What started out as an event catering to developers, quickly shifted to attract early adopters. From there, it ballooned further. Today, OpenStack Summit Portland marks the biggest ever Summit – with an estimated 2,600-plus in attendance. And the best part is, the majority of those people are users; and if they’re not users now, they’re potential users interested in giving OpenStack a shot. These are real companies building their businesses and doing great things on OpenStack, or they are hoping to.

This is huge. It’s a reminder of why we as a community are doing what we’re doing. This is a critical inflection point for OpenStack as a project. As a user and a major developer, Rackspace sees it from both sides.

Throughout the week we’ll hear from real customers using OpenStack in real ways. They like the advantages of an open, community-driven ecosystem. They’re tired of being locked in to closed, proprietary and expensive licensed software contracts.

Consider HubSpot, for example, a Boston-based company that got fed up with the limitations of its large, closed public cloud provider and turned to Rackspace and OpenStack for a hybrid environment that increased its efficiency four times over. This is a company that is breaking glass and embracing the shift to the open cloud. HubSpot has seen open cloud unlock new doors that were closed by proprietary providers. And they’re not only a user of OpenStack, they’re also contributing back to the community. HubSpot is a perfect example of a user that is using OpenStack to drive real business value.

It’s great to hear these user stories and see everyone so excited about OpenStack. For us at Rackspace, we also continue to see successes in running the world’s largest OpenStack-based public cloud.

Here are some stats that show users are really digging into OpenStack:

• We at Rackspace have had more than 549 million API hits across our three regions. That’s a pretty impressive number and we’re happy with the scale.
• We also continue to have high API availability across all three zones with better than 99.94 percent, including scheduled maintenance.
• Version 3 of Rackspace Private Cloud has had more than 8,500 downloads in just six weeks.

And yesterday, we made another step toward getting OpenStack into the hands of more users around the world: we unveiled our plans to build a Rackspace Global Cloud Network, a new program that arms service providers and telcos with an interoperable and linked OpenStack-based public cloud environment.

We’re also currently running Grizzly. And while we’re ahead of the curve there, our code commits percentage continues to decrease as more companies get involved in OpenStack. Forty-five companies contributed to Grizzly and our percentage of code commits was 14 percent, that’s compared to 30 percent in Folsom and 54 percent in Essex.

We’re working hard on OpenStack. We’re ramping up our OpenStack investment and our involvement. We’re all working to improve the user experience. Our reduction in the percentage of committed code is an amazing illustration that no one company is driving OpenStack. This is not about one company winning the OpenStack market; it’s about OpenStack winning the cloud market. And, ultimately, it’s the users who win with an open cloud environment driven by a strong community.

It’s users that are now in the driver’s seat. This has been three years in the making. The time for users on OpenStack is now – and it is awesome.

Today we took another step forward with Rackspace Private Cloud that will simplify running an open cloud in your data center. We’ve added a new set of features to the free, open source Rackspace Private Cloud Software, including an advanced operations fabric called OpenCenter. This is our third software update to Rackspace Private Cloud in just over six months.

OpenCenter is a centralized system that automates and simplifies the operational activities required to deploy, manage and maintain private clouds. Deploying new features is as simple as drag-and-drop. The intuitive new interface will lay the groundwork for you to leverage the expertise we’ve built around continuous integration and deployment in the public cloud in your own data center and have it backed by our award-winning Fanatical Support.

OpenCenter makes it easier than ever to run open clouds at scale in your enterprise’s data center. OpenCenter also leads to improved uptime by offering API or point-and-click deployment and management of high availability environments for OpenStack controller nodes.

In addition to the inclusion of OpenCenter, the latest Rackspace Private Cloud Software update allows you to choose which host operating system you use. You can select Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS in your Rackspace Private Cloud deployment. Customers have always had the freedom to run their guest operating system of choice in Rackspace Private Cloud.

And this is just the beginning of what we will work on delivering in 2013. This year we will continue to add new capabilities to our open cloud portfolio that will give you the power to have a true cloud anywhere experience. Our engineering teams are hard at work to help customers take advantage of:

• Continuous integration and delivery: Take advantage of continuously developed, tested, integrated and deployed innovations and improvements to Rackspace Private Cloud. You will receive access to bug fixes, patches, upgrades and features as they become available in near real-time, or at whatever pace you choose.
• Workload portability:Seamlessly move and scale workloads between Rackspace public and private clouds transparently. To put it more simply: build in either, run in either – with no application conversion or redesign.
• Network interoperability: Create a true hybrid or multi-zone cloud that uses a single software-defined network.

