API

You probably use application programming interfaces (APIs) multiple times a day and aren’t even aware of it. They make it easier to share photos with friends, access massive data stores and drive new app development. With the rise of APIs, including our own Open Cloud API, we’ve compiled an overview to help you understand how APIs work, how you’re already using them, and how businesses are finding big successes with APIs.

Rackspace President Lew Moorman took the stage at the GigaOm Structure Conference in San Francisco Wednesday to reveal the truth about vendor lock-in and showcase how the fusion of applications and infrastructure within proprietary cloud environments can trap customers and remove application portability. In his talk, Moorman disproved the myth of cloned APIs and showed how some of the cloud’s biggest and earliest users have become shackled to their providers. Moorman also presented a solution and showed how OpenStack and the Open Cloud lead to true application portability and cloud choice.

Cloud Load Balancers is continuing to grow its footprint by providing valuable features to our growing customer base. In recent months, Cloud Load Balancers has added several customer requested features including SSL Termination at the load balancer, secondary backend node options, metadata support and a growing list of supported protocols. Rackspace is proud to announce that we have added three more features to Cloud Load Balancers that are available today via the API. These new features will be offered in the control panel very soon.

Rackspace is pleased to announce that we’ve added a handful of new API features for Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers.

Anne works on the community documentation for OpenStack as a Content Stacker. She is also the author of  Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation.

We launched our RESTful Cloud Servers API last week and the feedback thus far has been fantastic.  When we were first looking to build the API, we surveyed the cloud standards world to see if there was anything existing we could embrace.  After all, why have another cloud interface if you can avoid it?  We believe in a world of open clouds where customers can migrate, federate, burst, etc. and not be concerned with lock-in.  Common APIs are part of that battle, but unfortunately, nothing suitable existed (although OCCI looked interesting).  So, we built our own interface embracing easy to use web service standards like REST, WADL, XML, JSON, etc.  We spent a lot of time modeling a compute cloud in a RESTful manner and adjusting based on feedback from our developer and partner communities.  The responses we got back helped us course correct as part of the design process and that open approach resulted in an API that is powerful, yet easy to use and understand (there is of course plenty of room for improvement).  We’ve heard that message over and over during this past week.

We will be at the O’Reilly OSCON Open Source Convention 2009 in San Jose, California this week, July 20-24th, at the San Jose Convention Center. In it’s 11th year, OSCON is bringing together “over 3,000 experts, visionaries, and hackers in the trenches to explore all that open source has to offer.”

Cloudkick is up and kicking, now supporting Rackspace Cloud Servers. Cloudkick is a cloud server management platform that allows consumers to utilize multiple cloud providers through one interface. We’ve mentioned Cloudkick in a previous entry demonstrating their Cloud Shift tool.