In a move deemed by some as “batshit crazy,” Rackspace is said to be cloning its cloud services and making it available to the public.  This move to counter the success that Amazon is having with its Amazon Web Services platform (AWS).

Rackspace stated that it will provide telecommunications companies, IT vendors, and hosting companies with OpenStack technology to be able to jump start their efforts and better compete with AWS.

Rackspace CTO John Engates stated that telcos and service providers have “approached us for years about helping them to get into the cloud business — they want the same category of service that we offer specifically around OpenStack … They want to go faster without having to do all the heavy lifting. They see us as uniquely positioned in that we know how to operate OpenStack, we have a public cloud.”

Full Service Suite?

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As part of the initiative, Rackspace will take care of patching, tuning and monitoring the cloud with carrier-grade service level agreements or SLAs aside from specifying hardware and software infrastructure “powered by OpenStack” and handle automated testing and delivery of updates.

“We’ll treat their data centers as our data centers. they’ll all run technology that is interconnected, we can link them all. So customers of one provider will see all the zones of all the providers in this network,” Scott Sanchez, director of strategy for Rackspace, said.

Rackspace has yet to announce which companies have already signed up for the initiative, and many still doubt that it will be able to compete with AWS.

Maybe it’s not all about competing with AWS but “all about OpenStack as a global infrastructure-as-a-service platform available to customers in every geography.”

Rackspace recently offered free “mobile cloud stacks” service which includes LAMP stack, Linux, MySQL, PHP and Apache, alongside MemcacheD, the Varnish PHP accelerator and several undisclosed technologies that facilitate mobile applications.to entice developers.  The mobile cloud stacks will serve as the foundation of mobile applications built on them.

More announcements are expected to come from Rackspace as the OpenStack Summit is just on its first day today.