A few words about collaborating with Rackspace

Earlier today, we announced a case study describing some of the work we've been doing with Rackspace in recent months, and this is a good opportunity to add some personal thoughts.

In dealing with Rackspace, we've come to the impression that their reputation as an excellent service provider (and employer) is extremely well deserved. Pretty much everyone we interacted with was enormously professional, brilliant, and passionate about their work. I'm sure you can follow my reasoning about just how exceptional they are when I tell you that even their legal team was and is a pleasure to work with.

And besides that, they have been excellent in driving, and then deliberately letting go of, OpenStack. Troy Toman — one of those delightful Rackers that we had the pleasure to interact with personally — summed it up nicely in his OpenStack Summit keynote from September: they're taking pride in the fact that Rackspace's participation in OpenStack, in terms of relative code contribution, is declining (although I'm rather positive that in terms of absolute lines of code or features added, it's still on the rise, just because OpenStack is growing so darn fast). That's a really strong testament to a platform that has managed to scale corporate walls and create its own vibrant and thriving community.

Rackspace were also kind enough to give us a tour of their Rackspace Open Cloud offering when it first went public, and I would strongly encourage you to take a look if you're currently running on any other public cloud, or planning to do so. They've put together a simple-yet-elegant UI in front of a massive OpenStack infrastructure, and if you're at all interested in the cloud, you should by all means give it a whirl.

Relative to the Herculean effort that the Rackspace team has thrown behind the largest public OpenStack cloud to date, our contribution in the infrastructure HA space was surely a minor one. But it's great to be a part of this. Thanks guys, for the pleasure of being able to work with you.