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.'"

Comments

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: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.