OpenStack

Alan Perkins recently joined Rackspace as Director of Product and Technology, Asia Pacific. In this two-part series, he discusses why he joined Rackspace. In Part I, he highlighted the company and its values.

We take customer support pretty seriously around here. Our philosophy is to include super valuable and responsive support with all our offers. For example, when you’re a customer and find out you’re going on national TV to pitch your product, we’ll be there to help with architecting and operating the situation at no additional cost. This is clearly not the standard level of support in the cloud space where even the most basic support costs a lot more on top of core cloud costs. Starting today, we take this already high standard to a new level with the launch of Rackspace Developer Support, an extension of our Fanatical Support specifically for developers.

Cloud-based platforms are key to pushing colleges and universities ahead of the curve in academic and scientific research. That’s exactly why schools like the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) are turning to open source technologies like OpenStack and the OpenStack-powered Rackspace Private Cloud to fuel their scientific research efforts.

We’ve been hearing a lot lately from customers who are frustrated by the limitations of one-size-fits all clouds, whether they’re based on public cloud or private cloud or bare metal servers. These customers want each of their workloads to run where it runs best and most cost-effectively. And that’s what we at Rackspace work to deliver to them, through our hybrid cloud.

Enterprise IT leaders are in a tough spot. They have to provide infrastructure that supports the critical applications that power their business, while also being responsive enough to handle the changing needs of their internal business units.

Last fall Rackspace announced the unlimited availability of Cloud Monitoring, our highly available API-driven monitoring system that is changing how we deliver Fanatical Support. Since then, we have been quietly adding features; and today we’re making those features available through unlimited availability, and we’re unveiling even more.

I have been a long-time attendee of OpenStack Summit (since the days when it was split into a Developer Summit on Monday through Wednesday and a Business Summit and Conference on Thursday and Friday). Now the entire event is called the “OpenStack Summit” and developers, operators and business executives converge in one place to talk all things OpenStack. So far, Every six months the conference has grown – the most recent brought nearly 3,000 attendees together in Portland to talk about the future release of OpenStack, Havana, and to share their experiences with OpenStack to date. With this type of growth, it was only natural for the OpenStack Foundation to ensure there were multiple tracks so attendees can align themselves to the sessions and topics they care about most. Some of the tracks this year included:

What really drives tech entrepreneurs? What makes them tick? What drew the great disruptors to technology? Rackspace On Startups is a video series that explores insights from tech evangelists and founders – from Woz to Graham Weston.

Technology is often a lopsided business. Studies show that just 12 percent of the professionals in engineering are women.

At OpenStack Summit Portland, the team that authored OpenStack Operations Guide during a five-day book sprint earlier this year held a panel discussion to answer questions and receive feedback from the community.