The Open Cloud

I think I've mentioned Rackspace before, at least a couple times. Now what they started about two years ago has come to fruition and they now consume their own service. The OpenStack architecture for datacenter infrastructure (abstracted computing resource and abstracted storage resource, both at the object and at the block level plus network management) is now provided in Rackspace's publicly-available infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering.

Watch the video now:

The small (256MB RAM) server that was available in their First Generation Cloud Server is no longer available in the Next Gen OpenStack-based offering, and that makes the lowest price point 2.2 cents per hour instead of the 0.5 cents per hour that we had before, but performance is better and provisioning is faster.

Rackspace also claims in another YouTube video that a big part of the Next Gen cloud (as you can see from http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/) is making block-level storage available to consumers, so that we can scale storage independently of compute capability. This is one feature of Amazon Web Services that made me choose AWS over RS for some applications; Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes made much more sense than buying a more expensive CloudServer just to have enough disk space but end up with under-utilized processor and memory, and as much as APIs help out, I couldn't afford the development overhead of passing and retrieving user-uploaded files to/from RS CloudFiles.

Anyway, great to see a company standing up against vendor lock-in, inviting multiple players to an open platform that answers the needs of so many application developers and business workflows out there.

Registered Linux User #370740 (http://linuxcounter.net)