July 24, 2009 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – In a major advancement of its open cloud strategy,
Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE:RAX), the world’s leader in hosting, has announced it has open sourced the specifications for its Cloud Servers and Cloud Files™ APIs under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license. Developers are now free to copy, implement, and modify the specifications, helping to enable a truly open cloud.
The Rackspace Cloud™ worked directly with developers in an open community to create the specifications and has now released them through Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain through its free copyright licenses.
"We welcome Rackspace’s decision to provide their client-side tools as open source to the community,” stated Rich Wolski, Chief Technology Officer, Eucalyptus Systems Inc. “It builds confidence among developers to know they can 'see' how the APIs function at a programmatic level. Moreover, by providing their API tools as open source, Rackspace is assuming a leadership position in helping to achieve cloud interoperability."
As part of its ongoing vision to open the cloud and speed cloud development, the company has also made available its Cloud Files language bindings for Java, PHP, Python, C#, and Ruby under the MIT license. The source code for these bindings is publicly available on GitHub, a public software versioning system, at http://github.com/rackspace, where external developers can now contribute. Rackspace has also produced a technical guideline for Cloud Servers language bindings which is also available on GitHub. This guideline will enable developers to build Cloud Servers bindings in a variety of languages, but with a consistent design and feel. Rackspace expects to offer a reference implementation in Python soon and is aware of Ruby, Perl, Java, and Twisted Python Cloud Servers bindings that are in the process of being developed.
Rackspace’s commitment to openness extends to its work with the community and expects to continue to expand the range of language bindings as developers provide them and work with developers to help ensure they are notified quickly of new features and updated technical specifications.
"It's great to see Rackspace push the movement forward by getting more code into the hands of the community" stated, Alex Polvi, CEO, Cloudkick, a leading cloud management platform developer. “We are thrilled to see the company moving so quickly and proactively to promote an open cloud.”
“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. “Rackspace is dedicated to bringing a coordinated effort to cloud development. We are working directly with our ecosystem of developers and the broader industry to share what we create with the open source community. We believe open source APIs are an enabling factor in making interoperable non-proprietary cloud solutions a reality.”
