Rackspace Flips, Won't Support Third-Party OpenStack Distros

itwbennett writes "Last year, Rackspace planned to support third-party OpenStack distributions as part of its private cloud offering. That was then. 'Things have evolved quickly as enterprises start evaluating their options in the cloud generally and the OpenStack market specifically,' said Jim Curry, general manager of Rackspace Private Cloud. Customers, it seems, want to run a cloud model internally that 'looks and feels like what Rackspace delivers in the public cloud. To deliver that experience, we needed to develop software that deploys an OpenStack cloud that Rackspace can operate and support.'"

Hey you

[ozduo]

get off of my cloud! Mick said it all.

So what?

[SomePgmr]

So... they won't be selling support services for your privately hosted and operated, DIY OpenStack "cloud" implementations?

If I'm understanding that right I'm not sure that's news, even if it does say OpenStack in the title.

So why support OpenStack then?

[Virtucon]

This more sounds like "We tried to play in the Open space where our cloud services could be more easily integrated with third party tools. We then discovered that we could just be forced into becoming a commodity player and we don't want that." What this means for customers is that Rackspace Cloud Services will become a closed framework that will purport to be "very easy to manage" but you won't be able to use any third party management solution tools to deploy more efficiently and to manage availability without going through our stack.

Next I expect to hear that they'll drop support for OVF because they "won't be able to deliver a robust experience for imported virtualized environments."

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

No, this isn't related to The Rackspace Cloud -- the public cloud services Rackspace offers. It's specifically relating to Private Cloud offerings at Rackspace. Two totally different things and different divisions of the company, in fact. What this means is that Rackspace will support Open Stack running on other's equipment -- but the flavor of Open Stack is limited. Just like Red Hat won't support Suse or Debian.

Re:

[Junta]

Even if distinct divisions, it's going to be related. If you take it at face value, they are claiming the common brand of "Rackspace" is expected to mean something and this change is specifically to make their offering more what one would intuitively expect. I suspect that this is probably more about avoiding a scenario where Rackspace advances the state of Openstack too fast. The faster Openstack matures, the less value their proprietary add ons provide. I've seen this repeatedly in the corporate open

Re:So why support OpenStack then?

[postbigbang]

Your subject line question is best answered by others that have jumped into the OpenStack framework with products and support whose name isn't Rackspace.

Although Rackspace is seemingly closing their turf to competition, any reasonable customer outcry will have them doing a 180, and with good reason. They want to flip the bird at Citrix, fine-- Citrix can make a fine target. But it's not a closed framework, only the realization that overly broad support could distract them by costing them lots of $$ to reasonably support difficult stuff. I think it's a reasonable stop on RackSpace's part, although they could have been wiser about how they went about it.

Re:

[dave562]

I agree. While I fully believe that there are many at RackSpace who fully embrace the idea of OpenStack and the philosophy behind it, this situation seems like the classic case of idealism meeting business realities. Like any company, RackSpace wants to deliver a good product and a good user experience. It is much easier to do that when a company can focus support staff on a fixed offering. The reality is that resources are limited, and a company that tries to be everything for everybody is going to qui

Re:

[postbigbang]

I can see a "skunksworks" division, the prototype-farm, or something similar. Either no support, or heavy premium. It could be easily isolated and even VLAN partitioned off their main grid.

The skunkswork potential of AWS has made Amazon a small fortune, and I have no idea whether it's caused plausible destabilization of the AWS services offering. But it has a very nice "cool" factor. Rackspace, while "cool" in some ways, is a more hardened model. I can see why it would be reasonable to keep science projects

And yet the commits keep coming in...

[troyer]

This is an internal support decision. As a customer of RCB, do you care if your private cloud is built on the Fedora packages or the Ubuntu packages? You don't manage it at that level, nor at the OS level, so what does it matter? As long as it meets the branding and operational requirements (ie, supports the proper APIs, etc) you have an OpenStack cloud and they don't have an exponentially growing support matrix.