RackSpace’s OpenStack
If you haven’t heard by now RackSpace has announced their new Open Source Cloud Platform appropriately named OpenStack. The announcement comes with the news that Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and NASA are already on board. RackSpace’s platform comes with the promise of never being tied down to one Cloud service vendor. Surprisingly it’s already raised enough attention that the New York Times is reporting on it.
What does it really mean? On one hand it will push the envelope for the big Cloud players like Microsoft, Google and Amazon. If RackSpace is successful the big players will be forced to change. Information Week describes the current painful process of switching Clouds "Today an Amazon EC2 user who wants to move to Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine or Verizon Business Cloud will need to convert his workload from an Amazon Machine Image using S3 storage to a new virtual machine format and a new storage AP". But I think the bigger truth is that we’re forgetting the customer. Most consumers don’t care about servers and the software they run (some really do though!). What most consumers really care about is if the program or application they’re hoping to run does so flawlessly. I agree with with David Chernicoff from ZDNet in his article Does Open Source Matter in the Cloud that "the technology that drives the cloud is far less important than the business value of the delivered services". I couldn’t agree more.
What do you think? Is RackSpace’s Platform a move forward? Are we wrong about what customers are looking for?
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Scott – I think this marks the continued evolution of hosting providers from where they started back in the 90s. To me, this is clearly a play at becoming the foundational element of any cloud/managed services model. Being open source only serves to remove vendor ego from the mix.