ActiveState, the leading private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider, today announced the beta release of Stackato v3.0. The new release is based on Cloud Foundry v2, uses Docker for application containers, includes an Activity Stream for developer collaboration and change visibility, and has deeper integration with both CloudStack and OpenStack.

The general Stackato architecture remains the same, but is now based on Cloud Foundry v2 which has been significantly modified for better performance, reliability, and scalability. This release ensures compatibility with the broad Cloud Foundry ecosystem moving forward and incorporates features that were demanded by Stackato’s growing list of Fortune 500 customers.

“Stackato v3.0 is a critical step in maintaining a strong Cloud Foundry ecosystem”, stated Jeff Hobbs, CTO & VP of Development at ActiveState. “Stackato introduced several of the key features in the updated Cloud Foundry v2 design. Rebasing Stackato v3.0 on the Cloud Foundry v2 trunk allows us to continue novel extensions to the platform while ensuring compatibility with the growing ecosystem. We’ve been encouraged by Pivotal’s openness and as a member of the Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board (CAB), we look forward to working closely with them to ensure that our Stackato customers will continue to have the best possible PaaS technology on the market.”

Stackato’s application containers are now based on Docker, the innovative open source project that has gained incredible momentum in 2013. Docker allows for much more powerful and efficient container management and portability across a Stackato cluster and opens the door for many additional capabilities in future Stackato versions.

Stackato v3.0 includes a new Activity Stream based on Appsecute’s social DevOps technology (ActiveState acquired Appsecute in June 2013). The Activity Stream allows developers and IT staff to collaborate more efficiently throughout an application’s lifecycle. This real-time view for enterprise cloud management allows stakeholders to see a unified information stream across multiple application management services. Developers and IT operations staff can comment and coordinate the work directly on the stream, improving communication within and between these groups.

“One of our key goals with Stackato has been to improve productivity by reducing the friction and hurdles that may currently exist in the development process. Our technology was designed to streamline this process and improve how developers and IT can co-exist as a cohesive and highly agile team,” commented Bart Copeland CEO of ActiveState. “With the Activity Stream now in Stackato, this latest release is a significant step in that direction.”

Stackato v3.0 also has deeper integration with both CloudStack and OpenStack, in response to the incredible demand from our users to deploy one PaaS in a multi-cloud environment. Stackato now uses native APIs for OpenStack auto-scaling instead of relying on now deprecated EC2 APIs. Stackato uses native CloudStack APIs for auto-scaling, building on its previously announced Citrix CloudPortal Business Manager (CPBM) integration to provide a turnkey PaaS solution for Citrix CloudPlatform and CloudStack users.

Additional features in Stackato v3.0 include a ground-up rewrite of the web management console for improved performance and usability, dashboards for easier visibility into Stackato’s performance, the latest versions of all packaged services and runtimes, a new version of the NATS message bus written in Go (Apcera’s Gnatsd) for better performance and scalability, native support for Amazon RDS, and the ability to perform in-place version upgrades as newer versions of Stackato are released.

To find out more about Stackato v3.0, visit http://beta.stackato.com