OpenStack startup Mirantis has signed on as a silver member of Cloud Foundry, the open source cloud platform for developer teams.

Typically, the move announced Thursday would signal a company's plans to ship a distribution of Cloud Foundry, or a similar cloud platform. But Mirantis has no such plans, with co-founder and CMO Boris Renski vowing not to expand from infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) into platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

Built on frameworks such as OpenStack, managed infrastructure services help clients maintain the virtual compute, storage, and network functions that underpin a private cloud. Managed platform services such as Cloud Foundry, on the other hand, give a client's developer team tools for building and deploying applications.

"We've seen more and more customers in the field who are looking to deploy Cloud Foundry on top of OpenStack," Renski says. Many of Mirantis' competitors in the IaaS space now offer platform services as well — IBM's Bluemix, HP's Helion, and Red Hat's OpenShift, to name a few.

Mirantis considered building its own PaaS offering but ultimately decided to leave that work to others and continue to focus on OpenStack and IaaS, Renski says.

"The platform-as-a-service market is in a really nascent stage," he says, predicting that Docker and other containers will end up competing directly with platform services like Cloud Foundry. "There's going to be an enormous amount of competition in the space," he says.

Rather than dive into the fray, Mirantis will enable other vendors to run their platform services on top of its OpenStack distribution, says Renski. Expect more on that soon.

"Most of the partner announcements you've seen us do in the past 12 months revolved around infrastructure vendors," says Renski. "Now we're building partnerships that are relevant to developers and DevOps teams, and our efforts for the next 12 months will focus on the layers above OpenStack."