Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. has announced the release of Airframe, a slimmed-down version of its Piston Enterprise OpenStack product. According to the announcement, Airframe is a bare-metal cloud management platform that installs in less than 10 minutes and delivers 100 percent of the core OpenStack services, including compute, storage, networking, and cloud management. 

According to the company, Airframe was designed to fill the gap between the OpenStack framework and Piston Enterprise OpenStack, Piston Cloud’s production-ready OpenStack distribution. At its core, Airframe has the same technology that powers Piston Enterprise OpenStack, which delivers virtual machines, block storage, scale-out object storage, and virtualized networking through a self-service web portal and a set of open standard APIs.

With Airframe, users can deploy a complete OpenStack environment that runs everything required for an application-development cloud. And, Airframe comes bundled with Cloud Foundry, a popular open source platform-as-a-service. Other Airframe features include: Moxie HA, hands-free 10-minute installation, push-button upgrades, all OpenStack core components, and an integrated distributed storage system (powered by Ceph).

Airframe also comes with a per-user entitlement key that allows users to easily upgrade to Piston Cloud’s Piston Enterprise OpenStack. Airframe will be available for free download on September 4, 2012.