Rackspace Elastic Engineering Platform

I have closely worked with Rackspace OpenStack  for almost three to four years.

My main use case for Rackspace OpenStack  involves working as part of the DevOps team supporting applications hosted on the Rackspace OpenStack environment rather than being purely an OpenStack administrator. My responsibilities include provisioning infrastructure when required, supporting deployments, troubleshooting environment issues, automating repetitive tasks, monitoring applications, and working closely with developers and operation teams to ensure everything runs smoothly.

In a recent project from about six months back, there was a requirement to set up a private cloud using OpenStack, which required mostly the provisioning of infrastructure using Terraform , Ansible , and a few other pipeline tools. I noticed that Rackspace OpenStack is highly customizable, and every organization's implementation can look slightly different. This means engineers moving between companies may still need to understand how the particular environment has been designed. Capacity  planning is another area that requires careful attention; unlike fully managed public cloud services where scaling can often be almost automatic, private cloud environments require teams to continually monitor available compute, storage, and networking resources to ensure sufficient capacity for future growth. Troubleshooting also requires looking at multiple layers of the stack, as sometimes an application issue may initially appear to be an infrastructure issue or vice versa. Having a systematic troubleshooting approach becomes very important. Over time, my team developed playbooks and standing standard operating procedures that significantly reduce investigation time during incidents.

Many people compare Rackspace OpenStack with AWS , Azure , or Google Cloud ; personally, I don't think it's direct competition because these address slightly different problems. Public cloud providers offer managed services that reduce operational overhead, while Rackspace OpenStack focuses on giving organizations complete control over the infrastructure. If an organization values flexibility, data control, compliance, and private cloud deployments, Rackspace OpenStack is a very good option. If speed of adoption and managed services are primary priorities, public cloud platforms may be easier. Both approaches have their place depending on business requirements. Working with Rackspace OpenStack has helped me grow as an infrastructure engineer, providing deeper visibility into how cloud infrastructure works behind the scenes, strengthening my understanding of virtualization, networking, automation, infrastructure operations, and production support. Overall, I would describe my experience as positive; no infrastructure platform is perfect, and every technology has trade-offs. What matters is whether the platform meets the organization's technical issues and business requirements. In my experience, Rackspace OpenStack delivered a stable, flexible, and reliable private cloud environment. With the right operational practices and automation, it can effectively support enterprise-scale workloads.

The best features of Rackspace OpenStack include that I have full power to design in my own way, unlike public clouds like AWS , GCP , and Azure , where I have less freedom. In Rackspace OpenStack, I enjoy more control over the infrastructure and greater flexibility. It can be deployed on-premises, in Rackspace data centers, or co-location facilities, making it ideal for organizations with strict compliance or data residency requirements. It is built on OpenStack, an open-source cloud platform, making it easier to customize to business requirements. It is designed for enterprise workloads, supports redundancy, and allows for upgrades with minimal service disruption, suitable for mission-critical applications. The best thing I personally appreciate is the capability to quickly provision additional compute, storage, and networking resources, which is beneficial for growing enterprise applications. Additionally, it provides strong automation support; being an API-driven platform, it works well with infrastructure as code tools like Terraform  and automation scripts that reduce manual provisioning and improve consistency. For enterprise security and compliance, it has strong security controls for regulated industries, helping organizations meet compliance requirements while retaining control over the infrastructure. Rackspace provides 24/7 expert support, handling monitoring, upgrades, maintenance, and operational management, which is useful for teams without dedicated Rackspace OpenStack expertise. In my experience, I have integrated this with Kubernetes  for containerized applications.

As the main DevOps team in the complete organization, we handle all automation tasks. From a DevOps perspective, this is valuable because we don't want engineers manually provisioning infrastructure every time a new environment is needed; instead, we define infrastructure as code using tools such as Terraform or Ansible . Once the code is written, the same infrastructure can be created repeatedly with minimal effort and without configuration drift. We set proper standards for setting up the infrastructure, and if any new interns or upcoming engineers want to create similar infrastructure, they can use our modules or other resources we have prepared. Automation integrates well with CI/CD pipelines; for instance, if I want to test an environment, the pipeline can automatically provision the necessary infrastructure, deploy the application, run tests, and then clean up resources after completion. This reduces manual work, speeds up delivery, and ensures every environment is created consistently. An advantage of Rackspace OpenStack is its scalability; as application demands increase, automated workflows can provision additional resources much faster than doing everything manually. Overall, the API-first design and compatibility with automation tools make Rackspace OpenStack a good fit for modern DevOps practices.