With our Private Cloud Software including OpenCenter, we enable you to become a service provider in your own data center and run like Rackspace. The latest software features, combined with our training, support and operations expertise around our OpenStack-powered Private Cloud, help organizations realize the efficiencies and true value of the cloud. Since Rackspace Private Cloud Software launched in August 2012, we’ve offered Private Cloud expertise, support and operations to more than 100 organizations, including 19 of the Fortune 100.

You can leverage our support as needed, or allow us to completely run your private cloud environment, either on or off-premise. We’re experts at building and running massive clouds at scale – we’re founders of OpenStack and run the largest OpenStack-powered public cloud in the world. You want your cloud to just work. We’ll take care of your cloud for you so you can focus on your business.

Start building your private cloud today. Download the free, open source Rackspace Private Cloud Software including OpenCenter and have a Private Cloud powered by OpenStack up and running in less than an hour: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/private/

For a deeper technical drill-down into OpenCenter and high availability, check out the Rackspace DevOps Blog.

At Rackspace, we are not simply changing the consumption model of public clouds by providing you complete infrastructure isolation; we go above and beyond with Fanatical Support, offering companies our operational and support expertise, even for private clouds in your facilities. Leaving cloud operations to Rackspace allows IT organizations to focus “up the stack” on applications that truly create competitive advantage for their business units.

And enterprises are ready: According to the latest Forrester Wave report, (The Forrester Wave™: Hosted Private Cloud, Q1 2013), this year 46 percent of enterprises are prioritizing investments in private cloud, and more than half of these investments will go to private cloud deployments in their own data centers. The great news is that Rackspace’s new business model accommodates private cloud deployments anywhere in the world: our data centers and your data centers, all backed by Fanatical Support.

Forrester has recognized our industry-changing efforts by naming Rackspace a top performer in the emerging private cloud market. At Rackspace, we leverage our experience in hosting and cloud to create a compelling product offering, a strong hybrid strategy and a robust third-party ecosystem.

“Rackspace brings its experience from the hosting and public cloud space to this market, giving it significant geographic presence, a reputation for fantastic customer support, and a large existing customer base from which to draw,” Forrester’s private cloud lead, Lauren E. Nelson, wrote in the report.

While we are happy to be recognized early during our open cloud journey, today marks just the beginning of the achievements we will make in our industry. Our goal is to take the pain out of private clouds, so we’ll offer our cloud expertise to help companies design, deploy, operate and continuously update their private cloud, allowing them to take full advantage of the rapid, open source innovation of the open cloud coupled with our Fanatical Support.

Last year we introduced our Rackspace Private Cloud Software, which makes it easy for companies to deploy a Rackspace Private Cloud anywhere they choose. Our software is powered by OpenStack, so it is fully open source and completely free. After you deploy your private cloud using our software, you can choose to either run it yourself or to have the cloud experts at Rackspace run it for you.

Rackspace Private Cloud Software has been downloaded thousands of times, in hundreds of countries, and on all seven continents – yes, even Antarctica! Fortune 100 companies, colleges, universities and enterprises are taking advantage of our open cloud.

We believe winning in the cloud requires great software, but in the end, it’s our operational and support expertise that will enable a true cloud service model. Our journey to the open cloud is well under way, and Rackspace Private Cloud is a key component of our success.

We would like to thank Forrester and our customers for their confidence in our new model. This is just the tip of the iceberg!

It’s been an incredible two and a half years since we launched OpenStack, but let’s take a quick look back and see how we got here.

Most are aware of how Rackspace and NASA joined forces to create an open source cloud operating system. In 2010, the market was looking for alternatives to Amazon’s proprietary public cloud and VMware’s virtualization solutions. Rackspace, as a provider, was looking for scalable technology on which to base our public cloud. At that time, there were very few choices, and the choices that existed weren’t going to meet our needs. There was no choice. All we had were proprietary and/or licensed solutions that would cause customers to be locked into the technology. At Rackspace, our legacy technology was proprietary, too. When we acquired Slicehost to power our first generation of Cloud Servers, we made some code changes, and we had our own APIs and proprietary technology.

