The Switzerland-based service provider Swisscom has based what it’s calling its Elastic Cloud on the OpenStack platform, and it’s using Cloud Foundry for applications.

Other partners for its Elastic Cloud include PLUMgrid for software-defined networking (SDN), EMC for SDN storage, Red Hat for its KVM hypervisor, and Cluster HQ for container storage.

In addition, Swisscom did a lot of in-house development and integration work, according to Stephan Massalt, VP of cloud at Swisscom Cloud Labs.

The operator is using six of its newer data centers for the Elastic Cloud – four for production and two for development.

Elastic Cloud allows Swisscom to provide three different offerings. The first is a private cloud in a customer-specific environment. The second is a virtual private cloud. And the third offering is a public cloud. But they all share the same technology infrastructure.

Swisscom first launched Elastic Cloud in beta about a year and a half ago, and went into production with it in October 2015.

PLUMgrid’s Open Networking Suite (ONS) creates a programmable data plane for the cloud. “We can create multi-tenant environments, multiple zones; we can create networks on the fly; we can add VMs [virtual machines] to it on the fly,” says Massalt. “It’s highly dynamic. We can put the components as close as possible to the traffic where it’s initiated or terminated.”

One of the other reasons Swisscom chose PLUMgrid is because its private virtual domain technology provides network containerization.

“One thing that’s important about PLUMgrid is we’re leveraging their SDN for VMs,” says Massalt. “As containers become more important we can extend this functionality to the container environment.”

From the enterprise customer’s perspective, containers will allow rapid scaling of applications.

“VMs and OpenStack take more time than a container to start,” says Massalt. “Combining large-scale apps that require VMs with apps that run better on containers is our objective. We’re working on the first drop of that. But the foundation is in our current setup.”