OpenStack and Rackspace

OpenStack and Rackspace

I suspect that if you find this as exciting as I do, one or both of us need to go out looking for a life. However, OpenStack is nearly here, and Connexions is in the Early Access Program. WooHoo.

OpenStack is in the frankly hilariously named Essex release, and is a collaboration between NASA (yes!) and Rackspace (and now 150 other companies) all of whom bascially want some of Jeff Bezos’ AWS lunch.

Now, I am currently trying to get Jenkins to nicely play with my cloud servers (see Pantry Bell) and it will use the pythonic nova Real Soon Now.

But the real pull is that we will be using rackspace to integrate all the different components involved in the new system, early as possible. The system currently builds the repository and the (old) editor, and I am working on bringing in the new Aloha editor and the webview asap. The sooner we see everything working together the sooner we shall find those great moments of code serendipity.

We have an opportunity as a bunch of Open Source developers to use the first real F/OSS cloud based offering and even influence a little part of its development. I am excited to see where it will go, and excited to see if it can provide measurable benefits to Connexions, either in development simplicity or sysadmin time savings. Interesting Times are ahead.