The Rackspace Cloud Invites Feedback on Upcoming Cloud Servers API

Filed in by Bret Piatt | May 20, 2009 12:59 pm

Since the launch of Cloud Servers[1] in March 2009, we’ve been working behind the scenes to build an API and add even more features. Now we’re ready to share our design with the community and listen to what you have to say about it. After all, we’re not building the Cloud for ourselves – we’re building it for you, and your thoughts are important to us.

The Cloud Servers API draft specification can be downloaded here[2].

Inside the API specification you’ll find more details about new features including the following:

• Server Metadata – You may now supply server-specific metadata at launch time that can be accessed via the API.

• Server Personalization – You may now specify files at launch time that will be injected into the server file system before startup. This is useful, for example, when inserting SSH keys, setting configuration files, or storing data that you want to retrieve from within the Cloud Server itself.
• Host Identification – The Cloud Servers provisioning algorithm has an anti-affinity property that attempts to spread out customer VMs across hosts.  Under certain situations, Cloud Servers from the same customer may be placed on the same host.  Host identification allows you to programmatically detect this condition and take appropriate action.
• Shared IP Groups – While we’ve always supported shared IPs, we’ve made this simpler with the creation of Shared IP Groups and the ability to programmatically enable high availability configurations.

We’re asking for your input by Tuesday, June 2, 2009, to be considered in the 1.0 release of the API. We encourage you to share your feedback publicly here on the blog or via Twitter. For Twitter, our team will be looking for input using the hash tag #csapi and tweets to @bpiatt.

You can also send us feedback privately by sending us an email at Cloudserver_API@mosso.com[3].

Thanks so much for being a part of the team, and we look forward to reading and discussing your suggestions!

Bret Piatt

Source URL: http://www.rackspace.com/blog/the-rackspace-cloud-invites-feedback-on-upcoming-cloud-servers-api/

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