What is the difference between OpenStack, CloudFoundry and Stackato?

Question

I'm quite new to all this *aaS thing, and currently I'm trying to wrap my head around concepts and how things basically work.

What puzzles me quite a bit at the moment is the difference between a variety of products, especially the following three:

• OpenStack
• CloudFoundry
• Stackato

The last one is the easiest for me to grasp: It's basically a software that manages application and service instances so you can push a custom-developed application to it and tell it to run this on a number of instances, so Stackato takes care of how to distribute the application.

But now I've read that Stackato is related to CloudFoundry (see http://strongloop.com/strongblog/in-the-loop-stackato-a-platform-as-a-service-that-you-can-deploy-and-manage-yourself/). Are they basically two products similar to each other that you can exchange for one another? Is the one a fork of the other (like Jenkins and Hudson), or how are they related?

And then I've read that you can Install CloudFoundry on top of OpenStack. I initially had thought that OpenStack is basically just another option, but apparently it's not, but something more low-level.

Can anybody please shed some light on this, and give me some hints?

Solution

All three can provide platform as a service. (IE, a database as a service.) and you can write applications that run on them.

Openstack also provides Infrastructure as a service, (IE, a full virtual server.)

You can run CloudFoundry and Stackato on top of Openstack.

Stackato is a built on top of CloudFoundry with ActiveState adding additional features.

A bit more info in this answer. But since Cloudfoundry was started by VMWare, it's safe to assume it was originally mean to run on top of VMWare's VSphere.

Comments

[gWaldo]

Note: Since this answer was given, CloudFoundry is now owned by Pivotal, and is meant to be somewhat platform-independent (or at least hypervisor-independent...)