need agility, flexibility,
convenience, ROI, and control.
Stackato private Platform-as-a-Service technology from ActiveState extends your private cloud
infrastructure by creating a private PaaS to provide on-demand availability, flexibility, control,
and ultimately, faster time-to-market for your enterprise.
The Challenge: Deliver on the Promise of the Cloud
You’ve virtualized. That’s great! But where are the flexibility, agility, control, and ROI that you
need? Why hasn’t the cloud delivered on its promise of a new world order? The problem is one of
excess. You have 10,000 new VMs and all this fantastic/cheap computing power, but who’s going to
manage it all? Your cloud has only partially delivered on its promise with many in the organization
still looking for answers:
IT teams need control and scalability. You serve the needs of various internal and external
customers, and your time is valuable. You now also have a lot of new computing resources to
manage, but you don’t scale like cloud infrastructure! Those management requests are only going
to grow in volume and complexity. You need an efficient way to manage your systems without
sacrificing control and oversight.
Developers need flexibility. You create products. You don’t want to be concerned with
provisioning services, deployment processes, or IT systems. You want to code! You want to create
products and services that just work. No more fiddling with environments, praying stuff works in
production, and playing tag with IT. You need the flexibility to develop in the language that’s best
suited to the job, in an environment that fosters innovation and creativity.
CIOs need efficiency. You’ve invested in cloud infrastructure and now need to start seeing returns.
You not only want productivity gains, efficiency improvements, and ROI, but you also want to see
the impact on your organization’s innovation and creativity. At the end of the day, it’s not about the
tools and systems, but what they help facilitate and enable.

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The Solution: Stackato Platform-as-a-Service Technology
Many organizations lack the IT resources to maintain multiple technology platforms or stacks. They
usually standardize on a single technology stack such as a Linux distribution, with limited choices
like Ruby, Java, MySQL, or Apache Tomcat. As a result, developers are forced to design applications
with these constraints.
Stackato private PaaS technology from ActiveState lifts these limitations, allowing developers
to choose the best cloud stack for their applications. By auto-configuring and self-provisioning
the services required, Stackato makes it easy for IT to support multiple technology stacks, giving
developers the flexibility they need. Organizations can easily develop, test, deploy, host, and
maintain applications without the cost and complexity of purchasing and managing the underlying
hardware and software.
Public Versus Private PaaS
Enterprises with strict policies or compliance requirements use private clouds to leverage the same
advantages offered by public clouds while providing additional security, control, and customization
capabilities. Public-cloud PaaS can serve many enterprise cloud needs, but the public PaaS offerings
carry significant drawbacks:
»» Lack of choice: most public PaaS offerings limit use to specific languages, application
frameworks, and configuration, so enterprise users have to conform to strict, inflexible
guidelines.Does each application require specific scripts and middleware components?
»» Forget those legacy apps: public PaaS offerings are typically designed for new
applications and don’t provide the ability to migrate existing application data.
»» Not as secure: most public PaaS offerings are secure. But the shared tenancy model is only
as safe as its tenants’ weakest vulnerability. Also, putting confidential corporate and customer
data on a public cloud leaves it out of your control. This potential vulnerability requires a
high degree of confidence that public providers can keep data isolated and protected.
When it comes to the public cloud, you need to ask several questions:
»» Can you verify the security of your application and data?
»» Can you modify and scale to suit the growing needs of your development team?
»» How is it integrating with internal infrastructure and data?
»» Does it comply with regulatory standards for privacy?
»» Can you migrate and manage existing web applications?
The primary differentiator of a private cloud is that it operates exclusively for a specific organization,
managed either by the organization itself or by a third party, and software applications can be
securely deployed behind the corporate firewall. A private cloud gives you full control over your
systems, customer data, your own data, and your level of security and compliance.

