Rackspace, the erstwhile managed hosting provider who is pushing hard to be an open alternative to Amazon, Microsoft, etc., took a step towards putting some order in their ecosystem with the release of a new portal calledCloud Tools. Rackspace jumped into the Cloud game with an acquisition of a tool for their future ecosystem. They hadJungledisk from the start. With therelease of their Open APIs, more companies joined their ecosystem. The greatest advantage of their APIs is the ease with which it can be integrated and a solid documentation support. One of the companies in the Amazon cloud ecosystem,Enstratus, recently joined the Rackspace ecosystem. After completing the integration, the CTO of Enstratus, George Reese,said the followingabout Rackspace API.

Rackspace really did a solid job designing and (especially) documenting their API. Took us no time to add Rackspace Cloud support.

Rackspace ecosystem is not as big as Amazon’s but they had recently jumped into the field and with their advantage of open API (unless Amazon changes the game by opensourcing their API) and fanatical support, it is matter of time before they capture the imagination of cloud pundits. Rich Miller ofData Center Knowledge points out that there are more than 51,000 cloud computing users and nearly 20,000 managed hosting customers.

Continues @ http://www.cloudave.com

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