Free clouds! Piston latest to jump on 'freemium' bandwagon

22.08.2012
-- which bills itself as the enterprise company -- is the latest cloud vendor to offer a free or low-cost version of its software for customer trials and proofs of concepts.

And it begs the question: Why are going cheap?

"We've spent a lot of time talking to analysts, customers, and most folks are in the 'we want to try before we buy phase,'" says Piston CEO Joshua McKenty, who is also one of the co-founders of the OpenStack movement.

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Piston Wednesday released Airframe, which is a light and free version of its private cloud software based on OpenStack code. The biggest differences between the free and enterprise-class versions is that Airframe doesn't allow for automatic scaling of the service and it doesn't provide for high availability. That means when Piston updates the software -- new OpenStack code is being released about every six months now -- the free version has to be shut down for those updates to kick in, whereas the enterprise version allows for a rolling update. Also, in the free version, to scale up and add virtual machines, that requires re-engineering the system from scratch instead of just plugging and playing in the enterprise version. McKenty says he doesn't think the free version of the software will bite into sales of the priced product; instead, he's hoping it will be a lead-generation tool.