After putting out the public beta of its cloud server APIs last week, Rackspace has now announced it is to disclose the specs for certain of its APIs under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license.
The company is trying to develop a market position where it is seen as one of the most open of cloud services, allowing developers to use and adopt its Cloud Servers and Cloud Files APIs and include cloud resources as part of their open strategy.
Anybody building private clouds, other public clouds, or developing standards is now free to take the Rackspace specification design work and copy it, modify it, or reuse it any way.
The API provides a flexible, programmatic way to control Cloud servers. It means a developer can write code that launches or reboots Rackspace Cloud Server instances, creates custom metadata for servers, injects files into the servers’ filesystems, creates high availability configurations using shared IP groups, or a variety of other tasks.
Rackspace says it is committed to supporting open standards and is one of many on the DMTF cloud incubator group working on a number of standards around cloud.
“We believe in a world of open clouds where customers can migrate, federate, burst, etc. and not be concerned with lock-in,” its official blog stated. “Common APIs are part of that battle, but unfortunately, nothing suitable existed. So, we built our own interface embracing easy to use web service standards like REST.”
It said that by moving to open source the API specification developers can start to distribute, modify, or reuse the API freely. “We don’t know if that will happen, but we at least wanted to make it possible.”