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vSphere, XenServer, and other virtualization platforms allow you to more efficiently use your
server farms, dramatically lowering IT costs and streamlining system administration. They help
you provision IT-as-a-Service so you can create self-service on-demand infrastructure to increase
productivity, improve hardware utilization, and reduce costs. However, your DevOps teams don’t
scale and need help managing all of this new, raw virtualized computing power. This is where
Stackato shines.
Why You Need Stackato Private PaaS Technology
A private PaaS is an application platform that works on top of your private IaaS or private cloud
infrastructure, exclusively for your enterprise. It enables developers to leverage all the benefits of
a public PaaS (on-demand availability, fast deployment, elasticity) to deploy, manage, and monitor
applications, and also meet the security, privacy, and compliance requirements enterprises
demand.
With a private PaaS, applications share infrastructure resources (instances) with other applications,
but each one is isolated via secure multi-tenant containerization so that one doesn’t adversely affect
the system or other applications. Other benefits include:
»» Flexibility. Developers can develop in whichever language is best for the task at hand, without
being restricted by IT resources. They can also self-serve and easily deploy applications themselves,
eliminating IT bottlenecks. An infrastructure-agnostic PaaS enables organizations to shift their
IT strategy as needed and ensure that their IT infrastructure will be able to support them.
»» Security. Breaches of public websites are regularly reported in the media, and while
most estimates of their costs are anecdotal, the resulting financial damages for
organizations can be extremely serious. A private PaaS is exclusive to your enterprise
and less vulnerable to such attacks. The privacy this offers is critical since sensitive
information is securely kept within the confines and control of the company.
»» Control. While allowing developers to deploy their own applications to the cloud through a
public PaaS saves IT significant overhead, you also want to ensure that development teams
conform to corporate standards and policies. A private PaaS gives you control over how
developers push applications to the cloud. DevOps teams have a simple and straightforward
web interface that allows them to easily see what is happening on all their systems.

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The Solution: Stackato
ActiveState Stackato® extends your private cloud infrastructure by creating a private Platform-as-
a-Service (PaaS) to provide on-demand availability, flexibility, control, and ultimately, faster time-to-
market for your enterprise.
With Stackato, enterprise IT enjoys rapid application deployment, scalable administration, assured
compliance, and greater control. Developers can code in the language that’s right for them and
seamlessly launch applications to any cloud. For the enterprise, that means faster time to market,
better productivity, cost savings, and greater innovation.
Stackato: a pre-configured cloud application platform with multiple choices
“Stackato has enabled a level of empowerment for our developers that previously was not possible.
Instead of quickly developing apps and then running into the brick wall of IT backlogs, developers can
literally run with their apps straight to the cloud. Easily, safely, and quickly.”
—Dale McCrory, Principal Product Manager, ExactTarget

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The Stackato Impact
Stackato’s impact can be felt beyond IT. The difference it makes to an enterprise’s productivity,
efficiency, and ROI can be felt in all parts of the company.
Agility
Stackato reduces the amount of time spent on IT configuration and helps you get your applications
to market faster. With Stackato, your developers can easily test in a production environment,
self-serve, and get apps to the production cloud in minutes, not weeks. And that saves you time,
resources, and money.
Freedom of Choice
Stackato provides your enterprise with the freedom of choice and flexibility to choose whichever
data service, language, or web framework that works best for each of your applications. Deploy
instantly to the cloud of your choice (private, public, or hybrid), on any infrastructure stack, and run
your business the way you want.
Scalable Management
Stackato’s intuitive web-based management console UI lets you scale your applications to grow
as usage grows, delivering the performance your end-users demand. Stackato offers centralized
cluster administration, dynamic load balancing, elastic scalability, persistent file-system sharing, and
consolidated logging.
Stackato is designed for the mission-critical operations of a large enterprise but can also easily scale
to the needs of individual developers on smaller projects. Start with the Stackato Micro Cloud, and
then cluster to take advantage of the built-in auto-scaling, as your usage increases.
Cost-savings/ROI
Stackato saves you time and money, and allows you to get your application to market faster by
enabling an IT-as-a-Service model that features automatic middleware configuration and scaling
capabilities.
Innovation
Stackato automates the configuration, deployment, and management of applications. Your team
no longer needs to worry about infrastructure resources and middleware configuration. Stackato
enables a fast and simple test environment for all your innovative ideas.
Security
Stackato delivers secure, compliant control over sensitive data and applications. With the Stackato
Fence subsystem, application instances are enveloped in their own secure virtual container (LXC).
This allows applications to be fully isolated from each other while protecting the host operating
system and ensuring that CPU and memory limits are strictly enforced. The Stackato Harbor Port
Service enables users to deploy network applications using protocols other than HTTP(S), and
take advantage of multiple SSL certificates. And Stackato offers extensible AOK authentication for
external services like LDAP.

