As someone who has taken an enterprise to the cloud globally, I understand just how much of an impact the cloud can have on a business. I have been a vocal supporter in the belief that the cloud can open all sorts of possibilities. It’s not just about cost mitigation and scalability.

Businesses looking to learn more about what cloud computing can offer are faced with a plethora of suppliers purporting to have cloud services. Many of the potentially transformational benefits can be lost in the confusion of conflicting ideas, and these businesses sometimes gain a false sense that the cloud sounds like stuff they have heard before.

The truth is that real cloud is a service that’s hard to fake. The key is that the products, services and technologies offered by a vendor enable an enterprise to focus on its business imperatives without having to worry about the infrastructure. It is always a tough question: does a company invest in expensive infrastructure just in case it becomes successful beyond expectations? Does it allow a huge opportunity to slip through its fingers simply because of a conservative approach to investing in infrastructure? Both are risks that all businesses have to traditionally face.

These risks become real concerns when businesses do not use the cloud. Cloud approaches mean that businesses can effectively forge ahead knowing that the infrastructure will cater to their usage needs. Imagine starting a fishing business and not having to worry about how big a boat and net you should buy. Instead, you can rely on being able to start with modest equipment and elastically expand the ship and net at sea if you happen to come across a huge school of fish.

The freedom from encumbrance that results from this elasticity has the potential to change the way businesses approach their strategic planning, innovation and related areas of risk management and process streamlining. More agile methodologies ensue that facilitate experimentation and allow changes to happen organically, leading inevitably to a focus on the business goals rather than the potential impediments such as not having enough infrastructure.

Cloud facilitates this change in thinking, but it has failed to overcome the concerns around privacy, security and data sovereignty. Despite all the advocates who have effectively said that the benefits outweigh the risks, the fact remains that some businesses stand to lose more than they can gain if their data is exposed. In some cases there are legislative impediments, PCI compliance, health records, national sovereignty rules to name a few, that render the potential gains seemingly academic. Further concerns around the high dependency on single cloud providers have further limited the uptake.

But Rackspace has largely addressed these concerns by open-sourcing the cloud. By working with NASA, Rackspace has given birth to what is now among the fastest growing open source projects in history – OpenStack. The OpenStack Foundation now has more than 8,600 contributing developers and has been adopted by more than 100 companies, including IBM, Dell, HP, NTT, Red Hat and Canonical. Rackspace has very publicly gone “all-in” on OpenStack and is one of the largest contributors to the code base. Rackspace’s approach is that Fanatical Support will be the key differentiator that enables the company to excel.

As a result of OpenStack, businesses have the freedom to build on the hybrid cloud, an infrastructure platform that uses a combination of public multi-tenanted cloud infrastructure, dedicated servers and private cloud facilities that are on their own premises if necessary. The technical barriers between each of these topologies are being eliminated, making for one platform that truly allows businesses to have freedom from worrying about their infrastructure as they focus on driving their business forward.

The freedom to choose a mixture of topologies, suppliers and service levels really allows businesses to focus on what they do, not how they do it. Adding Fanatical Support to that freedom allows cloud computing to fully realize its potential. And that excites me.

—-

Oh, and for those who want to understand more about my role at Rackspace, I have come on board as the Director of Technology and Product – Asia Pacific. My functions include promoting how cloud computing concepts can help businesses achieve their goals, expounding on the concepts of the open cloud, as well as helping ensure new Rackspace products and services are ready for the market in the Asia Pacific region.

I welcome the opportunity to talk about my journey to the cloud and how thinking cloud and related topics such as Big Data, the Internet of Things and social media can change our approach to business.

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.

According to UTSA President Dr. Ricardo Romo, cloud computing is a crucial component of UTSA’s strategic plan to help the school become recognized as a Tier 1 university. The initiative, called “A Shared Vision UTSA 2016,” aims to propel UTSA into a select group of nationally competitive research universities. The open cloud and open technologies are helping UTSA achieve Tier 1 status, which relies heavily on the quality of a school’s academic research.

There’s no doubt the cloud is revolutionizing the way researchers and scholars use technology to accelerate their research efforts. By offering increased computational capacities, the cloud allows you to process data in real-time while removing dependency on physical infrastructure. It also frees scientists from managing IT equipment, leaving scholars more time to focus on their research initiatives.

