Rackspace Developer Support marks the first time we will officially support your application code. When you’re programming your application to interact with the Rackspace Cloud powered by OpenStack, we want to make sure it is as easy as possible. We offer Software Development Kits for the world’s most popular programming languages. Right now, this includes PHP, Java, Python, Ruby and .Net. We are also working on node.js, which we hope to release soon.

Providing you a simple and strong SDK is only part of the puzzle to make your life easier. The other piece is to make sure you have Fanatical Support when you use them. Therefore, when you or your developer are writing code against our APIs or SDKs and you have a question, let us know. We’ll give you answers and even take a look at the code you’ve written around the use of the APIs or SDKs. If the problem is in your application code, we’ll even help you fix it. As the first step, stop by developer.rackspace.com for documentation and answers to a lot of your questions.

With the launch of this service, you will be able to contact Rackspace and reach API and SDK experts for the following:

• Analysis and optimization of where your code interacts with our APIs, SDKs, and infrastructure
• Help with identification and resolution of any API or SDK coding issues
• Advice on API usage, SDKs, architecture and best practices

Here are some examples of ways you could use Rackspace Developer Support:

• When you want to automatically create servers based on your application’s logic
• When an application on your dedicated configuration needs to scale out into the cloud when it reaches certain thresholds
• When you need a custom monitoring script to check the status of MySQL replication
• When you want to automate DNS failover between data centers
• When you want your app to automatically provision and attach, or detach, Cloud Block Storage volumes to a Cloud Server as the application storage needs change
• When you want to programmatically grant access to a user of a Cloud Database instance

As a developer, when you take our SDKs and add Rackspace Developer Support, you get a powerful combination that will make sure you don’t get stuck. You can focus on your app’s exciting core functionality instead of your app’s boring infrastructure code.

We are excited to extend Fanatical Support to help make your cloud automation ideas a reality. And, best of all, Developer Support is free for customers of all service levels! To use it, just contact Rackspace and we will get you in contact with a Racker that will be able to help.

What is ObjectRocket? It’s a MongoDB database as a service that is highly available, automatically sharded and lightning fast – 10 times faster than its leading competitors, according to our internal benchmarking tests.

Adding ObjectRocket to the Rackspace family deepens our open cloud mission and helps us broaden our product portfolio to give our customers what they’ve been asking for: a NoSQL database in the cloud that makes application development easier.

We’re excited about acquiring ObjectRocket and building an offer around MongoDB. Here’s why:

1. MongoDB is another open ingredient for the Rackspace Cloud

There is no question that open source technologies drive greater innovation. The world relies on open technologies to build the next generation of applications, and MongoDB is a key tool in that toolkit. MongoDB and other open technologies are making a huge difference in the market and are critical components of our open cloud strategy. These open technologies will play a major role in our support of building open, next generation data stores versus building proprietary ones.

Much like we did with OpenStack, we will build features that are relevant to our customers and push them out to the community. We want the MongoDB community to grow, and our success will be measured by how we help foster that growth.

2. MongoDB represents the perfect opportunity for Fanatical Support

MongoDB is easy to get started, but complex to manage and scale. When I started at Rackspace 12 years ago, the LAMP stack was hard. Today, the cloud is hard – and databases in the cloud are even harder. Databases are the core of any application and that makes our expertise and Fanatical Support even more critical.

Now more than ever, Fanatical Support is about combining technology and human capital to deliver a world-class customer outcome. ObjectRocket is built on those same principles. ObjectRocket makes it easy to deploy and manage instances, and offers every customer 24x7x365 support. Sound familiar?

The experience of the team is also critical. Chris, Erik and Kenny have deployed giant databases for web-scale companies like PayPal and eBay. Combined, they have more than 50 years of experience. Our customers can expect us to deliver deep expertise in MongoDB.

3. MongoDB is the de facto choice for NoSQL applications

Our customers want MongoDB. It is the No. 1 requested previously unsupported database. MongoDB is seeing widespread adoption by developers because it is super easy get started and to use, and it boosts productivity. Further, MongoDB has removed the schema barrier, which allows developers to focus on building applications, not databases. It also has widespread support for every language we see being relevant to the future of the web – C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Node.js, Objective-C and Scala, just to name a few. These reasons drive MongoDB adoption today and have pushed MongoDB to quickly become the database of choice for non-relational applications. MongoDB is here to stay.

