CloudBees announced today the availability of its private Java platform-as-a-service AnyCloud. AnyCloud can be deployed on Amazon Web Services, other public infrastructure-as-a-service provider or on-premise. CloudBees has been promising a private PaaS version for some time.

AnyCloud is the latest private/cross-platform cloud offering to come out of the PaaS market. Cloud Foundry, the Cloud Foundry based Stackato from ActiveState, Apprenda and Cumulogic are other existing options. AppFog also plans a private version of its Cloud Foundry based PaaS, and Heroku plans to offer the option to deploy applications to IaaS providers other than AWS.

The ability to run a platform on any cloud you choose, or in your own data center, is appealing. In the case of a PaaS like Heroku, applications can be moved to another PaaS provider without the need to refactor code. However, having a choice of deployment environments is a huge bonus. At the moment, AWS seems to be the most common IaaS for PaaS providers, but ability to deploy to Joyent or Rackspace will appeal to many. And of course those who for compliance or other reasons can’t use public clouds at all, a private PaaS option could improve agility.

Another interesting advantage of portable PaaS is the ability to mix and match multiple PaaS providers on the same cloud infrastructure. In my interveiw with Nodejitsu CEO Charlie Robbins on theCube, Robbins noted that latency can be a big issue for cloud applications hosted in different environments. So let’s say you want to run both a Ruby app and a Node.js app, and the two apps need to be integrated. Let’s say you’ve decided that you want to use Heroku for the Ruby app but you’d prefer to use Nodejitsu for your the Node.js app. Today, Heroku only runs on Amazon Web Services and Nodejitsu runs on Rackspace. Someday soon though you might be able to run both on Joyent, solving the latency issue without the need to choose only one PaaS provider for all languages.