Another Step Forward for OpenStack in Production

Today Mark Interrante, Rackspace’s head of product, announced that the next generation of Rackspace's Cloud Servers, powered by OpenStack Compute (Nova), is moving from Alpha to Beta for customers.  This is a major endorsement of the continuing maturation of OpenStack and its readiness to be deployed today.  Here are a couple of highlights about this launch:

• Rackspace is running very close to trunk, with basically a two week delta between what the Cloud Servers Beta is deploying and what is available at OpenStack.org.  This means that anyone has access to the same technology Rackspace is using today.
• Rackspace is exposing the OpenStack Compute API v2 developed by the community over the past year.
• This offering is a major step forward in terms of performance.  Mark highlights the ability to rapidly spin up instances and the better performance from the API.  The early demos of the beta have been truly remarkable.
• Rackspace continues to run OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) in production with its Cloud Files offering, and is actively working on offerings powered by other projects in the OpenStack community.  There is much more to come.
• Rackspace is continuing to increase its investment in moving the OpenStack community forward.  We are continually adding developers to push the code base forward, and adding our expertise to other community efforts including testing and documentation.

This is offer is not production-ready yet, but it is getting much closer.  Much of the work that needs to get done is specific to Rackspace’s service provider scale.  In the meantime, companies with smaller deployment needs are putting OpenStack into full production today.  We expect to see that pace continue to accelerate.

Congrats to Mark and the entire Rackspace team!

Jim Curry

@jimcurry