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Rackspace Hosting Open Sources its Cloud Tools

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Rackspace Hosting Open Sources its Cloud Tools

Rajani Baburajan | July 27, 2009 - TMCnet Contributor

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Rackspace Hosting, a leading provider of hosting solutions, reportedly announced it has open sourced the specifications for its Cloud Servers and Cloud Files APIs under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license.

 
These specifications, which are created by the open community of Rackspace Cloud, is released through Creative Commons, a not-for-profit organization that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain through its free copyright licenses.
 
Rackspace delivers computing-as-a-service, integrating the industry’s best technologies into a flexible service offering, making computing more reliable and affordable. Officials said that Rackspace is dedicated to bringing a coordinated effort to cloud development. For this, they are working with their ecosystem of developers and the broader industry to share what they create with the open source community. 
 
The open-sourced method gives complete freedom to developers to copy, implement and modify the specifications, helping to offer a truly open cloud.
 
Recently, Rackspace Hosting announced the availability of the public beta of its Cloud Servers API.  Cloud Servers, part of the company’s portfolio of cloud services, is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering that provides inexpensive compute capacity that can be instantly sized allowing businesses to pay only for what it uses—as needed, officials said.
 
To encourage cloud development further, Rackspace Hosting has made available its Cloud Files language bindings for Java, PHP, Python, C#, and Ruby under the MIT (News - Alert) license. Officials said that the source code for these bindings is publicly available on GitHub, a public software versioning system, where external developers can now contribute.
 
Rackspace also provides a technical guideline for Cloud Servers language bindings on GitHub. This guideline will help developers build Cloud Servers bindings in a variety of languages, but with a consistent design and feel. A reference implementation in Python is expected soon.
 
“Rackspace is committed to the development of open cloud solutions and standards. We are working quickly to offer a wide range of tools to help developers work with us to create these important building blocks for the cloud industry,” said Emil Sayegh, general manager, The Rackspace Cloud, in a statement.
 
Sayegh added that open source APIs are an enabling factor in making interoperable non-proprietary cloud solutions a reality.
 
According to Rich Wolski, chief technology officer, Eucalyptus Systems, Rackspace’s decision to open source its client-side tools builds confidence among developers to know they can 'see' how the APIs function at a programmatic level. 
 
Wolski added that by providing API tools as open source, Rackspace is assuming a leadership position in helping to achieve cloud interoperability.

Rajani Baburajan is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Rajani's articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Amy Tierney


By Rajani Baburajan


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