We had seen how successful Linux was and we wanted to offer our customers open standards and enable choice. At Rackspace, our intent was that we would differentiate ourselves based on our service and support of those technologies. So we created rCloud – an early iteration of OpenStack, prior to NASA joining. But that original rCloud introductory presentation – the one we shared with folks thinking of joining the initiative – outlined some ambitious goals; some that we’ve already surpassed just two and a half years later.

Looking back now, the summary slide from the rCloud presentation looks like a to-do list: Release our cloud software as open source projects? Check! Run the open source stack in production? Check! Dedicate resources like developers, code and marketing? Check! Check! Check!

And the reasons we did it are still what drive the OpenStack project today. We wanted to accelerate the pace of innovation through collaboration; drive standards through ubiquity to accelerate adoption; eliminate the fear of lock in; open up a closed and fragmented market; and enable public, private and hybrid cloud interoperability with an open stack.

The original note got a great response, but at the same time some folks from NASA released some compute code that also looked really good. We were really excited – here was another company, with a desire to build open source clouds and bring the community to its cause, which seemed to think like we did. It was an organization that had a great brand and major recognition. So, I struck up a conversation with Chris Kemp, then at NASA, now CEO of Nebula.

My email was quick and to the point:

“I run corporate development at Rackspace, and am very interested in talking with your team about Nebula. Confidentially, we are in the process of open sourcing our cloud stack and I am interested in seeing if there might be some synergies/opportunities for the two projects to work together. Would it be possible to setup some time to discuss with your team?”

This is how rCloud evolved into OpenStack – a brief email sent on a Friday morning got the ball rolling. A few days later we got together on the phone, and a few days after that we got together in person. An amazing thing happened during those meetings – as I believe it was during those meetings that the technical meritocracy of our project was born even before it started. Rackspace had Swift code already running in production. The NASA team was building something similar, and rather than argue over who had the better widget, they took our code. And NASA had just started architecting Nova, with only a thousand or so proof of concept lines written. We had started a similar process for compute, but theirs looked good, so we decided to abandon our efforts and use theirs. So OpenStack was born not just with the talking points we all know today, but with actual give and take between the two founders based on technical meritocracy. Amazingly, we agreed on the rest of the principles without debate, and they stuck.

The one thing that didn’t really stick was the name. Deciding on the name was a major debate. I spent more time coming up with names for OpenStack than with the names of my children. rCloud turned into Sangria, CodeRed turned into CloudOS and so on. I think OpenStack had more names than James Bond had love interests. Maybe we should’ve just called it 007. Other ill-fated monikers included Cloudbase, Cloudcontrol, Cloudware, CloudCommander and CloudManager. We even once had an OpenStack logo that had a stack of pancakes.

Luckily we settled on OpenStack, and I think it represents the project very well. I also couldn’t imagine saying that the Rackspace Cloud is powered by CloudCommander. It doesn’t have the same ring to it.

It’s incredible to look back now and see the humble beginnings of a project that turned the IT and cloud worlds on their ears. In just a short time we’ve gone from arguing about names to becoming a full-fledged community run by an independent foundation. The community itself comprises 6,695 people from 87 different countries at time of this blog, and it’s continuing to grow.

Now OpenStack powers not only Rackspace’s public cloud and suite of cloud products, but also our Rackspace Private Cloud Software (Alamo), which delivers an OpenStack-powered private cloud in just minutes. Really, it’s that simple: You can download it for free, enter some IPs and basic credentials, go get a cup of coffee and come back to a fully-configured private cloud.

It’s a step toward true IT-as-a-Service; IT delivered seamlessly that doesn’t require manual updates or upgrades. It just works. You don’t have to worry about the hardware, the host OS, hypervisors or any other component. Alamo is a step in that direction. It’s already been downloaded in roughly 150 countries on all seven continents; by just over a quarter of the Fortune 100 and more than 100 colleges, universities and research centers.

Rackspace Private Cloud Software eliminates the headache of having to worry about dozens of different configurations. We provide an open cloud environment that marries the speed and scalability of our OpenStack-based public cloud with the control and reliability of a private, dedicated cloud environment. This delivers on another one of our promises: the ability to deploy an open cloud anywhere, whether it’s in our data center, your data center or in another data center altogether. It fulfills the vision of having OpenStack everywhere. I like to say “my place, or yours?” It’s in public and private clouds, it’s in your data center, our data centers or in a co-lo facility and you can run like Rackspace and run like an enterprise.

