AppFog Announces Support for Rackspace Open Cloud

In case you’ve not been following the news – Rackspace has been one of the foundational powers behind OpenStack. As one of the groups who helped create the OpenStack movement, Rackspace has been instrumental in the success of this project. Seeing as how we at AppFog are also big supporters of OpenStack – a partnership made a ton of sense to us. And given Rackspace’s focus on developers… well… the fit was just perfect.

We are thus very proud to announce our support for Rackspace’s Cloud Servers infrastructure service! Based on OpenStack, Cloud Servers is multi-location solution that can run Public, Private or Hybrid.

With today’s announcement of the availability of Rackspace Open Cloud, including Cloud Servers, developers have a new, production workload ready option for the deployment and scaling of apps. As the largest public cloud implementation of OpenStack so far, Open Cloud is a major step for the industry.

Rackspace is as committed to fighting against vendor lock-in as we are, and Open Cloud demonstrates this commitment.

When we started testing the beta, our CTO John Purrier did one of the coolest experiments yet. He deployed a Ruby app to Rackspace in the US using AppFog, then migrated it to AWS East, then migrated to AWS EU, then migrated it to AWS Asia before finally migrating back to Rackspace in the US. In 7 minutes. Now that is portability!

The portability that OpenStack and AppFog gives developers is just incredible. To illustrate, check out this little video. This is a realtime, not canned, screen capture of Lucas deploying a WordPress instance first to AWS EU and then cloning it to Rackspace OpenCloud. The video is raw, unedited and unaltered.

As you can imagine, we believe that this functionality is the ultimate guarantee of reliability and flexibility – and also gives best protection against lock-in risk. Plus… it’s freaking cool!

Given Rackspace’s proven expertise in customer service and reliability, we believe that adding Rackspace to our existing infrastructure options gives developers the freedom and flexibility that we all want and in fact need.

Want to check it out? Sign up for a free 2GB RAM account and select Rackspace as your infrastructure target! Yeah… it’s that simple.

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