Rackspace and the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) recently showcased an advanced OpenStack-powered platform designed to fuel academic research and solve complex scientific and engineering problems. Traditionally, these intensive models were implemented on high maintenance computing infrastructures.

UTSA’s hybrid cloud computing platform features Rackspace Private Cloud and public open cloud solutions and provides scientists with massive scale, flexibility and speed in its world-class research efforts.

“As an increasing number of the society’s current and future challenges require integration of ubiquitous and distributed sensing,  smart data extraction and fusion, and redundant and flexible communications among computational and mobile platforms, open cloud is the natural enabling technology for us to implement integrated solutions to these challenging problems,” said Dr. Daniel J. Pack, chair of the school’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Rajendra V. Boppana, chair of the Department of Computer Science, says a hybrid cloud platform is a key tool for faculty conducting high-impact research in computer architecture, cyber security, big data applications and high performance computing.

“The computer science faculty will use this hybrid cloud to…develop new technologies such as high performance computing as a service and to explore and solve large-scale bioinformatics problems,” he says. “The UTSA hybrid cloud is also an important pedagogical tool that facilitates hand-on experiments and learning activities in computer systems, parallel computing and cloud security.”

And Dr. Romo says he is confident that the power of the open cloud will extend beyond UTSA’s campus. Earlier this week, he told dozens of local movers-and-shakers at a Chamber of Commerce event that he is set on making San Antonio a true hub for the open cloud and innovation.

Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston’s non-profit, the 80/20 Foundation, is also working to make San Antonio an open cloud innovation center. The foundation helped kick-start UTSA’s cloud initiative through a recent donation.

“We collaborate closely with academia and industry to create economic value and help shape San Antonio’s future workforce,” said Lorenzo Gomez, the 80/20 Foundation’s executive director. “The idea of an open cloud enabling research that creates economic value for San Antonio and improves the velocity of scientific research is very compelling.”

Check out this video for a more in-depth look at how UTSA leverages the open cloud and Rackspace Private Cloud for scientific research.

We believe that the hybrid cloud is the future of all cloud computing, and will allow each customer to find the best solution for its unique needs. So we were naturally interested to see our view confirmed in RightScale’s 2013 State of the Cloud Survey.

RightScale, a long-time Rackspace partner, recently polled 625 IT and business leaders and found that business of all sizes plan to adopt hybrid cloud infrastructure. The numbers in favor of this strategy are staggering: more than 75 percent of larger organizations have a multi-cloud strategy, with the majority of those planning for hybrid clouds. Of that group, 15 percent plan to use multiple public clouds; 15 percent plan to use multiple private clouds; and 47 percent will turn to hybrid cloud arrangements.

This survey shows that customers no longer want a provider who pretends that one cloud fits all. Instead, we believe, there will be millions of clouds – public, private, dedicated and hybrid – all built to deliver the best fit for a customer’s specific needs.

The hybrid cloud offers the best of all worlds. It allows you to blend the best of the public cloud with private cloud and bare metal servers into one common architecture. The hybrid cloud provides the best possible combination of cost-efficiency, security, reliability, performance and control. There are no tradeoffs in the hybrid cloud.

Hybrid cloud deployments also let you increase your ROI on existing IT investments while giving you faster access to infrastructure and greater scalability.

And it’s openness that makes this vision a reality. With our OpenStack cloud, we enable your workloads to move among the public cloud, private cloud and dedicated hardware at your convenience. You might, for instance, launch an app in the public cloud and then, when it scales, move it to a private cloud for superior cost-effectiveness and control. It’s about what’s right for your app, not what’s right for our cloud. We adapt to your needs, rather than insisting that you architect your apps to fit a proprietary cloud that locks you in. The OpenStack open source platform that we founded provides the springboard to easily move workloads as they outgrow a specific environment. And if you determine that you require the control and compliance advantages of a private cloud, we can help cut the deployment time by hosting it for you or helping you manage it in your own facilities, with Rackspace Private Cloud.

Customers are voting with their feet as well as with their survey responses. According to RightScale, 29 percent already run apps in hybrid environments; 38 percent in private clouds; and 61 percent in public clouds. We expect these numbers to shift as companies build out their infrastructures to better accommodate and scale to their specific needs.

