Rackspace Developer Discount: Sign of the Times
Need more evidence that it's all about developers? This week Rackspace, the San Antonio, Texas-based cloud company and initiator of the open source OpenStack project, reached out to "developers, hackers, devops people, and makers of the digital age" with a discount program aimed at codederos operating in a marketplace full of choices.
The Developer Discount program, unveiled on Tuesday, offers devs new to Rackspace a $50-per-month discount for the service at sign up. The deal lasts for six months, doesn't rollover month to month and applies to data centers in both the U.S. and the U.K. The deal doesn't apply to the company Cloud Sites Web site hosting service or the Managed Cloud hosting services.
The company made the announcement in a blog post by the company's newish open-source community advocate, Jesse Noller, a long-time Python Programmer (he's a core developer of the language and serves on the Python Software Foundation board).
"The Developer Discount program makes it easy for you to chase something you feel passionate about and simply need a place to build and deploy it," Noller wrote. "Regardless of what you make, or want to make, we celebrate and encourage your creativity. That's why Rackspace is dedicated to making developer lives easier. It's what keeps us passionate about supporting collaborative open source projects and communities."
Yes, there's a lot of marketing slobber in there, but there's no mistaking the dev deference. You can also see it in Noller's personal blog post announcing his move to Rackspace in April, a company he noted offers "fanatical support for developers." His and the company goal, he added, was to "Strive to make Rackspace the place where every developer wants to work; make Rackspace services the ones that every developer wants to use. Work to make Rackspace's Open Source projects the best of breed solutions in their areas (such as OpenStack)."
Rackspace is a recognized leader in the cloud hosting market, but it's facing stiff competition these days, from big players like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, and a growing list of smaller players, such as developer fav Digital Ocean. (Netcraft analyzes the "meteoric rise" of Digital Ocean on its Web site). And they'll need the hearts and minds of a lot of developers to keep their lead. That the company knows this is evident in the title of Noller's post: "Developer Love: Welcome to the Rackspace Cloud Developer Discount."
In a previous post I covered a panel of in-the-trenches start-up execs discussing the growing power of the developer. Great insights from some thoughtful people.
Posted by John K. Waters on September 6, 2013