Seeking a bigger slice of the public cloud pie, Canonical has joined forces with Pivotal to reposition Ubuntu at the center of the open PaaS ecosystem. Under the partnership, the Linux distributor will integrate an OpenStack-based version of Cloud Foundry into the next major release of its operating system to let customers consolidate their infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service implementations into a single environment. Pivotal’s PaaS solution will be made compatible with the Juju service orchestration tool to simplify the deployment of these unified clouds.

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth announced the news during his keynote speech at this week’s OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong, explaining that “it’s important for us to signal who we think is in the lead.” He added that his firm will collaborate with OpenStack providers to ensure that Cloud Foundry would run smoothly on their offerings.

Joshua McKenty, the co-founder and CTO of OpenStack distributor Piston Cloud, told SiliconANGLE that:

“Choice is always a good thing! Both for OpenStack, and for Cloud Foundry. Ubuntu is extremely popular with developers, and Canonical’s OpenStack efforts have been very successful in helping folks try out OpenStack on laptops and in labs. Increasing the adoption of Cloud Foundry in those same environments is beneficial to everyone.”

Piston Cloud is better positioned than most to capitalize on the accelerating adoption of Cloud Foundry. In co-developing the interface that makes it possible to run the platform on OpenStack, the company cemented its place in the ecosystem and gained a head start to winning developers’ hearts and minds. Furthering its lead, the firm recently expanded its partnership with Pivotal to become the community infrastructure provider for Cloud Foundry.

Piston’s free implementation aims to boost developer interest facilitate “large-scale continuous integration testing” of Cloud Foundry and OpenStack.