Opening Up the Cloud with Rackspace OpenStack

If you want people to build great stuff on your platform, you have to open it up. And that’s exactly what Rackspace has planned with the announcement today of OpenStack, an open-source project designed to make cloud code freely available for the developer community. At launch, the OpenStack project includes code from the Rackspace Cloud Files offering. Anyone is now free to take that Rackspace code and build on top of it to shape their own object storage system in the cloud.

The Rackspace announcement is big news in the evolution of cloud computing. One of the biggest fears many organizations have with the cloud is the fear of locking up their assets on someone else’s platform. That fear goes away when the platform is entirely open. Rackspace is a long-time partner of Limelight Networks, and the open approach is part of what has made our two companies work so well together.

Incidentally, along with the traditional Rackspace Cloud Files service comes an option to include Limelight Networks delivery services. In other words, you can host your files with Rackspace and have them accessible anywhere around the world using the Limelight content delivery network. Rackspace actually uses a Limelight API to integrate the storage and delivery services into one offering. That’s the power of open platforms.

Want more information on OpenStack? There’s plenty available on the new Rackspace OpenStack site, and you can follow @openstack on Twitter. (Shameless plug: you should also be following @llnw if you’re not already.) Stay tuned. There’s more to this story to come.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 19th, 2010 at 7:06 pm and is filed under Cloud, Content Delivery Network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.