ActiveState today announced the release of Stackato 3.4, with an updated free Micro Cloud license enabling Stackato clusters using up to 20GB of RAM. Stackato 3.4 opens up accessibility for IT Ops to leverage scalability, high availability and load balancing of applications in production, free of charge. Access to free clustering with Stackato enables a more accurate assessment of how apps can perform in a production environment and fosters greater accessibility for more Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) users to turn ideas into problem-solving commercial applications.

ActiveState's Stackato is the world's leading independent Cloud Foundry distribution. The history of the Company has been established with seventeen years of commercial success and an ongoing commitment to the open source dynamic language and cloud communities. ActiveState serves the needs of customers for velocity in development, agility, and portability across any cloud environment: public, on-premises or hybrid. Stackato enables the development of apps in any language, automatically configures the language runtimes and web frameworks, and provides a best in class dashboard with analytics and social monitoring tools. ActiveState's client base continues to grow with new Stackato customers.

"By implementing Stackato for our Cloud Foundry deployments, the team is able to focus on other critical infrastructure and application development priorities. Stackato has proven to be stable and the support we've received from the ActiveState team has been terrific," said Bob Wise, Chief Innovation Officer, MTN Communications.

"Stackato just recently won Gold, for best Platform-as-a-Service and we thank Network Products Guide for recognizing ActiveState at the 9^th Annual 2014 Hot Companies and Best Products Awards. It's especially thanks to our team's talent, experience, and cloud computing expertise, that we're leading with Stackato, growing with new top hires and equipped to serve and support MTN Communications and all our enterprise clients," said Bart Copeland, President and CEO, ActiveState.

"Stackato harnesses proven open source components from Cloud Foundry, Docker, and others. Our team gains insights on how to further enhance Stackato through conversations with IT operations and development communities, along with our global enterprise clients. We benefit from this dialogue and want to give back. One of our initiatives, the ActiveState Education Partner Program equips colleges and universities with access to Stackato. Today's announcement: Free access to the Stackato 20GB Cluster in production, is our most significant initiative to help support the breakdown of global accessibility barriers to technical innovation," added Copeland.

"The possibilities and opportunities with applications running on Stackato are as varied as our clients' focus areas. But, when getting started to build apps, not everyone has access to starting capital and IT automation with an application platform. Ideas become identified as commercially viable through assessment and testing. Stackato 3.4 is breaking new ground by enabling free access to clustering up to 20GB RAM to test and leverage scalability, high availability and load balancing, along with access to use the apps in production," said Jeff Hobbs, CTO and VP, Engineering, ActiveState.  

Stackato 3.4 Highlights 

• Stackato 20GB Cluster: Access to build a Stackato Cluster for free with 20GB of memory available for use in a production environment or internally.
  

• Application Rollback and Versioning: Ability to revert to a prior version; safety net for developers when promoting a newer version of an application; zero application downtime when deploying a newer version or rolling back.
  

• Cloud Foundry Upstream Merge: These updates include gnatsd, services v2, buildpack management, buildpack caching and more.
  

• User Management and Governance Enhancements: Provide the ability to see when Stackato users last logged in, and whether users have ever accessed the system.
  

• Quota Usage Dashboard and Enhanced Monitoring: Enables further control and monitoring of applications with enhancements to Logyard, quota usage dashboard and notifications about the latest Stackato updates.
  

• Sentinel: Enhanced system upgrades functionality.

As with all iterations of Stackato, ActiveState has completed a Cloud Foundry upstream merge. Now, any buildpack that supports offline assets can be used by Stackato, installed on the system and configured for priority order by the administrators. Stackato 3.4 also adds a brand new feature that developers have been asking for most of all: Application rollback and versioning. Developers can now jump back in time to a previous version of their app. Then, when a new version of their app is deployed, Stackato phases over to the new version from the old version. This is done by bringing down old version instances as new version instances come up. The result is zero downtime which is critical for ActiveState clients and the robustness of their systems.