Why Rackspace open sourced OpenStack

Making TurnKey easy to deploy on as many public and private clouds is an important goal for us. We're going to soon be expanding the number of image formats TurnKey officially support to include more major contenders in this space. We'd also like to establish a mirror network that supports rsync so that service providers will find it easy to get up-to-date images of all TurnKey appliances. By the way, if an rsync mirror is something you would find valuable, drop me a line.

Unfortunately there are too many players in the cloud software space for us to support every single one. It's much easier to put effort into making TurnKey work well with the winning horses. OpenStack is particularly interesting, because as I've said before it is most likely the future of open source clouds.

It was a very interesting move on RackSpace's part to put their weight behind the commoditization of cloud technology. You'd think after all of the effort and money they invested in developing their own cloud technology they'd want to keep it for themselves. Instead they form an alliance with their competitors and decide to give it away.

My take on this is that this is in fact a very smart move, but not necessarily for the official reasons RackSpace made public.

You see, well before OpenStack there was a fury of open source activity in this space and a few years down the road one of these projects (e.g., before OpenStack, Eucalyptus was my favorite candidate) would have inevitably become the "Linux" of cloud. This would have left RackSpace stuck with the costs of developing their own proprietary cloud operating system and robbed them of the ability to ride the wave of free innovation that almost magically happens once an open source project gathers enough momentum.

I think RackSpace realized, hey if it's going to happen anyway, we might as well lead the camp. I suspect this is a strong indicator that RackSpace really do believe their competitive advantage is based on branding, corporate culture (e.g., "fanatical support") and economies of scale rather than software development, which in this case is just a cost they would love to share with the community. They're probably right!

Also, having internal clouds run on the same platform as RackSpace's cloud will make interoperability much easier, unlocking a huge source of revenue as corporations finally begin trusting cloud providers, but not just any cloud provider, to offload (or outsource) their own internal IT infrastructure. Interesting how open source collaboration as a tool for reducing costs and commoditizing key technology components can make sense even to a large profit-oriented company. It doesn't have to be about the ideology, and these days I think it usually isn't - it just makes business cents.