We’re thrilled to welcome ObjectRocket to the Rackspace family.

ObjectRocket’s MongoDB will be available in our Chicago data center in early March and will soon be integrated deeply into our entire open cloud portfolio. Click here to learn more: http://www.rackspace.com/blog/objectrocket-acquisition-faq/.

Along with that move, we have launched and are soon to launch a host of new products and services that will change how our customers use the cloud.

This is the next evolution of the Rackspace Cloud. It’s new and exciting, and it adheres to the same beliefs and principles that have guided our approach to hosting and cloud computing since we first entered the cloud market with Mosso more than five years ago. Simply put, those principles are:

1. We believe in building products and services on open technologies that create real choice for our customers
2. We strive to create great service experiences around those technologies – Fanatical Support, as we call it — that give our customers not only instant access to expert Rackers, but products and services that simplify the use and management of modern computing

We have doubled down on each of these beliefs to deliver Fanatical Support on the open cloud to our customers.

The Rackspace Cloud is now built on OpenStack. As a founder of the effort, we have bet our company on this open source initiative. And we are thrilled with how the industry has embraced it. Now, the second largest cloud in the world is running OpenStack. For you, our customers, this means that you are on a truly open platform. The same code that we run, you can run. So can our competitors. This is real choice and gives our customers control. We view cloud computing as an integrated component to modern application development, and the risk of lock-in is undeniable. The open Rackspace Cloud offers true choice and portability, making lock-in a thing of the past.

The OpenStack codebase is still in its early stages, so it’s changing; and we’re committed to working with the community to ensure interoperability as broadly as possible across the OpenStack ecosystem. We are dedicated to working with the community on all major technologies and interfaces. The outcome will be more choice for our customers.

Another key advantage of running our cloud on OpenStack – and one of its most valuable benefits – is the pace of innovation this open ecosystem will drive. It has taken less than two years to get OpenStack to its current state and to shift our business onto it. The huge community effort advancing the codebase and OpenStack’s many projects guarantees rapid advancement in the future. We have invested incredible engineering energy into a continuous integration system that ensures we remain no more than two weeks off the OpenStack trunk – meaning you get the full benefit of open innovation as soon as it happens.

Rapid innovation is a major theme for Rackspace in this new open cloud era. We just launched our new generation of Cloud Servers, which delivers full IPv6, enhanced scalability and improved performance and stability; and Cloud Databases, a new high performance MySQL database service that introduces automated management of common database tasks.

We also just launched our new Control Panel, which we are especially proud of. The enhanced Control Panel offers new DNS controls as well as management tools like tagging, filtering and searching. It is built on the technology we acquired from Cloudkick and the passion of those Rackers. The Control Panel delivers a powerful, cutting edge management interface with speed and simplicity at the heart of the design. This is just the beginning. We plan to add new services; tie products together; automate tasks; and, frankly, make your life easier. And we want your feedback on it as we advance.

You can expect to see frequent product advances going forward. Security, storage and advanced monitoring and management are just around the corner. And we’re just getting started. I think you will be inspired by all of the great things coming your way and the pace at which they arrive.

And, of course, layered on top of all of these products is our trademark Fanatical Support. We have built our business on open technologies, and creating the best customer experience is how we will continue to earn your business every day. Fanatical Support on the open cloud begins and ends with passionate Rackers backing up these new, innovative products.

Rackspace is excited about this business transformation and the promise of these game-changing new technologies. We have prepared for months to get ready. We know that it all won’t go perfectly; transitioning platforms is never perfect. When we don’t get it right, we will be transparent and honest with you. And we will make it right. That is our promise. We know that the experience ahead will be great for our customers.

We thank you for the trust you put in us every day. It is a responsibility we do not take lightly. The true power of cloud computing is just emerging. It is our goal to make it a powerful weapon for your business. We are here to help. We hope you are as excited about the open cloud and its future as we are.

Modern applications are not run “on” the cloud, but rather are built into it. The cloud is now part of the application stack. Think of a cloud data center as a giant computer, with cloud software serving as its operating system. Applications are fused to that cloud software. This is a colossal difference compared to previous models where the infrastructure and applications were independent of each other. Now they’re welded together. They’re one.

This tight coupling between the apps and infrastructure is one of the most powerful benefits of the new computing paradigm. It’s what gives the cloud its agility and its elasticity. It introduces lightening fast access to services and the ability for small teams to build massive and scalable apps. It unlocks an entirely new development stack that makes it easier to build, deploy and maintain applications.

