That work has paid off. With today’s launch of the Rackspace open cloud into production, Rackspace is officially on OpenStack, making it the largest OpenStack-based public cloud in the world. OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system launched just two years ago by a community of developers and organizations, now powers the world’s second largest public cloud.

Today, our customers – existing and new — can use the Rackspace open cloud. You can spin up new servers with Rackspace Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack; you can leverage databases with our OpenStack-based Cloud Databases; and you can manage it all from our beautiful new Control Panel, the fast and easy to use interface for managing Rackspace Cloud products. Additionally, we have launched multi-region capabilities across our cloud product portfolio that give customers the power to create computing resources in our Dallas and Chicago regions.

The result is a better, faster and more affordable Rackspace Cloud experience, built on an open platform that spurs innovation and gives our customers true choice and control without the fear of lock-in. Customers can choose service providers and how they deploy applications, and they can pick the location and deployment options that best fit their business needs, whether that’s public, private or hybrid. All of it is backed by our award-winning Fanatical Support^®.

Here’s what’s available to customers today:

• Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack offers on-demand, self-service compute instances with pay-per-use billing. Customers create servers in the new Control Panel or using our new open API. The new Cloud Servers are more scalable, reliable and perform better than their predecessors. Customers can spin up thousands of servers in just minutes and it’s backed by a full SLA and 24×7 support. Plus, the new cloud servers are even more affordable: for Linux servers, we’ve reduced the price of 512 MB instances by 27 percent; 15 GB instances have been reduced 6 percent; and 30 GB instance instances have experienced a 33 percent price reduction. The price of Windows servers has also been reduced; for 30 GB instances, we’ve dropped the price 28 percent.
• Cloud Databases gives customers a high performance, fast and scalable OpenStack-based MySQL database optimized for public and private cloud environments. The automation in Cloud Databases means customers don’t have to worry about database installation and management; it’s done through the API or Control Panel.
• The new Control Panel is specifically designed to offer customers the comfort of a consumer-styled offering, but for business. The modern interface was built with customers in mind and boosts the horsepower and improves the ease of use. It’s designed for larger deployments, adding the ability to tag, filter and search. Cloud management is a breeze with a new interface that is, quite frankly, more beautiful than before. I urge you to take it for a test drive.

These products comprise the cornerstone of the open Rackspace Cloud portfolio, which in coming months will also include Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Backup, Cloud Block Storage and Cloud Networks.

Our work with OpenStack, the open source cloud software that we co-founded with NASA, makes the Rackspace open cloud possible. We helped build Nova, or OpenStack Compute, from the ground up as the engine that drives our open cloud platform, and we have added our own products on top of it – Managed Cloud, RackConnect and others — to boost its capabilities. Rackspace engineers, many of which are core OpenStack contributors, wrote a large percentage of the code; we have tested it at massive scale  — we have launched more than 1 million servers through our tests; and we have pioneered the approach of taking OpenStack from trunk, validating it, testing it and deploying it in roughly two weeks – as soon as it’s stable and we’re happy with it, we push it – through our continuous delivery model.

We are thrilled to deliver on the promise we made of Fanatical Support on an open cloud powered by OpenStack. And we are just getting started. We will continue to develop and use open standards and offer our customers the freedom to choose from a wide portfolio of cloud products and services.

We are extremely excited about the open cloud today and for what’s to come, and we look forward to continuing the drive to the open cloud with you, our customers.

To start using the Rackspace open cloud, sign up now.

For more on Fanatical Support on the Rackspace open cloud, check out this video:

I’m excited to announce that the Rackspace Cloud is now powered by OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system defined by a community of thousands of developers and hundreds of organizations including NASA, IBM, Red Hat, Morphlabs and Piston Cloud Computing. The Rackspace Cloud is the world’s first available large-scale, production-ready OpenStack cloud backed by our award winning Fanatical Support.

The next generation Rackspace Cloud offers a cloud architecture comprising a host of new and enhanced Rackspace products, including Rackspace Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack, Cloud Databases, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Block Storage, Cloud Networks and a new Control Panel.