But what’s clear is that customers are finding real value by integrating private cloud, public cloud and dedicated computing.

With the hybrid cloud, you can have your cake and eat it too.

At the same time, the industry is putting pressure on IT leaders to respond to the changing market and to drive innovation. In all, they’re being forced to be more nimble and to do more with less.

At EMC World 2013 in Las Vegas next week, you’ll hear how joint solutions from Rackspace and EMC are powering this transformation and helping enterprise IT leaders meet these challenges head on through a hybrid mix of cloud and dedicated infrastructure.

Rackspace and EMC^® have a long-standing partnership through which we offer enterprise-grade storage solutions to our growing roster of customers. At EMC World, we’ll detail how we join forces with EMC to provide solutions including Dedicated Hosting, RackConnect^® and Managed Virtualization. We’ll also showcase our disaster-recovery-related solutions and the addition of EMC Isilon scale-out NAS to our Dedicated Storage portfolio.

Rackspace and EMC also share a vision of openness. We’re both dedicated to building services on open technologies – Rackspace is a founder of OpenStack and EMC joined the OpenStack Foundation last year.

As the industry makes the move to the cloud, and specifically clouds built on open technologies, we’re here to help no matter where you are in the journey with solutions that enable you to solve IT challenges.

As an industry service leader, we’re in the unique position to offer customized enterprise IT solutions leveraging the cloud and through our great partnership with EMC. And we back them up with our award-winning brand of customer service, Fanatical Support^®.

Be sure to join us at EMC World next week for an engaging breakout session; and be sure to swing by our booth (No. 527) for games, giveaways and most importantly to learn more about how Rackspace and EMC can help you transform your business into the cloud.

Server Monitoring: Check The Internal State Of Your Servers

An outage on a web server often isn’t necessarily a catastrophic event, but it is caused by a problem that could have been detected by watching internal statistics like CPU usage or memory. To help detect these problems, we’ve launched a new feature of the Cloud Monitoring platform: Server Monitoring.

Server Monitoring can be enabled by installing the Cloud Monitoring Agent, which allows you to create checks on load average, CPU, memory, filesystem and network usage, as well as more advanced checks (currently available via the API only) including a custom plugin check that uses a user-supplied check to gather any metrics you like. In addition to creating checks, which continuously gather data in the background, you can query certain information “live,” enabling visualizations on the server detail view in our Cloud Control Panel:

There is no shortage of monitoring tools available today; you may already be familiar with Nagios, Munin, collectd or other tools from the open source community and startups. Those tools can work well for some users that are familiar with them. Our new Cloud Monitoring Agent is different. It was built based on your feedback and includes several key features that you’ve asked for.

You said you need redundancy across multiple datacenters, so you can be confident that your monitoring system is up and running. And we know that you’re concerned about performance, so we’ve engineered our monitoring agent to have a small memory footprint. You want first-class support for both Windows and Linux, so we built the agent on top of libuv, the same cross-platform library that powers Node.js. Flexibility is also important, so we open-sourced our agent and offer custom plug-ins. We utilized industry-leading security standards, so you can use it anywhere without having to worry about the security of your data, and we hope you find it easy to manage with the familiar Cloud Monitoring API used in our remote monitoring solution.

Server Monitoring will be free to try out until July 31, and we’re excited to get more of our customers using it! See below for more technical details, or install the agent to get started!

Graphs

Each time a check is run – whether a Remote check or, now, a Server Monitoring check – Cloud Monitoring stores the data it collects. Starting today, we’re giving you the ability to view the history of your Cloud Monitoring metrics with a new graphing feature in the Control Panel.

For each Cloud Monitoring check you configure, we’ll show you graphs of some of the most useful metrics. You’ll be able to find out whether your server responds more quickly from London or Chicago, how much filesystem space you have left, whether or not you run out of memory during heavy traffic and more:

To get started with graphs, all you need to do is create some checks via our Control Panel. Expect to see more features in the coming months that will help you get more insight into your infrastructure. In the meantime, if the Control Panel isn’t enough for you, you can use the Cloud Monitoring Metrics API to fetch, analyze or display this data on your own. Get started with the documentation today.

