Rackspace announced today that it will offer paid support for OpenStack, the cloud platform it open-sourced along with NASA, Dell and others. The new support service is called Cloud Builders, and it is staffed by members of Rackspace’s OpenStack team as well as employees of the Rackspace acquisition Anso Labs.
Cloud Builders will offer training, deployment services and ongoing support and management. The service is available starting today. This is the first time Rackspace has extended support outside its own data centers.
This is big news for those building private clouds. There are a few competing open cloud standards – Deltacloud and the NRE Alliance, for example – and commercial support will be a deciding factor in which one becomes dominate. It’s also a way for Rackspace to monetize OpenStack, which will hopefully ensure it has a long future.
Anso Labs plays a key role for Rackspace. The professional services firm helped NASA build the private cloud Nebula. According to The Register, Anso developers were some of the top contributors of code to the OpenStack project. The paper also says that Anso still maintains Nebula.
Between Rackspace and Anso Labs, you’d be hard pressed to find a more qualified support team for OpenStack.
