(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Hosting provider Rackspace (www.rackspace.com) announced on Thursday that it has open sourced the specifications for its Cloud Servers and Cloud Files APIs under the Createive Commons 3.0 Attribution license, in a move the company calls “a major advancement of its open cloud strategy.”
According to the announcement, developers are now able to copy, implement and modify the specifications.
The company says it worked directly with developers in an open community to create the specifications and has now released them through the not-for-profit Creative Commons organization.
“We really are embracing the idea of open standards and open APIs for our clouds,” Rackspace CTO John Engates told the WHIR in an interview, “We really want the customers to feel like there’s no lock-in at Rackspace. We don’t believe in using technology to hold people hostage. We think that fanatical support and our customer service and our high standards will win people over and keep them at Rackspace. It’s not about locking in to a particular set of technologies.”
According to Engates, one potential outcome of the move is the general adoption of any kind of standard across cloud computing systems.
“We tried our best to look at what was already there that we could embrace,” he says, “but we found that we really needed to do our own API. Given that we had to do our own, we really wanted to make it available to anybody and everybody to either use themselves, or build on top of.”
Along with open sourcing the APIs for its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers products, the company said Thursday that it had also released its Cloud Files language bindings for Java, PHP, Python, C# and Ruby under the MIT license. The source code for the bindings is available at the public software versioning system GitHub (www.github.com/rackspace), along with a technical guideline for Cloud Servers language bindings, which will enable developers to build bindings for Cloud Servers in a variety of languages.
Engates says the potential advantage to Rackspace of opening its APIs is developer mindshare.
“If you really think about who is using public cloud in a big way, its software developers, It’s startups, It’s people that are building in the ecosystem on top of the cloud and It’s SaaS vendors who are using it for their platforms,” he says. “In public clouds, I think the APIs and the openness do matter. I think some of our competitors have been a little bit more secretive about things, and a little bit more ‘closed,’ if you want to use that term.”
“I just don’t think there’s anything bad that can come of it. I think that was the point. If you open it up and you give it away, and make it available. There really is no downside.”
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