PagerDuty Integration

Cloud Monitoring can now route alerts to PagerDuty. PagerDuty is a popular incident management tool, which handles alerting (via phone, SMS, email or mobile push), on-call scheduling and automatic escalation of critical incidents.

We use PagerDuty ourselves and love it, so we’re excited to let customers use this feature. Currently the Control Panel doesn’t expose the ability to add the details of your PagerDuty account to Cloud Monitoring, so you’ll have to use the API for that step. But once you’ve got it set up you can begin using PagerDuty just by selecting the appropriate Notification Plan from the dropdown when creating checks or modifying alarms. See our post on the DevOps blog for details.

Integration With Managed Cloud

If you’re a Rackspace Managed Cloud customer, the agent will be automatically installed on your servers when they’re created. When you configure a check, you’ll be given the option to route alerts to your Rackspace support team so we can handle the problem while you focus on your business. If you’re not a Managed Cloud customer but want to be, sign up today!

Multi-Data Center Redundancy

We’ve made a big deal out of the fact that remote monitoring runs in a multiple geographically separated data centers so that an outage in one data center doesn’t affect our ability to continue checking your infrastructure or alert you to failures.

In a similar way, the Cloud Monitoring Agent connects to three Cloud Monitoring data centers but only requires a connection to one to operate correctly. Even if Chicago and Dallas are attacked by Godzilla, your agent will continue to send check data to London and you will continue to receive alarms.

Small Memory Footprint

The agent is built to have a small memory footprint. We understand that a 512 megabyte Cloud Server is large enough to do many jobs, but if our agent was too large you wouldn’t be able to monitor these smaller machines.

To be specific, we built the agent to consume about 6 megabytes of RAM; around one percent of the RAM on our smallest Cloud Server.

Excellent Security 

To protect your data, the agent uses TLS for all connections and a private Certificate Authority (CA). This means that even if some public Certificate Authority incorrectly issues a certificate for our domain to a third party, like the recent TURKTRUST incident with Google.com, our agent will refuse to connect due to an untrusted certificate chain.

The Linux binaries that we provide are signed with a GPG key that you can download from our API server over SSL. Meanwhile, the servers that build and sign those binaries are on an isolated network free from the dangers of the open Internet. Similarly, we will be using Authenticode when the Windows agent launches.

On top of that, the agent does not have the ability to execute arbitrary commands; it simply gathers and reports metrics.

Open Source Software

The agent is an Apache 2.0 licensed open source project. This gives the agent a few distinct advantages:

1. You can audit the code: We are proud of the engineering and security stance of our agent, but don’t take our word for it; dig into the code yourself.
2. You are free to compile the agent for your own distro: We provide a large list of supported binary packages for Windows, as well as Linux distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, etc. But we understand that we won’t be able to provide binaries for every distro and architecture. If we don’t support your platform, you’re free to compile the agent yourself. With time, we are certain that the agent will be ported to routers and phones.

We look forward to seeing your pull requests on Github.

Custom Plugins

A number of agent check types are available out of the box for common system statistics and applications. But, these checks are only a starting point and can’t cover every conceivable use case. For example, say you want to get alerted when the number of rows in the session table of your database grows above 1,000 – you can do this with a custom plugin for the agent.

The interface for custom plugins is simple and straightforward. The agent simply executes a script that you place in the plugins directory and gathers the metrics from standard out.

Say you write a script that queries your PostgreSQL database for the number of active sessions, let’s call it session_metrics.py. All this script would need to do is query the database and output the following format:

status 235 active sessions in the database
metric sessions int64 235
metric oldest_session int64 50034

Now you can write an alarm when the number of sessions is over 9,000 and be prepared to scale your infrastructure for the additional load.

Familiar API

Entities, checks and alarms are the basic types in the Cloud Monitoring API. To fit into these types the agent only adds one additional property to the entity called the agent_id. So, if you already have an entity for your webserver, you can link a new agent to that entity and start allocating agent checks like the agent.plugin check right alongside your existing remote.ping and remote.http checks. Even alarm criteria are written in the same manner as usual.

if (metric['sessions'] > 90000) {
 return new AlarmStatus(CRITICAL, 'The database says the session table is over 9000!');
}
return new AlarmStatus(OK, 'The session table is not over 9000');

Try It Free

As we mentioned above, Server Monitoring is free to use until July 31, 2013. We look forward to getting your feedback and seeing cool uses of the custom plugins interface.