Customers can sign up for Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack now through a “Limited Availability” program. To ensure the best experience and to accommodate customer demand, we will begin onboarding a limited number of customers May 1. We will continue granting access to new customers during the program so that in a few short months we expect that the OpenStack-based Rackspace Cloud will be open to everyone.

With Cloud Servers now powered by OpenStack and coupled with Cloud Files, the OpenStack object storage platform, we are truly driving innovation and progress as the foundation for the future of cloud computing, which we firmly believe will be based on open standards.

The Rackspace Cloud Portfolio

The Rackspace Cloud now offers a portfolio of new and enhanced Rackspace products all backed by Fanatical Support:

These products are now in “Limited Availability” – as they are available for customers to sign up for, are production workload ready, and include service level commitments, 24×7 support and regular billing:

• Rackspace Cloud Servers now runs the latest version of OpenStack Compute (“Nova”) in Essex, OpenStack’s fifth release. The Cloud Servers platform leverages OpenStack and Essex to boost its performance, scalability, stability and maturity, making it suitable for large-scale deployments. During development, we used a continuous delivery and integration model in which every code change was run through automated tests so we could rapidly make changes and confidently deploy new features.

• A new Control Panel  that leverages the best techniques and practices of modern web design to offer a fast, intuitive way to configure, update, manage and monitor your Cloud Servers, Cloud Files, Cloud Load Balancers, DNS and more.

These products are now in “Early Access” – as they are available for customers to sign up for, are production workload ready, but have limited support available, no service commitments and no billing:

• Cloud Databases  gives our customers a fast and scalable MySQL database with automated management of common database tasks. We designed Cloud Databases with performance in mind and utilized a highly-available SAN-based storage architecture.

• Cloud Monitoring (now in Early Access) adds scalable, programmable monitoring through a rich API to take the guesswork out of application and website availability. Customers can leverage Cloud Monitoring to configure items to monitor and define how to process alerts.

These products are now in “Preview” – as we are currently inviting customers to test the early versions of these products:

• Cloud Block Storage will be integrated into Cloud Servers, designed to give customers flexible volumes which can be attached to or detached from servers, while offering customers a choice between high performance SSD storage or standard block storage.

• Cloud Networks is designed to utilize software-based networking to let users manage logically abstracted network services programmatically and build on-demand Layer 2 private networks leveraging network isolation and port filtering.

The evolution of the Rackspace Cloud relied heavily on the contributions of many Rackers, and also more than 50 companies and hundreds of developers who made significant contributions to Essex – proving that open models foster innovation, collaboration and high quality systems. Our customers also played a huge role by putting our next generation cloud to the test during the Cloud Servers Beta. Throughout the beta we signed up large customers running high performance environments and their feedback regarding its reliability has exceeded our expectations.

Openness is key to the Rackspace Cloud and we give customers the power to choose our public cloud, or leverage it in their own data centers. And on top of our cloud we provide customers with our famous brand of customer service called Fanatical Support, which our customers have come to expect from us. For more than a decade, our business has relied on our commitment to Fanatical Support and our OpenStack cloud is further proof of that. We’re not just installing software; we’re investing in how to run the cloud and how to run it well.

Today signifies a new beginning – open clouds are here. We will continue developing and using open standards to ensure our customers have the freedom to choose from a broad portfolio of cloud products and services. And openness will remain a strategic tenet for us as we build out our cloud offerings and help shape this new era of cloud computing.

Welcome to the future.

Sign up now for the Rackspace Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack (Limited Availability) and we will provide access starting May 1.

Check out this video showcasing the OpenStack-based next generation Rackspace Cloud:

Rackspace is powering one of the largest public clouds in the world. We have the capability to test tens of thousands of instances in our Beta environment and we are committed to testing OpenStack at a new level of service provider scale and performance.  We will continue developing and testing until it reaches the level of stability and reliability that our customers expect.  Our bar is high.  In fact, we have invested thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars in the infrastructure alone.

Today, the way customers and partners will interact with the cloud is dramatically improving: our Beta includes access to a new control panel and a more robust and responsive API giving developers a new approach to building their Cloud Applications – on an open technology architecture that will be backed by our Fanatical Support.  By building it using web standards, public RESTful APIs, object-oriented Javascript and other advanced technologies, we hope to deliver a rich, responsive user experience on a platform that is scalable and accessible via public interfaces.

