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Rackspace's John Engates offers cloudstack update

John Engates, Rackspace's CTO, dropped by to provide an update on public clouds and openstack.
Written by Dan Kusnetzky, Contributor

John Engates, Rackspace's CTO, dropped by to chat about the growth in the use of public clouds and the progress of OpenStack. As with other conversations I've enjoyed with John, we roamed over many topics - too many to completely journal here.  So, I'll just offer some bullets as a summary of a wonderful, interesting conversation.

  • Rackspace is seeing public cloud growth in all of the markets its serves. John believes this can be attributed to the worldwide requirement to reduce IT costs while still delivering IT services to organizations and their customers.
  • Private cloud usage is being driven by the increasing maturity of the available tools. John waved the OpenStack banner here, but also pointed out that Eucalyptis, Nimbula, Apache CloudStack, and VMware's Cloud Computing Solutions are experiencing growth as well. He went on to discuss the fact that users of Amazon's AWS wanting to create a compatible private cloud were likely to adopt Eucalyptis. European organizations appeared to have an affinity for Nimbula and those wanting an open source solution gravitated towards OpenStack. When I asked for his views of CloudStack's growth, he commented that his focus was on OpenStack, but CloudStack's incubation period with the Apache foundation appeared to be going well.
  • Rackspace's own product offerings have all been sucessfully migrated to an OpenStack platform. John believes that this was a good move for the company because, in his view, OpenStack has the broadest base of support including a large development community; suppport of a large collection of IT harware, software and services companies; and a growing list of end-user organizations.
  • John went on to talk about a new "guarenteed uptime" service RackSpace is offering that is based upon a mature OpenStack platform.
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