Latest Rackspace developments include .NET SDK, PowerClient – a PowerShell-based management tool – and PHP mobile back-end.
Rackspace has recently added .NET to their portfolio of languages -Java, PHP, Python and Ruby- supported for managing OpenStack cloud infrastructure via APIs. There are two components available to .NET developers: .NET SDK, which includes a C# API along with a reference manual and sample code, and PowerClient, a Windows-based API client built on PowerShell.
The .NET SDK provides APIs for accessing most of OpenStack’s functionality including Identity, Servers, Block Storage, Files, and Networks. For development, the SDK needs .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 or 2012. The SDK comes as a NuGet package or a zip file.
PowerClient contains several dozens of cmdlets addressing the core of Rackspace’s infrastructure management needs: Authentication, Server, Block Storage, Networks and Load Balancer. The PowerClient roadmap indicates Rackspace’s intention to enable support for OpenStack clouds in general by June, and later, they intend to support Monitoring, DNS, Databases and Autoscaling.
InfoQ asked Mitch Robins, a Rackspace Solution Engineer, what are some of the features supported by NovaClient – the default management tool written in Python/Linux - and not yet supported by PowerClient:
- Fixed/floating IP operations
- DNS modification. This is on the roadmap for Rackspace Cloud
- Flavor creation. This is on the roadmap, for OpenStack deployments, not Rackspace Cloud
- Key-pair actions
- Migrations. This on the roadmap, for OpenStack deployments, not Rackspace Cloud
- Keystone operations (such as security groups). This on the roadmap for OpenStack deployments, not Rackspace Cloud
- SSH direct connection. This is on the roadmap for OpenStack and Rackspace Cloud
Another recent development worth mentioning is mobile, Rackspace providing a PHP back-end for mobile applications based on a LAMP stack plus Varnishd, Memcache with extensions or, Alternative PHP Cache. They intend to provide Ruby on Rails and Node.js back-end stacks in the future.