In a major turning point for the OpenStack community, Mirantis Inc. has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation to help support the adoption of the platform-as-a-service stack. The move marks a total reversal of its earlier attitude toward the project.

Until not long ago, the company promoted the view that the OpenStack ecosystem will ultimately produce a native alternative to Cloud Foundry in order to meet the fast-rising demand for development services. The need for such functionality has materialized on cue, but the upstream community did not react fast enough and organizations have shifted their attention to the existing choices.

Cloud Foundry thus established itself as the preferred middleware option for OpenStack, a reality that Mirantis can no longer afford to ignore now that its competitors are already addressing the opportunity. Emerging contenders such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and VMware Inc. have pledged their support to the foundation, while its main rival, Red Hat Inc., is pushing a homegrown platform-as-a-service stack.

The addition of Mirantis, which is the self-proclaimed top distributor of OpenStack with the largest number of production-level customers under its belt, at once validates the technology and removes the last trace of resistance to the convergence of the two projects. It also probably marks the beginning of the end for hopes that the cloud operating system will ever become more than an infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

That’s probably for the best in the long run, however, given the tremendous of sprawl that already plagues the upstream OpenStack ecosystem. As for Mirantis, it’s now better positioned to keep ahead of the competition and address the emergence of the first production applications built from the ground up to run on the platform.

Its entry into the Cloud Foundry Foundation is the cumulation of a long-running effort to address the trend that previously saw the addition of support for Kubernetes, another popular open-source development technology, to its version of the system. The Google Inc.-developed framework provides scheduling capabilities for managing containers, an emerging application delivery format that has garnered strong support within the Cloud Foundry community.