Understanding the Difference: Rackspace OpenStack Flex vs. Rackspace Cloud

For those using Rackspace services, you may have heard of theRackspace Cloud platform or our Rackspace OpenStack Flex platform. While they both offer public cloud-based multi-tenant infrastructure, they’re built on different underlying platforms, architecture, and OpenStack versions. This document is meant to highlight and understandsome of the key differences in the two platforms.

Platform Foundation

• Rackspace Cloud
  Launched years ago, this platform is proprietary and built using Rackspace's own custom technology stack but based around various versions OpenStack.

• Rackspace OpenStack Flex
  Built to be more in-line with a single modern version of vanilla OpenStack, an open-source cloud platform. This allows more flexibility and compatibility with modern cloud-native tools and upstream OpenStack documentation.

Terminology

While there are many differences, there is a lot of similarity. Unfortunately, the two platforms do not always make use of the same terminology. As a result the terminology used for what is ultimately the same component may differ between the two platforms. Below is a table showing some of the key terms that you may be familiar with and what they are called on each platform.

Know the Pros and Cons of Each Platform

Both platforms offer a robust array of products and services. It's important to understand the availability of features and services on each of the platforms. The tables below outline some of the details on each platform.

Rackspace Cloud

Rackspace OpenStack Flex

Migration and Future Focus

Since we are continuing operate, maintain, and make slight improvements to our Rackspace Cloud platform, it is perfectly fine for customers to continue using its products and services. However, customers should be aware that they can build new projects out in Rackspace OpenStack Flex without interruption to any existing Rackspace Cloud workloads. This means customers can slowly migrate their workloads and spin up new projects on Racksapce OpenStack Flex to take advantage of the better performance, more modern tooling, and increased flexibility.

To see more about how to access and plan your migration to Rackspace OpenStack Flex, check our guides out here:

Accessing Rackspace OpenStack Flex
Planning a Migration to Rackspace OpenStack Flex

Summary

In summary, while we continue to operate, maintain, and improve on our Rackspace Cloud platform - focus on major improvements and new offerings will shift towards Rackspace OpenStack Flex.