Rackspace, a cloud computing services provider, has announced the unlimited availability of Cloud Databases and Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack, along with a new control panel.
The new cloud offerings are backed by Fanatical Support, and allow customers to start using public, private or hybrid hosting tools on the production-ready cloud to deploy their applications in a Rackspace data centre or another data centre of their choice.
Application developers and IT organisations can use the new cloud products that will help them build, test and deploy applications in the cloud for the first time without being locked-in, said the company.
Rackspace VP of Technology Nigel Beighton said the new Open Cloud will offer an alternative to the proprietary clouds of other major providers.
"Among other things, it means that cloud users have more choice and flexibility and our customers can avoid costly vendor lock-in. Our new Open Cloud is production-ready at scale and available to tens of thousands of customers," added Beighton.
The open-cloud portfolio from Rackspace includes Cloud Servers and Databases, Cloud Files object storage with a content delivery network, Cloud Sites platform as a service for .NET and PHP, load balancers and monitoring.
The MySQL Cloud Databases is designed to run databases in public cloud environments, said the company.
The new control panel tags servers, databases, and websites to identify and organise infrastructure elements; searches by name, tag, and IP address; filters lists to find a server; uses action cogs to display contextual menus of most-used actions; and offers dynamic feedback for real-time status on the infrastructure.
Customers can now choose the platform for their applications by realising the power of hybrid computing through RackConnect, which provides integration between public and private clouds within Rackspace.