But with these rewards come certain risks.

Because the infrastructure and the applications become dependent upon each other, vendor lock-in becomes a real danger. The deeper your applications become ingrained in the cloud, the more difficult it can be to get them out should you decide to switch providers. This is especially true when using proprietary cloud providers. For basic operations and simple applications, the risk of lock-in isn’t too big. But when more complex services and components are used, lock-in can become very costly and constraining. It’s something you might not realize is happening until it’s too late.

Lock-in doesn’t occur overnight; it creeps in. It starts when you pick a vendor’s platform. And once data is added to the platform, it becomes more ingrained. API integration complicates things further. Apps are now directing the cloud and expecting certain responses. Finally, with deeper integration comes the use of other proprietary features and services offered by the cloud provider causing applications and the infrastructure to become truly fused into one stack.

This becomes a major issue if you want features your cloud provider doesn’t offer; you want to do business in regions or countries that it doesn’t serve; or you want to add a level of customization. In the proprietary cloud model, you’re not going anywhere.

This is one of the reasons we founded OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system. All of the OpenStack code, from API to source, is available to all, creating the possibility for real interoperability. OpenStack thwarts lock-in, making it easy to separate applications from the infrastructure and move from one cloud to another. OpenStack offers choice in how and where you deploy, what features you add and what partners you integrate while delivering a cloud that is open and scalable from end to end. You’ll be hearing a lot more about OpenStack in coming weeks. In August, OpenStack will become the engine of our public cloud. And the Open Cloud that we’re building at Rackspace is backed by our trademark Fanatical Support.

The cloud is generating incredible advancements and its power is undeniable. Be careful, though, not to let the characteristics that drew you to the cloud lock you into a single provider.

We hope you’ll join us in the Open Cloud.

You can learn more at OpenStack.com, and at the website of Rackspace: The Open Cloud Company.

It’s amazing that Om [Malik, GigaOm Founder] has been gathering us here for five years to talk about the cloud and its impact on technology. It’s been an amazing five years. What I want to talk about today for a few minutes is the next five years, which I think is going to be radically different than the first five years. But, let’s take a minute to celebrate the innovation that’s been driven by the cloud.

Here’s an example my mom can relate to, which has been very hard to find over the last few years. But just a few years ago, five years ago, when we started getting together, if she wanted to rent a movie or buy a movie, she had to get in the car and go down to Blockbuster. Or ask Netflix to send a DVD through the mail — took a couple days. Today, five short years later, there are many services where you can go buy or rent movies and do it on demand, instantly. This is an incredible advance.

This is what the promise of the cloud has been; speed and choice. And it’s changing every aspect of our lives. There are thousands and thousands of consumer services and many being planned and built today. Nothing is going to be left untouched.

Of course, what we talk about here at Structure are the underlying cloud platforms that power these consumer services, and there have been incredible advances there as well. In fact, we’ve spent the last five years talking about how instant computing has changed everything in the IT world. The ability to spin up and spin down, to scale and demand has changed everything. Choice, that has not been nearly as robust. And look, let’s give Amazon their due. They’ve been incredible pioneers in the space and they’ve built a dominant computing platform.

Let’s go back to our movie services example to show it. Netflix has been an incredible early adopter and evangelist for the cloud and what it can do for a business. But it says a lot about the state of choice when they’re evangelizing one of their most ruthless competitors.

So they’re a smart company. [Netflix Cloud Architect]Adrian Cockcroft, who I can see in the audience, loves the power of the cloud, wants to continue to bet the company on the cloud. And it’s the right thing to do. But he also wants choice. In a blog post that he posted this is what he asked of us as a community: “Please try to build AWS clones that scale.”

Well, I’m here to tell you the choice is coming but this is not how it is going to come. And the reason why it’s not going to happen is because there’s one main difference between consumer cloud services and the underlying platforms. It’s the fact that they’re programmatically accessible. And this is actually the root of the revolution of the cloud.

