It’s an incredible honor to be included on list for 2013, which features a who’s who in technology and business. Rackspace ranks No. 56.

About working at Rackspace, Computerworld wrote, “This San Antonio-based managed hosting services company provides a raft of technical training to its IT staffers. The organization offers the full Red Hat certification program at no cost to employees, as well as the most advanced Cisco certification, the Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert, and the Microsoft Certified IT Professional, Enterprise Administrator curriculum. Through Rackspace’s VTO, or Volunteer Time Off, program, which was introduced last year, every employee may take up to three workdays off per year to give back to the community.”

Computerworld’s annual Best Places to Work in IT feature has ranked the top 100 work environments for technology professionals since 1994. The list is compiled based on a comprehensive questionnaire regarding company offerings in categories like benefits, diversity, career development, training and retention. Computerworld also conducts extensive surveys of IT workers and their responses factor in determining the rankings.

We’re pumped to make the list for the sixth year straight as we continue our mission to be one of the world’s greatest service companies and to deliver Fanatical Support on an open hybrid cloud. This recognition wouldn’t be possible without Rackers, whose hard work, drive and spirit has once again put us among the 100 Best Places to Work in IT.

Want to find out for yourself what makes Rackspace an awesome place to work? We’re hiring.

Cool, huh? Let’s dig a little deeper into what this means for you, and answer some questions you may have:

Wait, what!? I don’t even know what Mailgun is. What is it?
Oh, let’s back up then. Mailgun is a set of APIs to send, receive and track emails. All apps and websites use email in some way; whether for welcome emails, shipping confirmations or marketing. And we all get them. Mailgun lets developers integrate email deeply into their applications without having to worry about managing email servers themselves. Mailgun also automatically manages the email delivery process, dramatically increasing the chances that your email pops up in the recipient’s inbox. Mailgun has grown rapidly since we acquired it, and it now sends more than 350 million emails a month!

Do other Rackspace customers already use Mailgun?
A number of you have already built Mailgun email into your apps. Integration is often as easy changing a single line of code and – PRESTO! – headaches around managing email vanish. But don’t take it from me; listen to one of our customers. At the beginning of the year, DealTicker, a Rackspace customer that operates one of Canada’s largest performance marketing sites, had been looking to improve its ability to scale email sending. DealTicker moved to Mailgun and now delivers in excess of 30 million emails per month. Here’s what DealTicker President Daniel Abramov had to say:

“As a customer of Rackspace, we have gotten used to unparalleled service experience, and dealing with Mailgun was no different. The flawless execution and service delivery is due to the dedication, support and hard work that the entire Mailgun team has demonstrated to DealTicker throughout our migration and integration process. We have transitioned from one of the largest full-service email marketing firms over to Mailgun and have seen unsurpassed inbox deliverability and service excellence.”

Do I have to send tens of millions of emails to use Mailgun?
Heck no! Not all Mailgun customers send as many emails as DealTicker, but that doesn’t make the emails they send any less important to their businesses. Mailgun helps developers of all kinds of apps deliver mail to the inbox – PagerDuty is one example. PagerDuty is an app that alerts on-call engineers when there is a problem with their app (if you use Rackspace Cloud Monitoring, you SHOULD also use PagerDuty for alerts, it’s awesome). Here’s what PagerDuty CEO and Co-Founder Alex Solomon had to say:

“We rely on email to notify our customers when their mission-critical applications are down. Reliable, on-time delivery was the biggest requirement for us when choosing an email provider, and we couldn’t be happier with Mailgun. Their team is there when we need them, and emails are always delivered quickly.”

Thanks Alex. We’ll buy you a beer next time you’re in San Antonio.

I won’t take any more of your time. Now that Mailgun is integrated into the Cloud Control Panel, you can use it now. Go for it. It’s fun and it’s easy. Happy emailing!

If you have any questions about Mailgun, just ask your Rackspace account team or start a live chat on the Mailgun website.

An Army Is Forming To Battle Patent Trolls
Last week, our fight against patent trolls took a big step forward, as a “big tent” meeting hosted by the Coalition for Patent Fairness swelled into a standing-room only affair featuring a number of high profile agencies eager to join the battle.