And as always, we are hiring.

• Business Value
• Case Studies
• Community Building
• Ecosystem
• Getting Started
• Legal
• Operations Summit
• Project Updates

This is always a great way to put presenters and attendees in the same room to maximize the value of the conference. However, there is unofficial track that I consider to be among the most important: the “Hallway Track.” Loosely defined, the Hallway Track encompasses all of the conversations that occur in the hallway or other social gathering points throughout the conference. It is here that you get to hear the dirty details of what a particular group really thought about a presentation or idea. It’s here that the tough questions get asked, and mostly answered; questions that would have probably been better if asked during the actual presentation. It’s a safer venue, a smaller one, that is filled with trusted opinions. Large takeaways from presentations are commonly disseminated during the Hallway Track and those are the ideas that attendees take back to their respective companies (and likely include in their conference reports).

Key Discussion Topics

I’m not going to dive into the details of every Hallway Track session I attended, but I want to share some of the overarching themes that were discussed during these sessions:

• Essex adopters are running OpenStack clouds with production workloads today. There were two keynote sessions that highlighted users who got their first real taste of OpenStack during the Essex Summit: Comcast and HubSpot.
• Most talked about session. State of the Stack April 2013 presented by Randy Bias from CloudScaling was the most talked about session in Portland. It was raved about. It was an update on all the projects, their best parts, their not so great parts and some general thoughts on the current state of all OpenStack projects.
• Interoperability, oh my! Analyst sessions, panels, blog posts and snarky comments abound all week. A lot of the OpenStack community contingent still believes OpenStack interoperability will occur, but there were some very strong opinions floating around about OpenStack just being too large, having too many deviations and there being too many factors to truly bring the whole community to an interoperability consensus. One thing both camps agreed upon was the great potential of interoperability. Personally, I think it’s too early to make a judgment call, but after seeing so many products start to converge towards a more common codebase, it might not be a pipe dream.
• Whiteboards in design session rooms. This seems to come up every conference, but if a room is designated for a design session, it should include a whiteboard. Sure, mostly there is debate and healthy conversation with an etherpad, but sometimes a discussion calls for a whiteboard for architecture or process flow.
• If you’re not using SCM, you’re doing it wrong. The age of logging into servers or virtual instances is seemingly coming to an end. More and more companies talked about advanced automation and the replacement of instances rather than nursing them back to health.
• Federated Auth in Keystone. This is one item that is near and dear to Rackspace, as we have proudly been running OpenStack Grizzly code in production for weeks. But since we switched our cloud platform over to OpenStack (on Aug. 1, 2012) there were some key features that we ran differently than the community due to our legacy cloud customers. The biggest hurdle to fully adopting native OpenStack is authentication, as Rackspace is not running the community variant of Keystone, but a Rackspace-ified version. With federated authentication getting closer to reality, it will allow Rackspace to adopt Keystone fully into our platform and move that much closer to running native OpenStack code.
• There was not a Piston or a Nebula party. Let’s be honest here; when the agenda came out and both of these companies were missing from the evening events lineup, there was quite a stir. These companies know how to put on a great party and roughly 3,000 attendees were let down. Luckily, there were still a slew of great evening networking events hosted by Mirantis, PuppetLabs, HP, Red Hat and Rackspace; but it just wasn’t the same without Piston or Nebula putting their respective party spins on the OpenStack Conference.
• nova-conductor:  One of the new services in OpenStack Nova, there was plenty of talk about what it does, why it’s needed and the best way to implement it. Yun Mao wrote a great post right before the Summit that answered a lot of those questions, and it was commonly referred to throughout the week. You can find his blog post on his personal website here:  http://cloudystuffhappens.blogspot.com/2013/04/understanding-nova-conductor-in.html
• OpenStack Operations Guide. A key element of Jim Curry’s keynote presentation was that 2013 is the “year of the user” for OpenStack. Over the past two years we have all been part of a transition that started with a strong focus on developers and now adds a heavy dose of OpenStack users. While the development of OpenStack has never been stronger – there were 500-plus contributors to the Grizzly release; OpenStack has also experienced a tremendous spike in growth and adoption. Another signal that users are here and ready to play is the release of OpenStack Operations Guide. There are more options than ever to get OpenStack running in your data center, and knowing all of the components of OpenStack and how they interact has never been more important. Once you have a grasp of OpenStack, the next question that is “what is the best deployment model for me?” OpenStack Operations Guide answers that question. The book is absolutely free and can be found here. Even cooler, this entire guide was written in a five-day sprint before the conference.