If you think about the pre‑cloud era, applications were isolated from the infrastructure. It’s like a rider on a horse. If you needed more power, more features, it was nothing more than a data transfer problem to get a new platform — very simple. The cloud is very different. This is a metaphor I like, remember the banshee in the movie “Avatar?” Here, the rider fused for life to the animal and their brain controlled the actions of the flying beast. This is very much how the cloud has changed application development. Modern applications control the infrastructure, they interact with the infrastructure. They rely on its behaviors and its specific features. And this is why small teams have been able to build incredibly robust applications that scale and do things that were not possible without huge operations teams in the past. Absolutely revolutionary.

Now, many people would say, “This is not a problem with the cloud. There is no lock in.” And I think part of the reason why is that it happens slowly over time as you start to work with it and use the power of the cloud. What I think this really says is that in the cloud era hardware has become software. I love the old metaphor and the old saying that is updated for today which is that “You date your hardware provider, you marry your cloud.”

And this is how it happens. It happens really in three stages. When you start to use the cloud, it does feel like traditional infrastructure. You can get Linux or Windows boxes on demand and it feels like everything is like traditional infrastructure; it’s just much faster and much more responsive. And at this point migrating off the cloud or to another cloud provider is fairly easy and it looks very much like traditional infrastructure.

But the second phase is where things get more complicated. And this is when the fusing begins. When you start to programmatically access the controls of the cloud; where your application stack reaches down into the cloud and they become one.

The last phase is once you’re integrated into a cloud provider it’s very tempting to use proprietary features of those clouds. And Amazon’s made great advances here and launched a lot of great services like SimpleDB and DynamoDB. But once you use these applications and once you use these components, you are truly fused to that cloud provider.

So this is what the community has asked for: APIs. Let’s just clone the APIs. This is a simple thing to do. There’s an interface. If programmatic access is the issue, let’s just make it one common language. This is what Netflix is asking for. And this is why our industry has been obsessed with API standards. And what I want to say today is that cloning APIs in this way is not possible. This is not how it’s going to happen. And this is hard to hear. This is going to be frustrating for people to hear, but let me explain to you why I feel this is absolutely the case.

First of all, there’s the basic fact that APIs are nothing more than an interface to real technology. They’re a bridge, a protocol. But the truth of the matter is the cloud is not a protocol. The cloud is a set of incredibly complex technologies that does incredibly complex things. So if your strategy is to clone the APIs, clone the whole experience of the cloud, you need to build a clone with that technology. But everything behind the API is not exposed in proprietary clouds and so the experience you build won’t be the same. It just is not possible.

Eucalyptus is a company that’s devoted themselves to doing this strategy, to cloning the cloud. And they’re doing good work. But if you look at one example of a service that they’re trying to replicate, their S3 service — so it copies the first Amazon service and one of the most basic in terms of features. And they’ve done a great job, about two‑thirds of the feature set is there but it’s certainly not complete.

Furthermore, if you look at their own documentation, the scaling characteristics are very different than S3. And this is not because they’re building bad technology, it’s because they’re building different technology. And the truth of the matter is that this is the best case scenario. While they have API coverage over a set of services, there’s a huge number of services they have zero API coverage across. This is the problem with the cloning strategy. I call it the OpenOffice problem.

How many of us, especially this group in Silicon Valley, haven’t said at one point or another “I don’t need Office. I hardly use any of the features. Why do I want to pay the tax?” Well, when one of 20 documents you open looks like this [a jumbled and unformatted document], you suddenly realize you need it. This is exactly true with the cloud as well. What is the power of a model that is always behind and not quite the same? I think that this is something that goes unspoken in our industry. I think it’s known, but we don’t talk about it.

Here’s a blog post that Thorsten [von Eicken], CTO of RightScale, wrote … he uses fancy words here but the effect of his language is, if you want to copy the experience of the cloud beyond anything that is basic, you’ve got to have the whole cloud, APIs are not enough. So who cares? Does this matter? If your cloud provider’s doing great things, continuing to add features, do you need to have a choice? Netflix says they want choice. I think others want choice, I think we all inherently believe choice is going to be good.

But what are some of the other reasons to have a choice? Well, what if you want to be in a region where your provider isn’t? What if there’s features that you need that could really advance your service and make things much easier for your users and much more performant. And then there’s the cost issues. Being beholden to one provider doesn’t typically end up with the best cost arrangement in terms of leverage in the long run.