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Portability
Stackato is infrastructure-agnostic, and can easily move applications between public, private, or
hybrid cloud environments.
How Does it Work?
Stackato deploys each application to virtual servers, automatically setting up everything an
application requires to run—web server, database, language interpreter, web framework,
prerequisite modules—virtually eliminating IT configuration time. By providing self-serve choices
along with data migration tools, developers are able to get applications to market faster with
Stackato. Here’s a quick look at the Stackato architecture:
Message Bus (NATS)
Databases
Messaging
Services
File
Systems
Services
DEA(s)
(Droplet Execution Agents)
Web UsersMonitoring Deploy & Upgrade
Cloud
Controller
Health Manager
Controller
Stager
HTTP(S) HTTPS
TCP
Router
> Client
Stackato scales your applications to grow as usage grows, delivering the performance your end-
users demand. Stackato’s Health Manager keeps a record of what hosts are hosting which DEA (the
node an application resides in), so it can balance the load on all available hosts, without overloading
any single one. If an additional DEA is required, Stackato can automatically add more in vSphere,
EC2, or OpenStack environments.
Stackato also allows additional Cloud Controllers, Routers, and Stagers to be added and used
as high availability failover safety nets or as load balancers to remove potential bottlenecks and
improve performance and reliability. (For a more detailed explanation of the architecture and
application deployment process, please refer to ActiveState’s “Stackato Architecture” whitepaper.)

www.activestate.com
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A Diverse, Multi-Choice Cloud Application Platform
It is noweasy to provision and manage diverse technology ecosystems on your virtualized
infrastructure rather than conforming to rigid, standardized stacks. With Stackato, development
teams can deploy new applications, or migrate existing applications to the cloud, and automatically
provision an application environment with your choice of languages and frameworks, including
module/package dependencies. Each developer also has the freedom to choose the database that
is best for each application.
Developers can mix and match frameworks and databases to fit the needs of the application,
rather than trying to make the application work with the pre-ordained stack because it is so costly
to support a diversity of technology ecosystems. They can develop applications for various uses on
many platform stacks. Whether they need Python or Java, MySQL, or MongoDB, they are free to pick
the best tools for the job.
Stackato automatically configures application environments, virtually eliminating the time IT
and DevOps spend on configuration and dependency management when preparing for cloud
deployment. Stackato installs and sets up everything an application requires to run—web server,
database, language interpreter, web framework, and prerequisite modules—then deploys the
application to as many server instances as required. Now that’s freedom for IT and development
teams.
An End-to-End Development Platform
Code, debug, test, and deploy directly from the desktop to the cloud using ActiveState’s Komodo
IDE®. The Stackato client offers all the functionality of CloudFoundry’s vmc client, with additional
functionality for running server-side commands and accessing databases services in the Stackato
cloud. If you choose to use Komodo IDE, you can test and debug applications in the environment
that they will be deployed.
Identical test (micro cloud) and production environments eliminate the constant back and forth with
IT. Developers can easily move applications from desktop to production, and be sure that what they
develop and test will work. No more wasted productivity and no more development backlogs.
Simplified Application Lifecycle and Data Migration Management
Stackato includes enterprise-ready staging and updating processes to ensure your production
application updates and migrations have minimal downtime. With Stackato, you can easily seed
your application’s databases, and extract and back-up from databases.
You can migrate and deploy applications in a few simple steps. Administrators can easily replicate
configurations of existing application environments, and then use the Stackato application update
and data migration functionality to move new, existing, legacy or third-party applications to the
cloud with minimal re-engineering.