It’s true IT-as-a-Service for customers. Customers deploying OpenStack have the option of having Rackspace support the software and actually run the environment for them, meaning that the same teams that operate our cloud can do the same for yours: monitor it and respond to events; patch it; upgrade it with every new build; plan for capacity additions; deploy best practices; test it and more. Basically, we take care of everything for you. You get an API and an infrastructure that just works. It’s everything you get from a public cloud, but delivered as a private cloud in your data center. You then can truly free resources from working on commodity infrastructure and instead work on the applications that sit on top – the parts that really differentiate your business.

That’s where we are today. It’s incredibly impressive to see how far OpenStack has come since we first started with rCloud, Sangria and a stack of pancakes almost three years ago. I am both proud and humbled to have been involved since the first email was sent, and I’m even more excited about what’s coming in the future.

We bet our company on OpenStack; and I can’t think of a better bet.

So what about Rackspace’s OpenStack offerings?

We support customers’ OpenStack private clouds in any data center they want, not just in Rackspace facilities. That means any facility, in any country, anywhere in the world. When we launched our offer in late 2011, we immediately saw strong interest from companies and institutions in the Australian market. Earlier this year we started helping Australian companies and institutions with OpenStack private clouds, and delivered our OpenStack training program to Aussies eager to get up to speed on the project. The market response isn’t surprising given the strong presence of OpenStack in the market already. Companies like Aptira and projects like NeCTAR have led the way. We are now excited to up our presence in the country as well.

Australians interested in having Rackspace support their OpenStack private cloud efforts now have several options:

1. Download the Rackspace Private Cloud Software powered by OpenStack (code-named “Alamo”) and deploy a real and fully open cloud within an hour. It’s 100 percent open source; 100 percent based on community OpenStack; and 100 percent free. There is nothing to lock you into Rackspace or the software. Use it on your own, or call us and add support.
2. Deploy your Rackspace Private Cloud in our new Sydney data center later this year, and have us manage your entire infrastructure – your hardware, network, etc., in addition to your OpenStack cloud. Learn what Fanatical Support is all about!
3. Build a hybrid infrastructure – run it in your DC and our DC; and let Rackspace help you with all of it.
4. Call us about private training on OpenStack, or look for public courses in Australia in the coming months.

I am thrilled to be making this commitment to the Australian market, and look forward to getting know the community there even better in the coming years.

Jim Curry
@jimcurry

And today, with the launch of Rackspace Private Cloud Software powered by OpenStack (code-named “Alamo”), we’ve done just that. We’ve made it quick and easy to deploy an OpenStack-powered cloud anywhere with packaged and tested software that customers can download and install, that lets them run an OpenStack-based private cloud in minutes. The cloud is fully configured and ready to use either in your data center or in ours on gear hosted by us. And the best part: the software is free; you can rapidly spin up and use an OpenStack-based Rackspace Private Cloud – a cloud that runs the same software that Rackspace uses to power our public and private clouds — at no cost.

Alamo gives our customers what they’ve been asking for; a simple way to start using OpenStack today, without the added headache of having to worry about dozens of different configurations. They don’t need to be OpenStack or cloud experts. We’re giving them an open cloud environment that marries the speed and scalability of our OpenStack-based public cloud with the control and reliability of a private, dedicated cloud environment. It delivers on our promise to offer our customers the ability to deploy a cloud anywhere. It’s not a separate distribution so you don’t have to worry about a branching dead-end.

The Alamo software allows companies of any size to use our open cloud technology to leverage cloud computing in whatever environment they want. It rounds out the Rackspace open cloud portfolio: we now offer truly open public and private cloud solutions powered by OpenStack. Because it’s open, customers have choice and control without the risk of technology and vendor lock-in that comes with proprietary clouds and hefty software licenses.  It’s the easiest way to start using OpenStack.

And on top of Alamo we’re offering customers our award winning Fanatical Support, whether the cloud is in our data center or yours. Companies running the software have free access to support forums and can purchase Escalation Support, which includes 24×7 ticket and phone support, from Rackspace.