Security and compliance are where Rackspace OpenStack stands out, as it is commonly deployed as a private cloud, allowing organizations greater control over their data storage, access, and infrastructure configuration. This is crucial for industries such as healthcare, banking, finance, and government where regulatory compliance and data privacy are major priorities. From a security perspective, Rackspace OpenStack provides role-based access control (RBAC), allowing administrators to assign different permissions to different users or teams. This ensures users access only the resources they need. It also supports network isolation using private networks and security groups, which reduces the risk of unauthorized access between workloads. Data can be protected through encryption while stored or being transmitted. Organizations can integrate Rackspace OpenStack with enterprise identity providers for centralized authentication and access management. Since everything is under the organization's control, security policies can be customized to meet internal standards and regulatory requirements. Security monitoring and auditing can also be integrated into this environment, allowing teams to collect logs, monitor activity, track configuration changes, and generate audit trails, which are useful for compliance reporting and incident investigation. Overall, I think Rackspace OpenStack is a strong choice for organizations that need a secure private cloud and have strict compliance requirements, giving them the flexibility to implement security controls that align with their governance policies while supporting modern DevOps and automation practices.

Rackspace OpenStack has positively impacted my organization in several ways. First, it provides a stable and reliable infrastructure for hosting applications, which improves overall operational confidence because the platform is consistent and allows my team to focus more on delivering application features rather than constantly dealing with infrastructure issues. Another significant impact has been on automation; we integrated infrastructure provisioning and deployment workflows with our DevOps processes, reducing manual effort and improving consistency across environments. This also minimizes human errors and makes deployments more predictable. From a scalability perspective, the platform allows us to provision resources based on project requirements. As application demand increases, we can expand our infrastructure without redesigning the entire environment, which helps development teams get the environments they need more quickly. Finally, with greater visibility and control over infrastructure, troubleshooting becomes more structured; we can monitor resource utilization, identify issues earlier, and resolve incidents more quickly. Overall, Rackspace OpenStack helps improve operational efficiencies, automation, and infrastructure reliability while supporting enterprise applications.

For improvement, I feel the documentation available for setting up and creating infrastructure using Rackspace OpenStack could be enhanced, as I personally find the existing documents are not sufficient for new learners or beginners. We can also work on improving the user interface; the Horizon dashboard is functional, but compared to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, the UI feels somewhat dated. A more modern, intuitive interface with better navigation would enhance the overall user experience, especially for new users. Improving the documentation, including more real-world deployment examples, troubleshooting guides, and architecture best practices, would make onboarding much easier. Faster upgrades would also help; Rackspace OpenStack upgrades can sometimes be complex, so simplifying the upgrade process and minimizing downtime would assist organizations in maintaining their environments more easily. Additionally, improving monitoring capabilities would be beneficial, with advanced monitoring and analytics dashboards providing administrators deeper visibility into performance, capacity, and potential issues without relying heavily on third-party tools. Adding more managed services, similar to what public cloud providers offer, could reduce operational overhead while still allowing customers to retain the flexibility of a private cloud. Lastly, integrating AI could be valuable, with AI-driven recommendations for capacity planning, security monitoring, and automated troubleshooting improving platform management.

I have been working in my current field for almost five years and six months, and from the start, I have focused on DevOps and cloud infrastructure.

My advice for those looking into using Rackspace OpenStack is to first understand business requirements before choosing the platform. Rackspace OpenStack is an excellent choice for organizations needing a private cloud with greater control over their infrastructure and strict security and compliance requirements. However, it is crucial to have a skilled operations or DevOps team because Rackspace OpenStack offers a lot of flexibility, and managing that flexibility requires expertise. I also recommend investing in automation from the beginning; using infrastructure as code such as Terraform or Ansible rather than manually provisioning resources improves consistency, reduces human error, and simplifies scaling. Finally, document your architecture and operational procedures thoroughly, as good documentation eases onboarding, simplifies troubleshooting, and ensures knowledge sharing across the team.

Accuracy and reliability are critical for Rackspace OpenStack's AI capabilities, as AI recommendations can directly impact production infrastructure. I don't think AI should make critical infrastructure decisions completely on its own; instead, it should act as an intelligent assistant providing recommendations while engineers retain final approval for high-impact actions. Ensuring accuracy requires training AI models on high-quality, up-to-date operational data, including infrastructure metrics, logs, incidents, and historical performance. Models should also be continuously validated against real production outcomes as infrastructure evolves. Reliability can improve by implementing confidence scores for AI recommendations; if the confidence level is low, the system should notify engineers instead of taking automated actions. Critical operations such as deleting resources, changing network configurations, or scaling production environments should always require human approval. Organizations should also regularly audit AI decisions comparing them with actual outcomes to measure precision and identify areas for improvement.

