Continuing its evolution from a provider of hyperconverged software into the developer of a full private cloud software stack, Stratoscale Ltd. today introduced a new version of its namesake offering.

Version 5 adds new identity management services along with support for message buses, domain name services, improved monitoring and database replication. It also adds improved services for managing open-source software components, better database support and petabyte-scale storage scalability that’s compatible with Amazon Web Services Inc.’s S3 and the open-source Ceph standard.

The Tel Aviv-based software company has raised $69 million toward its goal of building a private cloud environment that also supports workload integration with multiple public clouds. The company has recently added manage database, storage, Kubernetes and virtual machine services, among other things. The new components “tie together all aspects of application development from identity and access management to monitoring and notifications,” Stratoscale said in a press release.

Stratoscale is targeting what Business Development Vice President John Mao said is the “sophistication gap between what you get in the cloud and simple [virtual machines] on-prem.” Organizations that use public cloud providers want the same automation and simplicity that they get in the cloud behind the firewall, but are frustrated by the limited range of features in traditional data centers.

“Our solution is 100% on-prem private cloud,” Mao said. The company has spent been much of the last two years adding cloud-like services like managed databases and analytics to its infrastructure stack. The result is a private infrastructure software stack that can be managed “as if it was another cloud region,” Mao said. That enables users to write to a single set of application programming interfaces for both local and cloud deployment as well as to replicate scripts and management operators across data centers.

Future plans include the addition of managed open-source services such as Apache Kafka for data streaming and Elasticsearch for search, along with software containers delivered as a service and enhanced support for application program interfaces for Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Google LLC’s Cloud Platform. Stratoscale’s principal compatibility target to this point has been Amazon.

The company’s core market is facing new competition from the public cloud vendors themselves, all three of which have introduced on-premises versions of their infrastructure stacks. Although Mao called those developments “a little scary,” he said it also prompted his company to double down on making its infrastructure stack truly cloud-neutral.

“Do you really want to put all your eggs into one vendor’s basket?” he asked. The company’s longer-term goals are to emulate all APIs found in all major cloud platforms, making it possible for customers to point applications to either public or private cloud sources without extensive modification.

Photo: University of Texas at Austin