Rackspace Adds Application Templates To Private Cloud Offering

To help its private cloud customers quickly get working in their OpenStack cloud environments, Rackspace has introduced templates for deploying six of the most popular, widely used open-source solutions on the market.

The San Antonio-based cloud and server hosting provider has posted the application templates alongside the Rackspace private cloud software on GitHub. Future versions of the Rackspace software will incorporate those templates, according to Christian Foster, director of marketing in the Rackspace private cloud business unit.

"The gist of this is we wanted to provide customers a way to easily get started to adding business value in using their private cloud," Foster told CRN.

[Related: Rackspace Adds Four Nines SLA To Its Private Cloud]

The templates allow quick deployment and integration of Magento for e-commerce; Drupal for CMS; Galera for managing database clusters; MongoDB for big data analytics; ELK Stack for deep search and analytics; and Hortonworks HDP as a Hadoop data platform.

The templates "provide our customers a starting point for their private cloud." They can be used as building blocks alongside existing applications, or as examples of best-in-class industry standards, Foster said.

Those six free solutions are just the start.

"There's a lot more to come," Foster said, adding Rackspace plans to offer its customers custom automation stacks by combining templates with DevOps automation services.

The six templates are "our first step to enabling customers right out of the gate to start using things," Foster said.

PUBLISHED NOV. 10, 2014