The configuration includes the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS host operating system, a KVM hypervisor and the 100 percent open source Essex release of OpenStack, which includes features such as Compute, Images, Authentication and Dashboard. To streamline the deployment, we have designed the installer for private clouds of up to 20 nodes. Our software provides a platform to begin using OpenStack quickly and then scale out resources to support a larger private cloud environment. This is a great opportunity to leverage Rackspace for cloud management best practices.

And this is just the beginning. In coming months you can expect tighter interoperability with our public cloud and more options for Fanatical Support in your private cloud environments. Future versions of the software will also tie into other OpenStack projects and deliver functionality, including better Management and Monitoring, Volume and Block Storage, Software Defined Networking, High Availability and integration with the new Rackspace Cloud Control Panel.

So download the software and get started with Alamo, Rackspace’s Private Cloud Software. We’re here to answer any questions you may have.

We’re thrilled that in two years OpenStack has been put into a host of production environments; is being used by some of the world’s largest companies; and has attracted some of the biggest technology names to drive the community effort. And we plan to continue this trajectory. Two years has also shown us that developing in the open is tough. It has challenges. There are now more users solving much harder problems, and they’re relying on us to help them do that.

The first two years were great, but let’s look to the future and where OpenStack goes from here.

OpenStack’s first two years focused heavily on its development. Now it’s time to think about the users; the customers who will leverage OpenStack. In the next two years and beyond, we plan to focus on what cloud customers need. They need ease of deployment, simple upgrades from one release to the next, tight management capabilities and more. We’ve laid the foundation for the open cloud, now let’s make it easier to use. At Rackspace, we’ll be the proof-point; we’re running the world’s largest OpenStack-based public cloud. That means OpenStack powers the second largest public cloud in the world. And come August 1, when Rackspace officially launches its open cloud portfolio, OpenStack will land in more customer environments than ever before.

As cloud users take the spotlight in the future of the open cloud and OpenStack, it’s also imperative that interoperability shares that spotlight. Interoperability is a core tenant of OpenStack. As vendors, customers and others leverage OpenStack we must be sure that applications will be portable across all of these environments. The open cloud is about choice and portability; the proprietary clouds are closed. It is the antithesis of lock-in against closed-cloud antagonists.

OpenStack will soon shift to the control of the community. This will serve as a rallying call for all stakeholders. We’ve seen proof that single vendor and proprietary projects have the ability to move quickly in the short term, but the wisdom and influence of a bigger team produces the best long term results. This is evident in the throw down between Android and the iPhone; it was never a question of if Android would win, it was a question of when. Same goes for OpenStack. But to get to that point and make OpenStack the Android of the cloud, we have to make it feel and act more like a product and less about the cool features – but the features sure are great, and they’re getting better!

Personally, I would like to thank all of the individuals, companies and others who have pushed OpenStack over many goal lines in just two years. It’s been a labor of love for a lot of us, and to see it turn two makes myself and many others extremely proud. But this major milestone is no time to rest on our laurels.

The mission of the OpenStack Foundation will be to define exactly what we want to build together and to innovate and execute. And the community continues to make great strides. There has been an explosive cadence of contributions that has accelerated the pace of innovation.

For Rackspace’s part, we will continue to invest in OpenStack in both our public cloud and private cloud. And OpenStack will not just be in our own data centers, but in our customers’ data centers, colocation facilities or any combination of them. Why?  Because the demand is real. Just ask anyone in the ecosystem – the developers, contributors, community members and customers. Every IT manager who is building out a cloud infrastructure strategy for the coming decade is looking at OpenStack. Period. Let’s serve our customers. And let’s serve them well.

For more on OpenStack’s first two years, check out this infographic that gives a by-the-numbers look at OpenStack.

Today, the OpenStack community took a huge step toward the creation of the Foundation. Nineteen companies including AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE, Cisco, ClearPath, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, ITRI, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing and Yahoo! announced their intent to become Platinum or Gold members of the Foundation based on the mission and framework published to date. The list is impressive. Each of these companies contributed to the recent “Essex” release, and each is committed to providing substantial resources to further the mission of the overall OpenStack community.  Some of them have been involved since the beginning and some are relatively new. But most importantly they are all true believers in the mission of OpenStack – to build the world’s leading open cloud operating system.

These companies all believe in preserving the truly collaborative nature of the OpenStack project. They want to codify a structure that maintains the technical meritocracy that has governed the open design and development process since we launched in 2010, while expanding the commitment to extensive community building. They want to make the Foundation a body that represents the three key constituencies in the OpenStack community: the developers (and other technical contributors), the users and the ecosystem of companies building solutions on OpenStack.

