Building open cloud solutions is not a small feat; it is extremely complicated and challenging. The only way we could have accomplished this is by building the core of our infrastructure products in the open and getting feedback from a community. OpenStack has grown from being written by a few dozen engineers to a community of hundreds. It has grown beyond anything that we could have ever anticipated.

Working as an engineer, I want people to see what we are working on and see exactly how it works. If someone has a way to improve the codebase or they want to see something different, they can come to the community with improvements. This is the key characteristic to how open standards drive innovation.

We believe in this project so much that every bit, from the input to exhaust, of what we do to run our public facing open cloud is built on open sourced software. This means that a person with knowledge of the projects can redeploy and build what we have done.

One extreme challenge that our team faces in building an open cloud is how fast we pull in software from OpenStack trunk. We try to stay only a few hours behind OpenStack trunk; when someone commits code, we quick evaluate those patches and modifications to ensure that the code is compatible with our branch. We are committed to staying bleeding edge on this project and we strive to make sure that it stays up to the standards we expect and that it works to the scale that our customers expect.

We took the open source piece of Cloud Servers, known as Nova, and deployed that inside of Rackspace. Our public cloud was then actually built on top of that deployment in what we term as “iNova” or our infrastructure Nova. While we learn how to use our internal cloud, we can develop features and fixes that we feel would enhance our offerings. By having a better understanding of the customer experience and by using it as customers would, we can build a stronger product.

Our engineering team first deploys any new release of the software internally to verify that the quality is up to our customers’ needs. Consuming this internally first enables us to find issues and problems within the software before it hits our customers. When we discover a bug, we are able to fix it and commit the patch back to the OpenStack code base, ultimately improving the experience for the entire community.

Rackspace gets the same advantages of the cloud that our customers get by having an instance of the cloud to run our cloud environment. We get snapshots, private networks and virtual machines. We are able to increase and decrease our workload as we see traffic peak and subside. We can run everything on commodity hardware and our configuration and deployment times have been drastically reduced, as along with our operational costs. The Rackspace open cloud is a robust platform for computing resources, so much so that it can power itself.