Rackspace OpenStack is deployed in my organization as a private cloud for limited sets of resources where I require data to be accessed by only specific teams. I also use public cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure for other resources and configurations. However, for data that demands more security, I limit access to internal teams, including the security team or developers, by deploying those resources on Rackspace OpenStack private cloud.

I am using all three public cloud providers; I have resources and configurations as well as applications deployed on AWS, Azure, and GCP. I would rate my overall experience with Rackspace OpenStack a nine out of ten.

My main use case for Rackspace OpenStack  was for storage, such as cloud drive storage for all the photography and paperwork that we have for the association, and then I also had multiple email addresses associated with it, as I had one and then everybody on the board had their own email addresses as well as some of our section chairs.

The best features Rackspace OpenStack  offers include how you would access the drive, as it was easily accessible, and it was nice that you had the option to make an alias, and we had a decent amount of storage too.

Rackspace OpenStack impacted my organization positively in that the drive helped me keep files in an organized folder, and obviously we needed email addresses to be able to communicate with each other and for outsiders to be able to email us.

Rackspace OpenStack can be improved because it wasn't clear that you have to cancel 30 days before; otherwise they charge you for the month. I didn't really feel there was anywhere I could go if I had questions in order to live chat or reach out to someone; if that exists, it wasn't made apparent to me. Being able to search keywords and having what you're looking for come up, whether it's an email or in the drive, could definitely be improved, and making it work better with cell phones and improving the setup to be more user-friendly would be helpful.

I have been working in my current field of marketing for 13 years, and I have been helping the Massachusetts Paralegal Association for two years.

Rackspace OpenStack was stable; I just wasn't happy with it.

I wasn't pleased with Rackspace OpenStack's scalability; it didn't really fulfill my needs.

The customer support for Rackspace OpenStack was not the best; I would send an email and it would take a couple of days to get an answer, and I don't remember a live chat feature.

When I started with Rackspace, they had Rackspace OpenStack, and I switched to Google Workspace .

I actually switched from Rackspace OpenStack to Google Workspace  after evaluating the options.

Rackspace OpenStack handled my storage and email needs okay; it was a little expensive, and Google Workspace is much cheaper. The organization of the cloud drive didn't seem very new or updated; it almost seemed very outdated, as though that's what a cloud drive would have looked 15 years ago. The search function was horrible on the email addresses; I would do boolean searches or any type of searches, and my emails would never come up. Adding aliases was cumbersome on our main Rackspace account, and it wasn't really the easiest process.

I haven't seen a return on investment since I canceled it and switched to Google Workspace.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing made me think it was a little pricey; Google is much cheaper, and we don't have a very big budget because we're just a small association. It was a couple hundred dollars a month; I think it was only about $100 a month, and then all of a sudden it went up to $250, which is a crazy increase to do all at once.

I chose a rating of six because I just switched to Google Workspace, and it's so much easier due to all the integrations that it has and setting it up, including different accounts, aliases, groups for emails, and having Google Meet right within the same platform. It's really nice, and I have everything all in one place; I really didn't see that opportunity with Rackspace OpenStack, and the search is better when I'm searching for emails.

The accessibility of Rackspace OpenStack was kind of hard to add to iPhone; many of the board members had issues with it when adding it to their cell phones. The way you would add the mail server had many issues, and then if you logged into it with desktop, it would say you didn't open an email yet, even though you opened it on your phone. It wasn't super seamless, so that caused some issues.

My advice to others looking into using Rackspace OpenStack would be to be prepared that they might run into a couple of issues and that it's not the most user-friendly.

I found this interview to be not aligned with picking up on the fact that I canceled it and did not ask specifically why I canceled. My overall review rating for Rackspace OpenStack is six out of ten.

I am the reseller of Rackspace OpenStack , mainly on-premises solutions, not cloud hosting ones. I am still working with Red Hat products. I also use Rackspace OpenStack  as well. I utilize its managed environment feature, referring to the container management.

Nowadays, I find the virtualization module to be very valuable for the Sri Lankan market. The container management solutions are also very good and a futuristic solution.