RightScale, one of our partners who utilizes these new tools, has been working and testing with us as we develop next-generation Cloud Servers.

“We have been working with Rackspace for quite a while now and are excited to have been part of the Alpha program. Our initial experience has shown what we expected…that Rackspace’s leadership in the OpenStack community has positioned them well to make Cloud Servers faster, more scalable and provide a reliable platform for partners like us and for their customers. It is exciting to watch the OpenStack community continue to grow and to be part of the ecosystem creating real products that solve real user problems.” Bailey Caldwell, VP – RightScale

For OpenStack and cloud computing as a whole, our movement into the Beta phase signals a milestone in the maturity of this type of computing. With the contribution of the code that powers our Cloud Files product, we helped launch OpenStack Object Storage. Today, Rackspace Cloud Files is one of the largest OpenStack-based object stores on the planet and is now hosting billions of objects for thousands of customers.  We hope to continue contributing code to advance the offering of an open cloud computing platform for the benefit of our customers and the industry as a whole.

We continue to be actively involved in many OpenStack projects and my colleague, Troy Toman, will be posting about those activities soon. The community is growing and we will all benefit from the flourishing ecosystem of more than 150 companies and thousands of developers.

We are fast approaching production-readiness, delivering on the promise of an open platform that will change the way companies think about and consume cloud computing. Stay tuned for future blog posts in which we will keep you updated on our progress along the way. Meanwhile, if you would like to be considered for the Beta program, please fill out the following Beta Survey.  Welcome to the future of Rackspace and cloud computing!

-Mark Interrante

@Interrante

XenServer
We will shift our hypervisor to Citrix XenServer from our current Open Source Xen, which we call “Xen Classic.” XenServer is being well-adopted by our customers and partners and is the hypervisor we currently use for our Windows offering. Standardizing on one hypervisor will ensure a smoother transition to OpenStack. We are aware of some functionality differences including the inability to downsize a slice. However, we have thought through this and feel the added benefits of XenServer, including its out-of-the-box capabilities, management features and APIs, outweigh the drawbacks of not being able to size down.

Moving Cloud Servers to the OpenStack Compute (“Nova “) code base
The current strategic goal for Cloud Servers is to fully transition first to XenServer and then to the OpenStack code base.  To get there we will first aim for feature parity between Nova and our current Cloud Servers offering while moving to a common API across our current Cloud Servers offering and Nova.  We will strive to make this process as smooth as possible for our customers as we prepare for the future.

OpenStack’s Cactus release has allowed us to make significant strides in this transition. XenServer support is now a strong part of Nova. Many core public cloud features have been added in Cactus that closes the gap on feature parity. We are approaching the close of final details on an API that can be run on both Nova and Cloud Servers. The progress on all fronts is continuing to accelerate. We feel confident that we can stay on track to deploy Nova to our Rackspace customers later this year.

Another area of focus for Rackspace is a discussion around expanding Nova’s networking capabilities into a robust, flexible network as a service offering. It is exciting to see a large number of industry leaders working together in the open to evolve the thinking around leveraging network services in the Cloud.

Load Balancing
On Tuesday, we announced the general availability of the Cloud Load Balancers service.  While this service was initially developed internally, we are excited about releasing this codebase into the open.  At the OpenStack Design Summit, we will be hosting sessions on the product and technology and begin design discussions around version 1.1 of the service.  Initially, we are proposing this as an affiliated, incubated project of OpenStack. We still have a lot of work to do to make the code more readily deployable and usable for the community, but we’re excited to begin working with the community to develop a ubiquitous load balancing service.

Block Storage
As we look forward to the Diablo release of OpenStack and beyond, we are excited about getting involved in projects outside of just compute and object storage. Block storage is one of those projects and we look forward to sharing our proposal at the upcoming design summit.

