Piston Cloud’s flagship offering is Enterprise OpenStack, a tweaked up distribution of the increasingly popular open-source cloud platform. The only problem is that if you don’t happen to be deploying on a very large scale configuring all the different systems can be more hassle it’s worth, but as of today Piston is offering an alternative.

The company is launching Airframe, a scaled-down version of its distro that installs in less than 10 minutes and comes with the entire core of OpenStack services including compute, storage, networking and the management layer. It’s free and can be rolled out to any number of servers for an unlimited time and with no user cap – the only catch is that it can’t be used for commercial purposes.

Also notable is that Airframe comes bundled with Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open-source platform as a service software.

“OpenStack installers on the market today are too complicated for almost anyone to deploy and manage,” said Joshua McKenty, CEO and co-founder of Piston Cloud Computing. “We felt it was important to develop an ‘easy’ method of installing OpenStack, that didn’t require sacrificing a production-class architecture. Airframe is built on the same underlying technology as Piston Enterprise OpenStack, which means it is easy to upgrade from a pilot deployment to a fully-supported production environment, without starting over.”

Airframe is meant to be used primarily for testing and proof of concepts. An IT department can fire up a pilot deployment in a very reasonable timeframe and make use of the full feature set when pitching the solution to management.

Piston Cloud is expanding in multiple directions at once. With the Foundry integration it’s supporting the public cloud, and via a partnership with GridCentric it made its software viable for VDI. The latter’s VMS solution significantly reduces the amount of memory a VM running on OpenStack Enterprise uses up.