Rackspace OpenStack's open-source architecture is very futuristic and very valuable, assisting my customers in achieving interoperability through many open-source projects built into this solution, which are very valuable and usable for the customer's day-to-day operations.

Innovation means that the user interface should be more familiar to users, and from my side, I see that some user interfaces are complex compared to other virtualization and containerization products, mostly for the virtualization.

For the optimization level, I mainly expect a good user experience from Rackspace OpenStack's dashboard for resource optimization, where the design and functionality have to be very easy for the user to manage those solutions via their console dashboards.

In my opinion, the main improvements for Rackspace OpenStack can focus on certain gaps available in the primary disaster recovery solutions, which should be developed for a specific customer requirement level like RPO, RTO, and things of that nature. Currently, most of the time, they are focusing on active-active solutions, but some customers are expecting active-passive solutions as well, so they have to focus on those kinds of areas for some customer requirements.

The pricing for Rackspace OpenStack is sometimes not competitive according to other market products, as sometimes the price is high for some components like Advanced Cluster Management (ACM) and Advanced Cluster Security, which are very costly add-ons, not the main license.

I would like to see additional features in the future such as replication technologies, networking, more advanced networking functionalities, and improved user dashboards.

I have been dealing with Rackspace OpenStack for around two years.

I think the product is stable, definitely.

I find it scalable, as Rackspace OpenStack has their features for scalability.

I would rate the technical support by Rackspace OpenStack as good, with knowledgeable support, and I can rate it eight out of 10 or nine.

For competitive products, I usually recommend Rancher  Prime from SUSE or Broadcom VMware instead of Rackspace OpenStack if it doesn't fit my customer's budget.

For the container management solution, I believe that Rackspace OpenStack is the best product in the market right now for its features, levels, and functionalities.

After integrating those applications, I have experienced that it reduced the complexity for those APIs.

I have integrated third-party applications with Rackspace OpenStack's APIs, mostly data protection solutions like Veeam, Commvault, and things of that nature, and Ansible  as well for the automation side.

I would rate this review an eight out of ten.

I mainly use Rackspace OpenStack  for my virtual environment, for the KVM  environment, such as hosting VMs. That is what we use it mainly for. You can say it is just like VMware; we are using Rackspace OpenStack ; however, VMware is on a little higher ground. Rackspace OpenStack is kind of medium to high, you can say, but not high. It is not as good as vCenter.

The most useful opinion about Rackspace OpenStack is that it is very flexible, first of all. It is very flexible and the most important feature is that it is feature-rich. All over the KVM  environment, I have played with many, but Rackspace OpenStack is built on many third-party applications, like Nova, Cinder, and many things. So it supports a lot of vendors, first of all. The far most important point is that it can be certified for the SAP HANA  database.

Most of the things are already available in Rackspace OpenStack. It was easy to integrate a few things, but I did not find much of the backup solution; it is not there. The backup solutions are not proper for it, and that was the main layoff for me. You can say, there were also integration issues, but it depends on what you are trying to integrate. If you are trying to integrate some major products, you will be able to. But for cheaper products, you will not be able to integrate. We tried very hard to integrate a certain backup solution. We used Acronis, and the other one we tried, we worked with them for approximately six months, but we were not able to integrate that properly.

There are two front-ends for Rackspace OpenStack. One is what Core-edge provided us; that is a customized one, which is never finished customizing. The second one is the official one, that is Horizon. Horizon comes in the older version of Rackspace OpenStack, and what we used is currently end-of-life. In that, Horizon was there. In the new version, there is a Skyline dashboard. I do not have any complaints with Horizon, as well as Skyline. Skyline is also good; it is very much improved and very good. People are selling that product as a service, directly on the dashboard without much editing, only some white labeling. So I think the dashboard is very good, the latest one, Skyline.

The advantages are that it is stable; it is very integratable because most of the people will integrate most of the things with it. But new products might have issues. It depends; it is 50-50 on integration, you can say. But it has lots of moving parts, that is a disadvantage. There are lots of resource requirements, such as human resources. Other things like that, you have to constantly train people about it, how to utilize it at L1, L2 levels. Then the end user will not appreciate it as a SaaS platform or as a PaaS platform or as an IaaS  platform. So Infrastructure as a Service , it is a little bit good with Skyline, the new version, but it is still not appealing because they know what they are going through. But Rackspace OpenStack in Virtuozzo is very good. Virtuozzo has created a layer and made it simple.