OpenStack Products Abound

There was also a great deal of product talk at OpenStack Summit Portland, with many OpenStack players offering up new solutions. Check out NetworkWorld’s roundup of the hottest OpenStack products right now. Here’s a sampling of some of the products launched and discussed at the Summit:

• Rackspace announced the Rackspace Global Cloud Network: Rackspace revealed plans to expand its global cloud network through a program in which Rackspace will build and run interoperable public clouds for service providers around the world.
• RedHat announced RDO: RDO is a community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and their derivatives. Red Hat hopes to do for OpenStack what it did with Linux.
• Project Savanna: Red Hat, Hortonworks and Mirantis will collaborate to contribute significantly to Project Savanna, Apache Hadoop on OpenStack for simpler and cost-effective transitions of big data workloads between public and private clouds.
• Nebula released Nebula One: Nebula finally came out of the darkness and released its long awaited product, Nebula One, a turnkey private cloud system that provides compute, network and storage services through a self-service interface and APIs, using industry-standard servers from vendors such as HP, IBM and Dell.
• CloudScaling announced Open Cloud System 2.5: CloudScaling launched Open Cloud System 2.5, which supports OpenStack Grizzly; 100 percent community OpenStack – no forks; virtual private cloud via Juniper Contrail technology with block storage snapshots; and runs on certified hardware from Dell, Cisco, Quanta, Juniper and Arista
• Mirantis FUEL: FUEL is the public open source release of Mirantis’ toolset for production deployments of OpenStack. It has been used in projects completed at NASA, PayPal, WebEx and others.
• Ceph is hot, Swift is not: A full replacement alternative for Swift, Ceph is an open source, distributed storage system that provides block and object storage fully integrated with OpenStack. You can find more information about Ceph on the Inktank blog about Ceph’s Cinder compatibility. That being said, SwiftStack put on another series of fantastic workshops that gave newcomers and grizzled veterans of the technology some hands-on time and theory around using Swift in production.

Overall, OpenStack Summit Portland was an excellent five-day look at the state of the project from nearly every perspective. Roughly 3,000 people showed up to shape, drive and learn more about OpenStack, and the energy and enthusiasm in the sessions, and the Hallway Track were infectious. One thing is for certain, OpenStack is here to stay. I can’t wait to do it all again in six months.

We’re now in the Open Age, where the entire startup world is being built on open technologies and on the cloud. As President of Rackspace, Lew Moorman has witnessed this progression first-hand – from the birth of the internet in Silicon Valley while attaining his J.D from Stanford in the 90s to being on the forefront of cloud computing at Rackspace and the development of OpenStack.

According to Moorman, the world is constantly getting better, and that’s driven by technological innovation. Technology educates, creates breakthroughs in science and helps us understand each other better. And startups are fueling the next wave of technology. As Moorman said, startups “are thinking about the next next thing.”

In this video, we get insight into Moorman’s thoughts on startups and why they’re so important to Rackspace.

Check out the previous installments of Rackspace On Startups featuring Rackspace Startup Liaison Officer Robert Scoble and author and speaker Guy Kawasaki.

OpenStack is making great strides to invite and include women through internships, support, breakfasts and meetups and by encouraging them to get involved, contribute code and come to the Summit.

At OpenStack Summit Portland, Rackspace Videographer Jacob Forbis caught up with some of the women who are making OpenStack great and who are working to get more women involved.

The book is gaining traction – it’s marching up the popularity list and is in the top four of all things downloaded from docs.openstack.org.

According to the team of authors, the input from the community and from users was valuable and will help guide its future efforts. The next step is to build a community around the book and enable community members to include their experiences.

In this video (shot and edited by Rackspace Videographer Jacob Forbis) the team discusses OpenStack Operations Guide in more detail.