AppFog’s Cloud Foundry-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is coming to OpenStack clouds in a big way, now that the developer has joined the open source cloud operating system’s community. AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson is billing the move as making PaaS a first-class citizen in the OpenStack ecosystem – and as a strike against Amazon Web Services for its unfriendly ways with developers.

The real disruptive factor of this announcement, Carlson says, is that for the first time, developers have the option of deploying PaaS across OpenStack public cloud service providers. The first wave of OpenStack compatibility includes the ability to deploy applications with behemoths like Rackspace and HP, both of whom recently launched public cloud services based on the OpenStack platform. Carlson promises that soon, AppFog will gain support for more providers.

The timing is pretty straightforward. Last year, the big trend in PaaS was multi-language (AppFog supports coding in PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Node.js and Perl), but in 2012, Carlson says that the push is for deploying applications across multiple cloud service providers – that way, if one goes down, there’s always another backup.

“Servers are ephemeral, apps live forever,” Carlson said.

And besides, with AppFog’s built-in support for multiple clouds, Carlson says that his company is uniquely positioned to assist in matters of portability, which has always been a pain point and weakness for AWS.

So where OpenStack comes in is relatively straightforward: As we’ve discussed recently, OpenStack aims to democratize the cloud service provider space. That’s in stark contrast to Amazon Web Services, which Carlson applauded for its innovation, but certainly not its friendliness to developers. Every new service that Amazon adds to its cloud portfolio just digs the developer more deeply into its ecosystem, draining their wallet, worsening headaches and generally decreasing the developer’s productivity and ability to come up with their own innovations.

So while OpenStack levels the playing field, Carlson sees AppFog – available in public beta next week – as being a real game changer in the ecosystem, as developers now have a PaaS that can deploy right on top of public OpenStack infrastructures. As I always note when talking about OpenStack, however, it’s important to realize just how much of a head start Amazon has. In fact, outside the OpenStack community, AppFog itself supports Amazon EC2.

It’s also important to note how competitive it is now in the PaaS market. AppFog is fighting  a new  competitor which seems like every day. Joining OpenStack makes sense. Every strategic move counts right now. It’s just a question of how long it will take for OpenStack initiatives to deploy and how deep it can reach into the market.