But even more importantly, the ability to customize your cloud can make enormous differences to the underlying cost structure. When you have an application that is running at a massive scale or in a very specific use case, the ability to customize the underlying architecture has huge implications to the economics. This is why private clouds and specialty clouds are going to be around for a long, long time. And the truth of the matter is that Netflix is already proving this. In the last couple of weeks they announced their own CDN. Why? The ability to control the experience and the cost structure is an important element of their long-term future. To have that flexibility really matters and they’re running at such a scale that it makes a big difference.

How long until they think this way about computing? Now, I have to give them credit. The truth of the matter is there hasn’t been a real alternative in the first five years. There hasn’t been a good choice for them and they’ve done the right things for their business. What is the answer? A true end‑to‑end open and scalable cloud. What do we mean by end‑to‑end open? The ability to truly move the cloud anywhere you need to go; true portability. When you have access to the entire code base from APIs down to the actual source of the features, you can run it anywhere: public, private, hybrid. You choose the features, a true open source model that allows you to contribute to the evolution of the project and is openly extendable to any technology.

And finally, all this flexibility allows you to optimize your cost structure to be as competitive as possible for your business. And of course, this is what we started OpenStack for. This is why OpenStack exists. And OpenStack is here. Now we’ve talked about it for the last two years and it’s shown great promise. It is now time for the delivery. Starting with the core components of the technology, OpenStack is ready. The number of private deployments is going to start exploding. It is exploding. And I’m happy to announce that on August 1, Rackspace will officially make OpenStack the engine of its public cloud. And from there, the innovation is going to really start to advance. Rackspace and developers from all over the world are building features around the code base to have it continue to grow and get the features of all the proprietary vendors. And because it’s openly extendable, open source projects and enterprise vendors can also plug in and make seamless offers.

This is the power of an open model and in the long run open models create more innovation faster than any single vendor can. This is why over 180 companies have committed to the OpenStack project. Not just with press releases but with dollars, with developers and with a commitment to create real solutions. And the start of them is going to be coming every day. You’re going to start seeing more and more news around OpenStack. This world knows that we need choice. We are talking about the platform of all modern computing. There must be an open alternative. And there must be choice. Why? We need choice on how you can deploy your cloud, choice on where you can deploy it, anywhere you need to deploy it, on what features you want to deploy it with and what partners you want to go to market with. This is the power of choice. It’s imperative for our industry.

I’m going to leave you with an example of choice and what it might look like in this world. Wikipedia was an early proponent of the OpenStack code base and has run the Object Storage Swift code on premise. And they’ve had good success with it. They’ve been at the OpenStack conferences talking about it. The great thing about them is they now have choices. Of course, if they want to use a public cloud vendor, we hope that they’ll use our Cloud Files service, but the truth of the matter is that there are other providers out there offering similar services, SoftLayer, HP and many others. And they can do this with seamless interoperability because everything up to the APIs down to source is the same — extremely powerful. But that’s not all. The truth of the matter is that the same basic lowest common denominator interoperability exists with the proprietary stacks as well. And the reason why is because it’s an open model and anyone who wants to build API extensions into those proprietary stacks can do it and will continue to do it as long as there’s demand for that. That is the power of choice.

The first five years have been incredibly exciting. I think the next five years will be even bigger. Everything in technology is going to change. But now is the time to have a true open alternative. One that gives real choice and allows unconstrained innovation. We at Rackspace are really thrilled to be part of it. We are more excited about the future than ever. We hope you will join the era of the Open Cloud.

I thank you for your time.

The dawn of the cloud has created a tectonic shift. The center of computing has been pushed from the device – or, in many cases, our desks – to the data center; into the cloud. It’s in the cloud where the majority of computing takes place today and where we believe nearly all computing will take place in the future. Devices — smartphones, tablets or other web-enabled endpoints — are where the outcomes of that new compute power is consumed.

The cloud’s meteoric rise has made the data center more agile and programmatic. It has created a paradigm of instant computing at dramatically lower costs.

That ripple effect has impacted the entire economy: the cost to start a business has plummeted, creating a wave of ground-breaking and inspired startups that build new products, new services and, despite the financial crunch, new jobs; and the rate of experimentation and innovation has skyrocketed, leading to products and services of which we could only dream just five years ago, much to the delight of consumers. We now have the ability to move at incredible speed. We’re more nimble than ever before. And, we are just getting started.

This revolution is powered by cloud software; the cloud operating system, if you will.  And like previous generations of computing, the dominant operating systems will be critical to the unfolding of this great technology shift. The emergence of the dominant cloud operating systems has just begun, and we, along with more than 150 other companies, are just getting started in our quest to build the open cloud operating system — OpenStack.

