Clouds evidently make for strange bedfellows.

Piston Cloud Computing, the start-up peddling an OpenStack distribution for enterprise private clouds, is co-operating with VMware of all people to develop a Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) that integrates OpenStack cloud infrastructure with Cloud Foundry, VMware's open source Platform-as-a-Service.

Piston means to distribute and support this new integrated capability in a future release of its Piston Enterprise OS (pentOS), explaining that it takes advantage of Cloud Foundry BOSH, the recently announced open source tool chain for release engineering, deployment and lifecycle management of very large-scale instances of Cloud Foundry. BOSH currently works with VMware's own vSphere and Amazon Web Services.

Using a client written in Ruby, the CPI is supposed to manage the deployment of a set of virtual machines and enable applications to be deployed dynamically using Cloud Foundry. Piston says "a common image, called a stem-cell, allows BOSH to rapidly build new virtual machines enabling rapid scale-out." The two should work seamlessly together.

Piston says its development team will work closely with the Cloud Foundry engineering team. It touts Cloud Foundry as the leading open source PaaS and says it's got a fast-growing ecosystem and strong enterprise demand.

Jerry Chen, VP of cloud and application services at VMware, said in a statement that "It is vital to our customers that Cloud Foundry be a true multi-cloud offering. We look forward to supporting the engineering effort as well as our mutual customers."

There will also be a new community open source project mating the Cloud Foundry PaaS with OpenStack submitted to the OpenStack satellite ecosystem for future consideration as an OpenStack incubation project.

See https://github.com/piston/openstack-bosh-cpi.