Interesting news today as OpenStack vendorMirantis joins the Cloud Foundry foundation. While some may see this as a somewhat bizarre blurring of the traditional divisions between infrastructure and platforms, the reality is that it is a move that is beneficial for customers.

Two of the most interesting open source cloud initiatives of recent years have been OpenStack and Cloud Foundry. OpenStack is, of course, the cloud infrastructure platform that was first created as part of a collaboration between NASA and Rackspace. Since then the initiative had gained a huge following – many startups and an equal number of large traditional IT vendors have jumped into OpenStack to be part of the movement. OpenStack is most easily explained as an open source alternative to the number one public cloud vendor, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Many organizations are using OpenStack to build their private clouds to give the advantages that AWS brings, but within their own infrastructure.

But as impressive as OpenStack and cloud infrastructure is, organizations are increasingly looking to move “up the stack”. This is where Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions such as Cloud Foundry come in. These solutions offer far more functionality than pure infrastructure. A good PaaS will help developers automate deployment, scale their applications and plug in to useful developer tools. Cloud Foundry was initially a VMware initiative but, like OpenStack, has spun out into its own foundation and achieved widespread industry buy-in.

Some of that buy-in has been from vendors who are also OpenStack shops –IBM is a good example – it offers both an OpenStack infrastructure service, as well as a Cloud Foundry-based platform on top of it. This move is perhaps the reason that Mirantis, probably the largest independent OpenStack vendor, is today joining the Cloud Foundry foundation. As part of joining the foundation, Mirantis is committing to supporting Cloud Foundry and partnering with its distribution vendors. Importantly, Mirantis is also committing to not building its own Cloud Foundry distribution – something that will help to avoid vendor sprawl and customer confusion.

There is much self-interest in this move. Mirantis is well aware that there is an increasing desire from customers to move “up the stack”. I suspect that a large proportion of Mirantis’ customers and prospects are spending much time looking at how well Mirantis’ flavor of OpenStack plays with PaaS platforms such as Cloud Foundry. By joining the foundation, therefore, Mirantis casts itself in a credible light as a vendor that can deliver an infrastructure solution that works effortlessly with Cloud Foundry. Says Alex Freedland, co-founder and chairman of Mirantis:

…Mirantis is focused on making OpenStack the best way to build a private cloud and enable software development. Part of that vision is making it as simple as possible to deploy and manage technologies higher ‘up the stack’ – like Cloud Foundry, which has become a very popular PaaS for developer productivity on top of OpenStack. We believe that OpenStack serves the market best by supporting the most popular PaaS solutions and giving enterprise customers maximum choice, rather than prescribing a specific PaaS.

Of course, as the commentator who has often shone a light on the none-too-friendly war between Mirantis and its one-time partner (and existing investor) Red Hat, I have to mention that this is something of a barb delivered to that other open source company. Red Hat RHT -0.48% has its own PaaS, OpenShift. It is also pretty much the last vendor pushing the OpenShift bandwagon and, as such, it has a tendency to proscribe OpenShift as the PaaS to use. This move from Mirantis, while pushing Cloud Foundry as the best PaaS solution to use, leaves open the opportunity for Mirantis customers to chose from the wide range of Cloud Foundry solutions that exist.

Of course, much of this announcement is positioning. But the fact remains that organizations are keen to move up the stack. By signaling an intention to play nicely with Cloud Foundry, Mirantis helps them on that journey.

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