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The Stackato client offers all the functionality expected of a vmc clone, with additional commands
to migrate existing applications and data, and for executing server-side commands necessary for
deploying certain applicationssuch as Django and other web frameworks.
From mission-critical behemoths to throwaway scripts, Stackato simplifies application lifecycle
management with tools and processes designed for portability.
Dynamic Load Balancing and Elastic Scalability
Once your application is pushed to the cloud, Stackato scales the application as necessary to
automatically grow as usage grows.
The application can be distributed across multiple instances (even in different data centers) for
load balancing, redundancy, and to ensure up-time and availability. Every component in your stack
is protected by health checks and automated fail-over.You can also modify memory and instance
allocation for all your applications using the Stackato client.
Stackato’s elastic scalability delivers the performance your end-users demand.
An Application Platform for Your Hypervisor of Choice
Stackato is a hardened, enterprise-ready version of Cloud Foundry, so you don’t need to work
through various minor but time-consuming details that make the difference between open source
and commercial-grade software.
Installation is easy. The server-side Stackato components are packaged as a virtual machine that
can be run as a stand-alone micro cloud instance, or cloned across a cluster as special-purpose
nodes (controller, router, data services, and execution agents).
Enterprise-ready means Stackato works seamlessly with the world’s leading cloud infrastructure,
to ensure your application automatically and elastically scales to meet the demands of your most
popular applications. Run Stackato on your hypervisor of choice, then manage and monitor using
that system’s tools for centralized control and visibility at every level of virtual infrastructure.
Stackato also works with cloud application monitoring services such as New Relic (included with
Stackato) to ensure your applications are meeting your service and performance standards. As a
real-time application performance dashboard, New Relic provides immediate insight from the end-
user’s behavior down to the line of code.
“Stackato [has] a deployment and operations layer that offers the flexibility we need to rapidly
update our web software. Stackato’s clustering model has enabled us to deliver a stable and scalable
configuration...Into this environment, we’ve deployed our blog site’s Content Management System
(CMS), which is built on Drupal.”
—Matt Butcher, HPCS

About ActiveState
ActiveState empowers innovation from code to cloud smarter, safer, and faster. ActiveState’s cutting-edge solutions give developers and enterprises the power and flexibility to
develop in Java, Ruby, Python, Perl, Node.js, PHP, Tcl, and more. Stackato is ActiveState’s groundbreaking cloud platform for creating a private platform as a service (PaaS), and is the
cost-effective, secure, and portable way to develop and deploy apps to the cloud. ActiveState is proven for the enterprise: More than two million developers and 97% of Fortune-1000
companies use ActiveStateís end-to-end solutions to develop, distribute, and manage their software applications. Global customers like Cisco, CA, HP, Bank of America, Siemens, and
Lockheed Martin look to ActiveState to save time, save money, minimize risk, ensure compliance, and reduce time to market.
© 2013 ActiveState Software Inc. All rights reserved. ActiveState®
, Komodo®,
, ActivePerl®
, ActivePython®
and Stackato®
are trademarks or registered trademarks of ActiveState.
All other marks are property of their respective owners.
ActiveState Software Inc.
1700-409 Granville Street
Vancouver, BC V6C 1T2
stackato-sales@activestate.com
Phone: +1.778.786.1100
Fax: +1.778.786.1133
Toll-free in North America:
1.866.631.4581
Don’t Get Left Behind
Enterprises around the world are realizing the benefits of adopting Stackato’s private-PaaS
technology. The impacts are not minimal:
Efficiency: be the enterprise of tomorrow and free yourself from the shackles of your
infrastructure. Your systems should not hinder or constrain your business, but help your
organization grow. Cut your application deployment times from weeks to minutes; see what true
productivity can do for your enterprise.
Agility: the businesses that survive are the ones that are flexible and nimble in responding to
changing market and customer needs. If you need to move to a hybrid cloud, Stackato can easily
support that the shift with its portability and infrastructure-agnostic capabilities. If you need to
code in Ruby in addition to Java, Stackato has that capability built-in. An agile enterprise is one that
sidesteps roadblocks and moves towards the future.
Innovation: efficiency and agility lead to innovation. Once teams are freed from the daily burdens
of administration and configuration, they can actually focus on moving your business forward.
They are able to easily prototype, test, and launch multiple new advancements, without sacrificing
control or oversight. Lowered cost of mistakes and increased experimentation is the lasting
hallmark of private PaaS.
Enterprise clouds that employ Stackato private PaaS technology offer the efficiency, flexibility, and
convenience of a public cloud combined with the security, control, and compliance of a private
cloud. This allows for more freedom and flexibility, while saving time and money in development
costs, which in turn increases team productivity and fosters greater innovation. From the desktop
to the datacenter, Stackato makes it easy to develop, deploy, migrate, scale, manage, and monitor
applications on any cloud.

Stackato Private PaaS for the Agile Enterprise

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