Much will be written about the OpenStack Foundation. My advice – read the details for yourself. Here are what I see as the highlights:

• OpenStack is and has always been licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.  We believe that this is key to enabling true collaboration.

• The three key constituencies in the OpenStack community – the developers, the users and the commercial entities — will be represented in the governance structure.

• When it comes to building the project (i.e. writing code), technical meritocracy has ALWAYS reigned – this is not a new development with the move to a Foundation. The contributors to each of the sub-projects elect the project technical leads who drive the project day to day. The developers build what they believe is critical to build, without interference.  The Foundation will enshrine this principle.

• With the formation of the Foundation, we are investing in community building activities, and continuing to build a broad base of commercial support.  The Foundation will focus on items such as trademark protection, furthering OpenStack’s mission and increasing the user base. And there is now a group of companies committed to funding it.

• Yes, this is a new structure. But we took the best of what worked for other open source projects, measured that against the needs of the OpenStack community and proposed a solution that we believe works; one that we are confident the vast majority of the community will support.

I am really proud to be associated with such an amazing community of individuals and companies focused on the mission of collaboratively building an open cloud operating system. We have much work to do still, but the pace will now quicken to an expected launch in the third quarter.

Many thanks to all of the companies and individuals who have made OpenStack into what it is today!

Jim

Essex also marks a significant expansion in community participation.  When the project launched in 2010, only two organizations – NASA and Rackspace – contributed to its development.  With the Essex release, more than 200 developers from 55 different companies contributed.  More evidence that this isn’t simply an open source software project, but an actual movement!

Here is a quick look at some of the new capabilities highlighted in this release:

• OpenStack Compute (“Nova”) now has enhanced feature parity amongst hypervisors, live migration with multi host-networking, better support for high performance computing (HPC) and support for additional block storage solutions.

• OpenStack Storage (“Swift”) brings compliance and data security enhancements, increased protection from data corruption, more sophisticated disaster recovery capability and various enhancements for service providers.

• Essex also introduced two new projects – OpenStack Dashboard (“Horizon”) and OpenStack Identity (“Keystone”).  Dashboard is a control panel for both adminstrators and users that provides plug-in support for additional applications such as monitoring.  Identity provides a unified authentication and identity management capability for all of the OpenStack services.

We now start the march to the “Folsom” release this fall.  A key component that is expected to be included in Folsom is project “Quantum.” which begins to deliver the capability for a truly virtualized network.  It is currently being incubated by the community and while not a part of this release, it is available to anyone who wants to use it today.  Rackspace is currently running Quantum as part of its private beta of our next generation cloud based on OpenStack.

Beginning on April 16, the OpenStack technical community will get together at the OpenStack Design Summit to begin plotting out the plans for Folsom and beyond.  We expect more than 400 developers and key contributors from throughout the world to attend.  That will be followed by the OpenStack Conference starting on April 19 where more than 800 attendees are expected to hear users share their stories; the project’s technology leaders discuss the community’s vision; and the many and varied OpenStack ecosystem companies discuss the solutions they are bringing to market for their customers.  Most importantly, the community will continue to get together under one roof and get to simply debate and bond.

I would like to thank the many individuals and companies who made this release happen.  The developers, architects, product managers, marketers, technical writers and anyone else who devoted their time and energy to our cause are the reason OpenStack exists.  Our project is a remarkable showcase of collaboration with which I am very proud to be associated.

Last fall, we announced Rackspace Cloud:  Private Edition.  It’s a long name and doesn’t roll off the tongue, but it was meant to convey a simple concept:  Rackspace will run a cloud for you anywhere – in our datacenters, in a customer’s datacenter, in a colocation facility, or in any combination.  It’s the ultimate managed private cloud –- you don’t have to worry about your cloud because we will take care of it for you.

To be clear, this is NOT a software offering:  this is world-class operations and support.  We use OpenStack as the core component of our offering, but there is nothing unique about what we deploy.  Today, it’s based on our own packaging of the code at openstack.org, but longer term it will include third-party distributions as well (see further down).  What customers are buying is Rackspace’s unrivaled expertise in operating clouds.  If for some reason a customer no longer needs our expertise, they can keep the technology and go.  This is the epitome of no vendor lock-in.  This is why we started OpenStack: the core technology is a commodity, but our Fanatical Support is not.