While the cloud industry is still blossoming, it got off to a great start with proprietary players. VMware dominates in the private cloud space, while Amazon Web Services, and yes, Rackspace, lead in the proprietary public cloud.

With the announcement of our Cloud Servers powered by Openstack, we’ve gone all in on a new approach, an open model and its promise of true portability. We’ve also set the stage for a complete portfolio of cloud products – compute, storage, networking and more. Underpinning that portfolio is OpenStack Compute, or Nova. Now, OpenStack is the platform upon which our complete cloud portfolio rests.

Leveraging OpenStack to power the Rackspace Cloud comes as the world and the market lack, and crave, a clear open alternative to the proprietary cloud model. The market is ready to be seized by a community-focused cloud contender based on open standards. Historically, open standards and open choices have shaken up the technology world. In fact, the rise of an open alternative is inevitable in modern computing ecosystems.  Look at the rise of Linux out of the shadow of Windows. Think about how Android came seemingly out of nowhere to rival the incumbent iPhone. Those are just two examples of game changing open operating systems that changed the course of computing.

In the 20 months since Rackspace jumped into the open cloud fray with OpenStack, the project has grown and matured by leaps and bounds. With its recent fifth release, called Essex, OpenStack is ready for primetime with ambitions for much more. The community has shaped it into an incredibly powerful, reliable and stable platform upon which large, high performance clouds can be deployed – we’re so confident in OpenStack that we’ve rebuilt our Rackspace Cloud to run on top of it and are using it as the fuel to run most of our cloud products.

How are we so sure that OpenStack is ready? The community and the marketplace are screaming it.

Started by Rackspace and NASA, the OpenStack community has swelled to more than 150 companies representing some of the greatest and most influential players in technology, such as HP, IBM, Dell and Red Hat. The Essex release alone had code contributions from more than 50 companies and more than 200 developers. Live OpenStack clouds are available today from Rackspace, HP and Intermedia. And in just a year and a half– a short time for an open source project – OpenStack has experienced more than 100,000 downloads and is now live in more than 50 deployments. And this is just the beginning.

Compare OpenStack’s trajectory to the Linux Foundation, which recently revealed that the Linux kernel version 2.6.11 had 368 developers from 68 companies when it was released in 2005 – roughly 14 years after its original launch. OpenStack’s staggering momentum can’t be ignored.

We firmly believe that OpenStack will change everything. It will transform the cloud market and create a powerful ecosystem that is a real alternative, or in other cases a complement, to the proprietary leaders. It will help drive the shift in how computing is used. And it will spark innovation and offer choice while also creating an ecosystem of business opportunities for us and many others. All of this will happen in a talented, community-driven environment. Cloud software is the operating system of modern computing and the open alternative is staking its position as a driving force in this world.

We’re excited to be a part of this monumental shift and we’re thrilled to have been involved since the beginning. And as we hand OpenStack over to the OpenStack Foundation, we’re certain that the community will continue to strengthen.

We have bet our business on OpenStack and on an open model. We have a major stake in its execution and in its success, and many others do as well. OpenStack powers the cloud that we use and the products and services that we sell. With the Rackspace Cloud, OpenStack is the foundation and it’s backed by the best support in the world – Fanatical Support. The combination of the open cloud and our more than 10-year history as a service and support leader makes the Rackspace Cloud a true game changer.

This truly is the epoch of the next generation of the cloud, and the open generation will be an awesome ride.

Truth be told, we have been running OpenStack Object Storage (code named Swift) in production since the announcement of OpenStack last year.  And now, we are happy to start talking about our move to OpenStack Compute (code named Nova).  We have been working tirelessly to build a cloud to support our 100,000+ customers, and we are making great progress.

Two weeks ago, we started inviting a small set of customers and partners to use a private alpha of Compute running in our data centers.  Over the coming weeks and months we will add features, capabilities and customers.  We will refine the code, work out bugs, solidify our operational systems and start hooking in our production systems.  Priority #1 inside our cloud product development organization is making this shift, and we could not be more excited about it.

While we are not announcing dates at this time we do have a plan for a phased launch program and will be very transparent about it with you over the coming weeks and months.  In the current Alpha stage we are limiting participation to a few select customers and channel partners (by invitation only).

