Leading Experience and Expertise: 1 Billion OpenStack Hours Served

What can be accomplished in 1 billion hours? It’s a number so large it’s difficult to put into context. One billion hours, or 114,000+ years ago, humankind was in the early stages of its development, preceding even the earliest human civilizations by more than 100,000 years.

It would be a monumental understatement to say humankind has accomplished a great deal in 1 billion hours. But it is fair to say that in the past 1 billion hours, humans have leveraged our collective experience and acquired expertise to make advancements in every area of our existence.

This holds true even in the very recent world of cloud computing, where nothing can fully replace the experience and expertise that comes from operating a cloud at scale over a long period of time. That’s why we at Rackspace are proud to have reached the significant milestone of 1 billion server hours managing OpenStack clouds.

It’s a milestone that demonstrates our commitment to the OpenStack project we helped start in 2010 and have made a centerpiece of our company’s strategy ever since. Six years later, that commitment and focus has made us:

• The standard bearer and a leader in the OpenStack community.
• The OpenStack market leader with more than 5x the revenue of our closest competitor.
• Creator and operator of the world’s largest OpenStack powered public cloud.
• Operator of some of the world’s largest OpenStack powered private clouds.
• Operator of the world largest developer cloud.

It’s also given us the opportunity to contribute back to the community and to the project in tangible ways, including:

• Extending the scaling capabilities of OpenStack by creating Nova cells based on our public cloud experience.
• Creating the OpenStack-Ansible project so that others in the community can leverage. the best practices we’ve acquired over the years deploying OpenStack.
• Creating the Tempest project which automates QA testing of OpenStack.
• Creating the Magnum project for container orchestration and management.
• Creating the Craton project to automate cloud management at scale based on tools we developed to manage our public cloud.

The experience and expertise that comes with having reached this milestone means Rackspace is best positioned to lead the OpenStack project into the future. Reaching this milestone also means no one has more to offer to help customers succeed with their private cloud deployments than us.

We’ve literally seen it all when it comes to operating and scaling OpenStack clouds and with our managed cloud approach, customers can rely on our 1,000+ OpenStack experts to operate their cloud while they focus on building and running revenue-generating applications.

What might the next 1 billion server hours look like for Rackspace and OpenStack? We want to continue pushing the project forward into new areas of advancement by sharing our expertise with the community and showing how we are able to extend the capabilities of OpenStack at large scale. We’re also committed to driving OpenStack adoption in the enterprise by continuing to improve on the best OpenStack private cloud offering in the industry.

If you are interested in finding out more about what we’ve learned from 1 billion server hours managing OpenStack, we invite you to request a free strategy session where you will have the opportunity to meet with our OpenStack Solutions Architects who can answer your OpenStack questions. You can sign up for a session at https://www.rackspace.com/1billion.