AppFog Partners with Rackspace To Support OpenStack -- ADTmag

AppFog Partners with Rackspace To Support OpenStack

By John K. Waters
August 8, 2012

Platform-as-a-Service provider AppFog recently announced it has joined with cloud hoster Rackspace to make it possible for its users to deploy apps on the OpenStack-based Rackspace cloud, the two companies announced. AppFog's customers will be able to redeploy applications currently running on other clouds to Rackspace with no code migrations, the company said.

AppFog also announced that its solution will be available through the new Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace, a catalog of third-party apps designed specifically or the Rackspace Cloud that launched in July.

Portland, Ore.-based AppFog was founded by web developer Lucas Carlson, co-author (with Leonard Richardson) of Ruby Cookbook: Recipes for Object Oriented Scripting. The company initially billed itself as a PHP-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider, but quickly began supporting Ruby, Python, Perl, Node.js and Java. The company's name comes from the idea of "bringing the cloud down to earth," Lucas said.

In addition to Rackspace, the company supports deployments to AWS, HP and Microsoft Azure.

San Antonio, TX-based Rackspace Hosting, which bills itself as the "open cloud company," initiated the open-source OpenStack project in July 2010 with NASA. Rackspace contributed its Cloud Files storage service to the project; NASA contributed its Nebula compute controller.

OpenStack is made up of several interrelated projects focused on delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution. As the community Web site describes it, the project aims to deliver "solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich." More than 180 companies participate in the OpenStack project, including AMD, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, HP, Intel and Microsoft.

Rackspace officially began offering its hosted services and database on OpenStack earlier this month.

Hewlett-Packard also recently began offering an OpenStack-based cloud storage service, called HP Cloud Object Storage.

About the Author

John K. Waters is the editor in chief of a number of Converge360.com sites, with a focus on high-end development, AI and future tech. He's been writing about cutting-edge technologies and culture of Silicon Valley for more than two decades, and he's written more than a dozen books. He also co-scripted the documentary film Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, which aired on PBS. He can be reached at [email protected].