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by jacquesm 5818 days ago
What a great move by rackspace.

That's very impressive, they're essentially risking enabling their competition by doing this and still they've done it.

This actually will allow the development of 'micro clouds', a thing I wrote about a while back because I don't like the centralization issues of clouds for a number of reasons and use cases.

http://jacquesmattheij.com/node/37

Getting rid of vendor lock-in is also fantastic.
2 comments
chrismsnz 5818 days ago
It was touched on in the article, but allowing the actual plumbing of a cloud to become commodity, it allows them to focus on their core business: managed hosting.

Along with other benefits such as a developer community around their infrastructure and ease of friction around moving cloud hosting providers (i.e. Vendor lock-in) makes this a clear win and an excellent move by Rackspace.

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jacquesm 5818 days ago
This could very well be the biggest announcement of something being open-sourced made this year. I wonder if Amazon will make a comparable countermove or if they will join. (Or ignore it altogether, unlikely).
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izak30 5818 days ago
They won't have to make theirs open, or join OpenStack. All they would have to do is write a set of binaries that translate commands from one to another, and translate return values. Presumably some hackers will sort this out and open source it.
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jnoller 5818 days ago
boto, libcloud, etc, etc mostly support talking to multiple clouds. The API is far from the hardest part of migration - it's actually pretty simple in most cases, unless that vendor picks something like SOAP.
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russell_h 5818 days ago
You should also check out Ganeti: http://code.google.com/p/ganeti

Its basically a tool for managing virtualization clusters, with a ton of nice features: live migrations, redundant storage over DRBD, support for KVM and Xen (I think support for a few other virtuualization/containerization systems is in the works too), scriptable deployments and an HTTP API. It is, as I understand it, used internally at Google (they developed it) for a few things, and judging by the mailing lists there are a number of other good sized deployments around as well.

In a few hours you can set up your own internal "cloud" with Ganeti, and its fairly easy to scale later as the need arises. Bring a new node online, get on the Ganeti master node and tell it the hostname and root password, and Ganeti will SSH in and take care of most of the setup for you.

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