Last week, Rackspace announced that is was beginning to offer OpenStack as an option for it public cloud.
Why has it taken so long for Rackspace to offer OpenStack in its own public cloud? It’s a question of capabilities and the maturity of the code base. The OpenStack Essex release came out earlier this month, accompanied by the news that IBM, Red Hat, HP, Cisco, Dell, Yahoo and AT&T are all now supporters of the effort.
“While the Nova project (OpenStack compute) had an awesome framework and a platform where we wanted to be long term, there were some capabilities we felt that we needed,” Troy Toman, Senior Director, Software Developer at Rackspace told InternetNews.com.
Among the missing capabilitied was integration with Rackspace’s own internal systems for billing. As well, the original Nova code lacked some abilities that Rackspace needed to resize a server up or down. Toman stressed that Rackspace was looking for feature parity from OpenStack with its existing cloud server solutions, which is something that now, at long last, has been achieved.
Looking beyond just feature parity, using OpenStack will provide operational benefits and features that go beyond what Rackspace already is delivering. Toman noted that as part of the transition to OpenStack, they are using the OpenStack Quantum networking project as well. With Quantum, Rackspace has more flexibility for delivering private networking capabilities into the cloud.
Read the full story at ServerWatch:
Rackspace Cloud (Just) Now Moving to OpenStack
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