We’re Investing In Cloudant For NoSQL DBaaS
At Rackspace, our goal is to provide developers the best tool for the job. This week, we fortified our partnership with Cloudant, a NoSQL DBaaS provider that further enables us to give developers choice in which database flavor they use on the Rackspace Cloud.

Rackspace Developer Support: Fanatical Support For Your Code
This week we launched Rackspace Developer Support, an extension of our Fanatical Support specifically for developers. Rackspace Developer Support marks the first time we will officially support your application code.

Drchrono Is A Must Have App
In this week’s installment of Must Have App, we looked at drchrono, an app that streamlines the patient-caregiver experience. From electronic health records to medical billing and patient profiles, drchrono provides heath professionals and patients an all-in-one solution.

Woz On Startups
We concluded our Rackspace On Startups video series with insights from Apple Co-Founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak, who talked about Apple’s humble beginnings and offered advice to startups.

New Functionality In Cloud Servers
This week, we highlighted new capabilities in Cloud Servers: the ability to provision additional IPv4 addresses on Cloud Servers in the next generation Rackspace Cloud, and the ability to attach and detach networks from a live Cloud Server.

Check Out Our Guide To Business Email
After 13 years of offering business-grade email hosting and helping millions of customers navigate business email choices, we’ve compiled the Business Email 101 Guide, an eight-step guide to address the most common variables involved in the business email choice.

CA World 2013 Shines Spotlight On Cloud Evolution
At CA World 2013 in Las Vegas last month, we had the opportunity to share industry insight from our cloud customers and highlight our approach to helping customers with their journeys to the cloud. Here are some key takeaways from the event.

Hybrid Cloud Is Taking Hold
The hybrid cloud offers the best of all worlds. It allows you to blend the best of the public cloud with private cloud and dedicated servers into one common architecture. And RightScale’s 2013 State of the Cloud Survey confirmed that customers crave hybrid clouds.

Why Google Glass Matters To Rackspace, Developers
Google Glass is a new kind of conversation starter. It will have huge impacts on Rackspace and its business in coming years. It will also change how developers work. This week, Robert Scoble examined why Google Glass matters to Rackspace and developers.

SF Rackers Saddle Up For Bike To Work Day
This week, dozens of Rackers in Rackspace’s San Francisco office celebrated Bike to Work Day. Cycling to work has become a key component of Racker SF culture.

Don’t Ruffle Your Feathers – Rackspace Has Your Back
Downtime can upset customers. Reliable apps need a reliable cloud, and the Rackspace Cloud powered by OpenStack was created from the ground up to help make sure you stay online. Don’t let downtime ruffle your feathers – we’ve got your back.

Open Cloud Helping UTSA Obtain Tier 1 Status
The open cloud, which the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) uses to power its scientific and academic research efforts, is a crucial component of the school’s plan to become recognized as a Tier 1 university.

Good.Co: A Must Have App
This week, we kicked off a new blog series: Must Have App. The first Must Have App is Good.Co, a professional networking app built to help you find joy and meaning in your career and to help employees discover their strengths and how they fit within their role or company culture.

DevOpsDays Austin Breaks Down Barriers
Several Rackers presented at DevOpsDays Austin last week, an event that has become the must-attend conference to bring development and operations together and break down barriers. This week, we looked at some of the highlights and takeaways from DevOpsDays Austin.

New Cloud Control Panel: A Behind The Scenes Look
Want to learn more about what the new Rackspace Cloud Control Panel means for you and your business? Check out the recording of this webinar for a behind the scenes look.

OpenStack is making great strides to invite and include women through internships, support, breakfasts and meetups and by encouraging them to get involved, contribute code and come to the Summit.

At OpenStack Summit Portland, Rackspace Videographer Jacob Forbis caught up with some of the women who are making OpenStack great and who are working to get more women involved.

The book is gaining traction – it’s marching up the popularity list and is in the top four of all things downloaded from docs.openstack.org.

According to the team of authors, the input from the community and from users was valuable and will help guide its future efforts. The next step is to build a community around the book and enable community members to include their experiences.

In this video (shot and edited by Rackspace Videographer Jacob Forbis) the team discusses OpenStack Operations Guide in more detail.

So where is OpenStack going? Will public and private clouds merge together? What will be the primary use cases? Will OpenStack be as ubiquitous as water?

