Rackspace Is Back With A Seat On The OpenInfra Foundation Board

Rackspace, one of the original creators of OpenStack, has been welcomed back into the fold with a seat on the Board of Directors for the OpenInfra Foundation, which oversees the project after apparently losing interest for several years.

OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure platform, had its roots in a joint project between Rackspace and NASA back in 2010, with the pair turning over responsibility for it in 2012 to the newly formed OpenStack Foundation (now the OpenInfra Foundation).

Rackspace went through a rough patch a few years ago after being bought up by investment house Apollo Global Management then being returned to the stock market again in 2020. The debt-burdened company that emerged decided that a focus on cloud consultancy and professional services for clients using public clouds like AWS was a better bet than being a cloud provider itself.

Now as a Platinum Member of the OpenInfra Foundation and appointed Josh Villarreal, Rackspace's general manager for OpenStack private and public cloud, to the foundation's Board of Directors.

The company also claims to have reaffirmed its longstanding commitment to OpenStack with the recent launch of Rackspace OpenStack Enterprise, a fully managed distribution of the cloud platform that it says is built to ensure critical workloads perform at scale.

So it's not that Rackspace had turned its back on OpenStack, as our partner site The Next Platform explained, just that it had withdrawn to some extent from its commitments to the foundation in recent years.

"Rackspace believes in choice and in providing enterprises with open source alternatives to proprietary platforms, and we want OpenStack to be the premier choice among those options," Villarreal said in a statement.

He insisted that the company will again be actively contributing to many OpenInfra projects and becoming a larger, more involved ambassador for OpenStack, making use of Rackspace's global presence and network of ecosystem providers to advance the cloud framework.

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Villarreal also said that the company saw an opportunity in Broadcom's takeover of VMware, which has led to dramatic price hikes for some customers, and a recent report suggested that more than half of VMware users are looking to find other platforms.

"We have many VMware customers that are interested in shifting to an alternative approach, and we are eager to show them how OpenStack and Kubernetes can be a great solution for them," he commented.

However, enthusiasm for OpenStack has faded since the early days, when those backing the platform expected it to take a significant share of the private and public cloud markets.

This was partly because the open source framework proved difficult to deploy and maintain, and many enterprises instead drifted towards on-premises versions of public clouds, such as Microsoft Azure Stack, that are more or less turnkey and offer hybrid cloud capabilities.

A report in 2022 found that much of the growth in OpenStack adoption was coming from telcos, using it as a platform for hosting virtualized network functions in new-build infrastructure.

Rackspace said it is one of the largest OpenStack cloud providers in the world, and has contributed more than 5.6 million lines of code to the project. It claims to operate more than 140 private OpenStack clouds and has 350,000 nodes under management by a dedicated team comprising more than 150 OpenStack experts and 50-plus Kubernetes administrators. ®