We are still accepting requests for the forthcoming private Beta stage, if you are interested, please email Will Promecene if you want to be considered. We expect the private Beta to start once we’ve completed initial testing with the alpha customers. We hope to be at near production quality for the private beta, but we won’t offer an SLA yet and there will be no cost to participate.

As we approach public beta and GA launch, we will be incorporating a ton of new features and products that have been requested by many: a new control panel and monitoring system based on the technology from our acquisition of Cloudkick, as well as an exciting set of new offers.

Concurrently we have a team that is very carefully architecting and planning an automated process to transfer current customer instances to the OpenStack powered cloud in a seamless way. We will have more details when plans are finalized.

With the widespread adoption of OpenStack, the dream of establishing true cloud standards, removing fear of proprietary lock-in for customers, and creating a large ecosystem that spans cloud providers is in sight.  Today Rackspace is helping customers run OpenStackprivate clouds in their own data center, and also on private clouds hosted at Rackspace.  The ultimate goal is to enable features like cloud bursting and cloud federation, giving enterprises ultimate flexibility and agility.

With the Alpha program fully in flight, we are one step closer to delivering the next generation in cloud services, powered by OpenStack and the world class community and ecosystem that stand behind it.  We think you are going to love the results.  We can’t wait to get it to you.  Stay tuned here for updates as they happen.

The stats are just amazing:

-Developer summits: #1 – 100 attendees; #2 – 250 attendees; #3 – 500 attendees
-Number of contributors who have signed CLA: 217
-Number of developer community members: 1,200
-Number of downloads from Launchpad alone: 35,000

Click here to read Lew’s entire post and his 3 predictions for the coming year.

Click here to see the OpenStack timeline over the course of 1 year.

The stats are just amazing:

-Developer summits:  #1 – 100 attendees; #2 – 250 attendees; #3 – 500 attendees
-Number of contributors who have signed CLA:  217
-Number of developer community members: 1,200
-Number of downloads from Launchpad alone:  35,000

It was only with the Cactus release in April that OpenStack Compute (Nova) became a production-ready platform for most enterprises. The number of companies — from large service providers across the globe to major Fortune 500 companies — that are currently either deploying or experimenting will soon result in a huge spike in that number.

About 18 months ago, Rackspace decided definitively it would give away the intellectual property that built its cloud and embrace open source.  Our strategy rests on a few simple ideas:  1) standards matter and the cloud really needed an open, strong de-facto approach; 2) the core technology that runs datacenters should innovate faster and be available to all, 3) in working with a great ecosystem of partners we could get access to better technology than we could on our own. We have no regrets about the approach.  Yes, we have and will continue to enable many competitors.  True, many companies will hold on to computing since they now have the tools they need to run it closer to the efficiency at which a cloud provider can, but this was always part of the bargain.  Our job is to create a better experience, to operate our cloud better, to deliver scale and to offer an unparalleled level of service we call Fanatical Support™.  In the end, the tech won’t win, the experience will.  At least, that’s how we see it.

What will the next year hold?  Here are just three of my predictions:

1.  Mature code that is ready to deploy. OpenStack is a young project: the code is young and the ease of deployment is still too low; however, this is rapidly changing.  Not only is the code getting ready for major production systems, deploying and operating OpenStack clouds will soon become easier.  Furthermore, the number of features and capabilities will grow exponentially, whether in core projects or in new projects emerging in networking, identity management and web-based interfaces.

2.  Big time deployments, including Rackspace. The number of big name companies relying on OpenStack is going to shock people in the coming year.  We are 100 percent committed to the OpenStack code base.  In the coming months, we will make several announcements regarding our plans and it’s our understanding we are not alone.

3.  The OpenStack economy. Startups, M&A and new products are already emerging to tap into the OpenStack installed base.  It will multiply.  If you build enterprise hardware and software but not thinking about how you fit in the OpenStack community you are missing a huge opportunity.  As the network grows, its value will multiple.  Interoperability standards will need to emerge and we hope to help make it happen.

Together, we will see how it turns out.  As the project turns one, we thank all those community members that have made it all possible.  No question many organizations and companies have made huge contributions to this effort.  NASA, Citrix, Dell, Cisco, NTT and Nicira are just a few of the major contributors, and we thank them.  Thanks to all for a great year.

Now the fun begins…

Click here to see the OpenStack timeline over the course of 1 year.