Piston Cloud Computing, which bills itself as the enterprise OpenStack company, has announced an open source, cooperative project with VMware to officially bring the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service to OpenStack-based clouds.

This was bound to happen sooner or later: Despite its origins as a VMware project, Cloud Foundry is an open source PaaS that makes the elimination of vendor lock-in one of its priorities, with a special focus on compatibility with multiple cloud platforms (Amazon Web Services and VMware’s own vSphere platform are currently supported). Meanwhile, OpenStack is itself an open source cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platform that’s been maturing rapidly and starting to see some real adoption.

There may be some philosophical differences between the two projects, especially as OpenStack service providers are ramping up to take on VMware vSphere themselves. But generally speaking, their open source natures, as well as OpenStack’s general need to help users move up the stack to PaaS, means that it’s only a wonder why it hasn’t happened sooner.

The integration will take advantage of the recently-released Cloud Foundry BOSH engineering, deployment and lifecycle large-scale management tool, with Piston Cloud developing a cloud provider interface (CPI) for BOSH. It’s going to first come to a future release of the Piston Enterprise OS (pentOS) cloud operating system software as an officially supported feature, but Piston Cloud intends to turn it over to the OpenStack community for consideration as an incubator project. And VMware and Piston Cloud will work together to refine and develop the tool over time.

Otherwise, there’s not much to say at this point, but I have every confidence that once this partnership bears fruit, Piston Cloud and VMware will make sure we know about it. In the meanwhile, analysts like Cloud Ave.’s Krishnan Subramanian are expressing their hope that the OpenStack community takes this tool and runs with it, expanding its versatility and flexibility.