For Rackspace OpenStack security features, we currently opted for ShapeBlue one, which will be installing CloudStack . ShapeBlue is helping us in training. So, we are moving away from Rackspace OpenStack to CloudStack  because CloudStack has most of the features that we require, and it is also lightweight.

Rackspace OpenStack does not provide that thing. The product has all the things included, you can say like that. But the thing is, if you are a company, if you are a hosting company, you will require at least three to four people with higher expertise to install and get going with Rackspace OpenStack. It is very hard; you have to understand bits and many things about it, how it works. It is not something you just tinker around with. The second thing is we are moving to CloudStack because it comes as just a single package that I can install in a VM and I am done with it. I just need to configure it the first time, and everything, the experience out-of-the-box is very good with CloudStack. But Rackspace OpenStack is very assembled parts, you can say. Would you prefer an assembled PC or would you prefer an HP-provided PC, a branded PC? It depends on you.

The main thing about Rackspace OpenStack is that it is totally built on many modules. It is approximately 30 to 40 modules, you can say. You have to learn and understand that, which there is a very steep learning curve. If I am not wrong, there is a very steep learning curve. There is not one way to install Rackspace OpenStack; there are several ways, approximately three to four ways. But it depends on who deployed it. Suppose a person deployed it in a different style; after one or two years, he got changed, and another person comes. He does not know about that style, then it will be very hard to navigate. Currently, Kolla-ansible, which we have, is very hard to navigate for me. Although it is very easy to install, it is very hard to operate because it works on Docker . So, there are too many moving parts. If you say to me, there are too many moving parts, and the visibility is low on that.

It is very hard to have any issue with it. It is a very stable product.

I am currently using Rackspace OpenStack, and it has been approximately 2.5 years that I have used Rackspace OpenStack.

For stability, I would rate Rackspace OpenStack eight.

For scalability, I would again rate Rackspace OpenStack eight.

I do not think they provide the technical support. I have not taken any vendor management system. I was having Core-edge-related support. Core-edge was building the upper layer and they are also supporting us. In that case also, it is so complex that you will get lost in the contract because it is so vast. What is included in the support, what is not included, I think that will eat you up. So I will give it a five.

I just want to confirm, currently, I am not working with Morpheus  because Morpheus  was taken over by HP.

I am currently working with Rackspace OpenStack. Additionally, I am now also moving from Rackspace OpenStack to ShapeBlue, which is CloudStack.

I am working with CloudStack. Now, we are implementing CloudStack. For the last two years, we worked with Rackspace OpenStack.

We are moving from Rackspace OpenStack to CloudStack due to the requirement of human resources and technicality. There are lots of moving parts in Rackspace OpenStack.

Rackspace OpenStack has three to four setup procedures. Some are very easy, while some are very hard.

I am not currently using HP solutions because we have to drop Morpheus due to our requirement for some customizations, and Morpheus was not entertaining that.

I help my clients with Rackspace OpenStack as a consultant. I work with my clients as a consultant with Rackspace OpenStack. I am not involved in the purchase process of the platform. The pricing for Rackspace OpenStack is free. Rackspace OpenStack is good, but I think it is complicated in its own sense. To be adopted by a company, it is harder to operate, but easier to implement. The final assessment is that it is not that everything is good or bad. There are certain things which are very good, but there are certain things which are very bad, such as the dependency of the person. I would give this review an overall rating of eight.

My main use case for Rackspace OpenStack  involves large data management, as it provides a reliable database service.

A quick specific example of a task where Rackspace OpenStack  helps me is in handling the database and assisting with backups in my organization. It also hosts my applications, managing cloud infrastructure services while I create multiple servers. In my product area, I operate three to four servers, including a development server, testing server, UAT site server, and solution expert server, managing these servers effectively.

The infrastructure level concept is strong, making it easy to handle everything and adaptable for customization based on my organization's specific terms, conditions, and needs.

Rackspace OpenStack positively impacts my organization by making processes easier since I do not need to manage all servers manually because it efficiently manages server operations and maintains proper data, which saves time.

As a beginner, I find some difficulties in understanding Rackspace OpenStack, as it can be complex without a foundational grasp of cloud and networking concepts. To improve, I suggest providing proper documentation aimed at new users or beginners, which would help them understand how public and private clouds operate.

I have been using Rackspace OpenStack since my college study where I had one subject on cloud computing, and in my organization, I have been using it for the last three months.

I advise others looking into using Rackspace OpenStack to have a solid understanding of cloud concepts, as managing these aspects in Rackspace OpenStack requires a good knowledge foundation. I have rated this product a seven overall.