Tune into this video (shot and edited by Rackspace Videographer Jacob Forbis) and hear about the next decade of OpenStack from Jim Curry, OpenStack Co-Founder and Rackspace Senior Vice President of Private Cloud; Steve Kirk, Senior Director of Global IT for Sony PlayStation Worldwide Studios; and Rob Hirschfeld, Dell Distinguished Engineer.

In this keynote presentation, Rackspace Senior Vice President of Private Cloud and OpenStack Co-Founder Jim Curry outlines how OpenStack has evolved and how the numbers show that it’s making an impact with users.

Curry invited HubSpot CIO Jim O’Neill to the stage to share how the marketing software company leverages OpenStack and Rackspace’s open hybrid cloud technologies to power its environment.

Check out the full keynote presentation here:

Following the keynote, we caught up again with HubSpot’s O’Neill, who was kind enough to run through the full demo of how HubSpot uses the open hybrid cloud:

“OpenStack is being used, and it works,” said Rackspace Senior Vice President of Private Cloud and OpenStack Co-Founder Jim Curry, noting that among the more than 2,400 OpenStack Summit attendees, the majority are users or potential users.

At the Summit Tuesday morning, a number of customers took to the stage to showcase how OpenStack boosts their businesses.

Retail giant Best Buy highlighted how it used OpenStack to build out its new ecommerce platform, which reduced its online product page load times from between seven and 30 seconds to just 2.5 seconds. Joel Crabb, Bestbuy.com chief architect, said that elasticity of the cloud environment enables Bestbuy.com to better accommodate major traffic spikes, which often occur during the bustling holiday shopping season – when traffic can spike to more than eight times normal levels.

And Best Buy’s Continuous Delivery Cloud (CDC) helped Best Buy get away from manual touches and changes and helped it automate its environment. The CDC creates faster development cycles and gives Best Buy’s roughly 40 development teams the ability to build and test more quickly and be more nimble.

Comcast, too, is putting OpenStack to the test. After roughly a year of general investigation, the $60 billion company began building the X1, a service that connects the set top box to the cloud and enables Comcast to offer its customers a more personalized experience through searching and recording capabilities.

In a live demo, Comcast Senior Vice President of Product Engineering Mark Muehl showed how the service provider juggernaut leveraged OpenStack to move intelligence off of the set top box and into the cloud. X1 lets users search for recorded programs, on-demand features, sporting events and more by simply using the remote. Muehl illustrated how Comcast’s OpenStack cloud’s intelligence enhances search capabilities and delivers results to the customer.

“Every keystroke goes into the cloud,” Muehl said.

Previously, Muehl said, Comcast had very little control over what data lived on the set top box. Moving to an OpenStack cloud allows all of the communication between the set top box and the network to go through Comcast’s OpenStack production cloud.

Using the film “Serenity” as an example, Muehl pulled up the information page, which also features Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes ratings, data that he said wouldn’t be available if it relied on the storage capacity of the set top box.

But it isn’t just large companies making waves with OpenStack. Smaller businesses like marketing software upstart HubSpot are finding real value in open clouds. Using OpenStack and Rackspace’s public cloud, private cloud and bare metal, HubSpot is able to achieve true image parity and move workloads between each environment with relative ease. Jim O’Neill, HubSpot CIO, said its applications no longer know nor care where they run. According to O’Neill, HubSpot’s OpenStack-powered hybrid cloud has helped the Boston-based company achieve a four times increase in efficiency processing workloads.

Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack Foundation Executive Director, said these customer stories illustrate how OpenStack has matured and said the time is now for real companies to be using OpenStack to build great things.

“The software that we’re building … it’s going to all of these places and more,” Bryce said. “What this community has done together is nothing short of amazing.”

The Summit’s growth is a signal of the importance of the project – which has grabbed the interest of developers, operators, testers, users and more.

Between OpenStack’s Folsom and Grizzly releases, OpenStack experienced a more than 50 percent growth in contributions. According to some of the businesses closest to the project, OpenStack isn’t just about writing code; it’s about creating an infrastructure everyone can use. It’s about creating something amazing.

In this video, shot by Rackspace Videographer Jacob Forbis, we hear from Rackspace, Dell, Scalr and the OpenStack Foundation about the importance of OpenStack, the growth of OpenStack Summit and how the OpenStack project is powering the future of cloud computing.