Relational Databases
Also at the design summit, Rackspace will be leading sessions to discuss our work and research around relational databases. Work on this effort has been focused on feature development within Nova on the underlying infrastructure control code.  Our engineering leads will discuss how we are approaching this problem and begin engaging the community on a more common approach.  As we’ve started working through this project, it has become apparent that a number of the problems we are solving are widely applicable to other types of products and services users may choose to build in the future.  We want to start a discussion on the best approach to solve these problems and engage the community as we continue developing products and services to build relational databases in the cloud.

And there’s more!
We are offering a proposal and prototype for a common identity service for all OpenStack projects. This is a first step towards supplying the glue that holds OpenStack services together and allows them to interoperate with enterprise IT systems.

Also, we have placed our Cloud Servers API spec in OpenStack for the community to drive it forward. We have proposed an extension mechanism that allows anyone to publish their own extensions to the API in a way that allows for popular extensions to get promoted to native APIs. This mechanism will enable an ecosystem that allows for an open API evolution.

We are moving quickly so check back for updates on these initiatives over the coming weeks and months. If you’re a customer who is affected by any of these activities, we will communicate more details to you directly. And if you’re at the OpenStack Design Summit, look me up – I look forward to meeting you and discussing these initiatives and the future of Cloud products.

Mark
@interrante

I have been asked to lead our Product & Development efforts for our Cloud services. Previously I led the global Product teams for Yahoo! Finance, Sports, News, and Entertainment properties that cumulatively have more than 250MM users worldwide. I am passionate about technology and have spent the past 20+ years focusing my efforts on helping companies build and develop world-class products and services. I can’t tell you how excited I am to come to Rackspace and help develop the future of Cloud.

Since joining Rackspace, I have spent a lot of time listening to our customers. Many of you love our services; many also have ideas and requests to help take our services to the next level. I want you to know we are listening! For example, we are actively working to improve cloud control panel responsiveness, how elastic our services are, and, over the course of the next two quarters, we will be upgrading our CDN offering within our Cloud Files product line and delivering features such as SSL, HTTP Compression, Edge Purge, Streaming and most importantly CNAME. We have listened to our customers and we are excited to deliver on these long-standing feature requests.

We are taking our efforts to the next level and are putting together some big plans for the future. We realize that the Cloud Computing market, and more specifically the competition we face, is not going to be slowing down its effort to try and win the battle for your business. In addition, I believe ultimately the market will be made up of five computers that power everything we do; this is essentially the vision I have for Cloud Computing and I want Rackspace to be one of those computers! In another post I’ll explain more about what I mean behind that philosophy. We are working on some big investments for the future that we believe will ultimately help you and your business take advantage of the promises being made around Cloud Computing that are talked about in the media every day.

If you have been following our blog over the past few months, you have already seen some of the developments start to come to reality, and it’s just the beginning.  We’ve introduced new services like Cloud Servers for Windows, Cloud Connect, Load Balancing as a Service, Bulk Import for Cloud Files, a new plug-in for .NET and Visual Studios developers and of course we decided to open source our Cloud with the announcement of OpenStack. While we are proud of these accomplishments, we realize there is still much work to be done.

We’ve heard your feedback and have worked to create new ways for you to offer feedback, with tools like our Product Feedback tool. We know you are asking for a better solution for backing up Cloud Servers, CNAME support for Cloud Files, a faster more responsive Control Panel, and much more. I want you to know that these are all things we are actively working on at this time and there is a lot more on top of that.

In addition I am making some changes inside of our organization to better align us with the future vision I see for Cloud Computing.

1. Design Thinking First
   We are going to put the user experience and design at the top of our agenda when we look to develop and update our products. We want you to have an amazing experience every time you use our products and services.
2. Loosely Coupled Innovation Teams
   We are going to re-engineer the way our teams are structured today, so we can capitalize on ideas quickly and scale our product and development organization around the world.
3. New Talent, New Functions
   We are going to be hiring like crazy—top talent for all sorts of different functions. Want to help shape the future of Cloud Computing? Come apply, we’d love to chat with you.

Over the next few months, you are going to start to see a much more heavy investment from Rackspace in delivering new services and tools. That’s my promise to you.

I hope you are as excited as I am about what the future holds. It’s going to be a fun ride!