If a customer needs the OpenStack technology and wants to run it themselves, there are great options today.  The first is as easy as getting the code from openstack.org.  The second would be choosing one of the many OpenStack-based distributions, operating systems, or software solutions from companies such as Canonical, Piston, Nebula, StackOps, Cloudscaling, or many others.  These companies provide innovative and opinionated technology around OpenStack, and we look forward to partnering with them in the future.  They all provide OpenStack-based engines for powering clouds.  But choosing this route does not solve the problem of operating your cloud – it’s just the software piece of it.  You still need to add new employees, train your existing ones, or to bring on consultants with the relevant skills.  But if you want someone to operate and support your entire cloud environment for you, then you want Rackspace.  We do support better than anyone – it’s in our DNA.  Or put another way – we take the engine and turn OpenStack into a chauffeured car service for our customers.

Since 1998, Rackspace has run customers’ IT environments for them.  Not just the operating system, but everything up to the application layer (and we are starting to do that, too).  We have traditionally based our solutions on industry standard offerings like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows.  But customers don’t come to us because we offer this software or because there is anything unique about the OS flavors we provide.  They choose us because we give them Fanatical Support and assure the maximum uptime for their environments.

This is exactly what we are doing today with Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition, but with one major change: we are providing this support to environments that run in Rackspace datacenters as well as to those that do not.  This is a first for our company.

So what does Rackspace’s Fanatical Support on an OpenStack-based cloud look like?  Here it is at a high level:

1. You get 24/7/365 access to a support team that is both an expert on the solution as well as an expert on YOUR environment.  You can pick up the phone and call or submit a ticket anytime, for anything.  You know your Racker support team’s names, and they know yours.  Our main goal is to keep your environment up and running.

2. It’s as much of a “black box” as you want it to be.  We can handle all the pieces behind the scenes while you simply interact with it via the APIs, administrator control panel or user control panel.  Or you can get under the hood and engage with us to make your cloud operate as you want it.

3. We cover everything from hardware up to the guests.  Our goal is to make the cloud work.  There’s no need to determine if it’s a software or hardware issue, and who is responsible for it.  If it breaks, we fix it. Period.

4. You get access to engineering expertise as well.  We have many of the original developers on the OpenStack project, and everyone on our team is a major contributor to the project.  We know OpenStack.  Want us to develop a new feature for an upcoming release?  No problem.  Need a bug fixed?  We got it.  We can handle all issues up through software engineering.  We combine great operational expertise and traditional software support into one package.

5. Rackspace runs the world’s No. 2 public cloud.  We also run a lot of private clouds.  We have developed the tools to operate and support clouds well. And we have a vast team of experts at the controls.  We have the expertise to know how to do this and do it right.

6. We keep you up to date with the latest innovations in OpenStack.  We offer customers the ability to have their environments upgraded with each major project release.  So you don’t have to worry about when to jump into OpenStack with both feet – we make upgrading easy.

7. We really test this stuff.  Rackspace maintains its own labs for testing our private cloud reference architectures, and we actively collaborate with a variety of hardware and software partners to assure their stuff works.  We also actively lead community testing efforts, and maintain our own continuous integration environment internally.

8. We are committed to training our customers and the general public.  We run public and private training classes on how we deploy and operate OpenStack.  You learn everything about what we do with the technology.  To date, we have delivered these classes in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia, and we will continue to expand through certified partners.

9. We are a $1 billion-plus global company with presence in North America, Europe and Asia.  We are closing in on 200,000 customers who have trusted us with their mission critical stuff.  We are here for the long haul.

That is where we are today, but let’s look to the future…

We are rapidly developing the capability to easily run “cloud” wherever a customer wants.  Forget whether it’s public or private.  Imagine being able to connect an OpenStack-based private cloud seamlessly to our OpenStack-based public cloud.  Take it further and connect your dedicated resources – compute, storage and network.  From there you’ll be able to seamlessly manage it all through a fully integrated control panel.  Rackspace will provide fully integrated monitoring, patching, ticketing and more from a single account team.  This is where we are headed…and it starts now.  (we are hiring too!)

We will have much more to say about our progress in the coming months.

Jim Curry, General Manager and Vice President, Rackspace Cloud Builders

@jimcurry