Remember .NET, the other application software platform besides J2EE, which always seems to dominate cloud conversations?

Well, Apprenda, which has got a rare if not unique "deploy anywhere" private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) stack for .NET, has just released Apprenda Platform 3.0, hoping to set the standard for enterprise-ready PaaS offerings.

For one thing, it'll work with any .NET or SQL Server application now, making it appealing to service providers as well as enterprises interested in a private Azure-like set-up.

Shucks, even Microsoft doesn't have a pure software solution for creating a private PaaS cloud out-of-the-box - although otherwise Apprenda kinda works like Azure - and Apprenda figures other people haven't waded in because there's no open source code to fall back on.

It claims traditional PaaS offerings have failed to address the requirements of most mission-critical applications and workloads. It describes Apprenda Platform 3.0 as a "new breed of advanced PaaS technology."

CEO Sinclair Schuller says, "We take a deeper approach to PaaS with the platform behaving more like an application server, running underneath the application and injecting new capabilities into it that were not there before, and adding value to the actual application itself. What this means, is that our customers not only get their cloud apps deployed quickly, but their applications become progressively better over time inheriting all the benefits of the Apprenda Platform."

The newest release of the Apprenda Platform offers enhanced functionality and value-added options that each application can opt into at the time of deployment.

It also includes new platform owner capabilities to allow for greater control of the infrastructure resources allocated to individual applications.

There's an enhanced API that gives the developer more control over caching, service communication and broadcasting service requests.

High availability and workload balancing is supposed to be easier to set up and manage with each application independently defined and additional nodes added at runtime as desired.

Developers can choose the existing sub-domain URL pattern or opt for a path-based URL for their application such as mycloud.com/application.

And for the first time .NET developers can sandbox applications within defined usage boundaries, creating what Apprenda calls "slice policies" that define the resource limits of each application.

While in the past developers often wrote for maximum capacity, Apprenda Platform 3.0 reportedly makes it easier to track and manage resource usage based on "slice policies" selected by each application provider. This means you're only using the capacity you need and allowing other applications to take advantage of that excess capacity.

• Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Sinclair Schuller – Apprenda