Rackspace opens its cloud

Third Pipe law of the cloud #1: The cloud wants to be open.

Rackspace, the web hosting company that is trying to morph itself into a utlity computing provider has just taken a step in the right direction to make it happen. By opening its API’s, Rackspace will make it’s cloud offering useful to the developer community. It’s kind of hard to imagine being successful the in the utility business without the support and involvement of developers.

Rackspace said today that it will release the APIs for its Cloud Servers product, which provides on-demand, per-instance-based computing. Releasing the APIs means a variety of companies — such as RightScale — will be able to build products and development platforms using Rackspace’s cloud without going through its control panel to manually allocate the necessary servers. This helps bring Cloud Servers, which Rackspace acquired through its purchase of Slicehost last year, into the same league as Amazon’s EC2, which already allows developers to build platforms and management products on Amazon’s cloud through its own APIs. (GigaOM)