At first blush, it sounds like a mystic\u2019s riddle, somewhere in the vicinity of the sound of one hand clapping. But in reality, it\u2019s a setup that makes perfect sense: Rackspace runs its OpenStack cloud in another OpenStack cloud.
\n\u201cWe\u2019re running our cloud inside of a cloud,\u201d John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, recently told Wired.com. \u201cAll of the control nodes that are necessary to serve the customers on our cloud are running in another OpenStack cloud.\u201d
\nThe arrangement is only natural. \u201cIt\u2019s a better way of doing things,\u201d Engates said. \u201cWe\u2019re merely eating our own dog food. The application we\u2019re offering to customers is running on that same application.\u201d
\nOpenStack is a way of pooling resources from a vast collection of machines, including processing power and storage space. Rather than running your software application on a particular server, you run it on OpenStack, a platform that spans hundreds of servers, and this platform can grab you as much processing power as you need, whenever you need it. This makes it easier to launch applications, but it also makes it easier to expand or \u201cscale\u201d them \u2013 to reach more users with more servers. And when a server fails, the platform is smart enough to move the machine\u2019s work to a new one.<\/p>\n