Yesterday, Rackspace Cloud Builders unveiled both their open reference architecture (RA) and a private cloud offering (on GigaOM) based upon the RA.  The RA (which is well aligned with our Dell OpenStack RA) does a good job laying out the different aspects of an OpenStack deployment.  It also calls for the use of Dell C6100 servers and the open source version of Crowbar.

The Rackspace RA and Crowbar deployment barclamps share the same objective: sharing of best practices for OpenStack operations.

Over the last 12+ months, my team at Dell has had the opportunity to work with many customers on OpenStack deployment designs.  While no two of these are identical, they do share many similarities.  We are pleased to collaborate with Rackspace and others on capturing these practices as operational code (or “opscode” if you want a reference to the Chef cookbooks that are an intrinsic part of Crowbar’s architecture).

In our customer interactions, we hear clearly that Crowbar must remain flexible and ready to adapt to both customer on-site requirements and evolution within the OpenStack code base.  You are also telling us that there is a broader application space for Crowbar and we are listening to that too.

I believe that it will take some time for the community and markets to process today’s Rackspace announcements.  Rackspace is showing strong leadership in both sharing information and commercialization around OpenStack.  Both of these actions will drive responses from the community members.