Rackspace acquired Cloudkick to add its Web portal for managing servers in the cloud as well as in data centers to the Rackspace cloud computing portfolio.
Rackspace will acquire Cloudkick, developer of a cloud-server management
portal, to expand its cloud monitoring portfolio, Rackspace confirmed on Dec.
16.
With cloud computing, organizations can quickly and efficiently launch new
servers, but in the automated cloud environment organizations can end up using
server resources inefficiently and can "even lose track of some,"
said Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer of Rackspace. "Cloudkick brings
order to that chaos and sprawl" and makes cloud computing "more
powerful with less expense," he said.
Cloudkick creates Web applications with all the information and controls in
one dashboard, helping developers and system administrators deploy and manage
their cloud environments, said Rackspace. The Web-based dashboard is like a
"cockpit" with instruments and controls that provide information
about all the servers in the organization, even for a hybrid environment that
includes both multitenant virtualized servers and dedicated hardware or cloud
server environments running across multiple providers.
Cloudkick provides "robust cloud health" information, and enables
automation around deployment and scaling, said Moorman.
Cloudkick is currently cloud-agnostic, and works whether the service is from
Rackspace, Amazon Web Services or any other provider. Rackspace will continue
to make the tool available directly to customers, and Cloudkick customers will
continue to be able to use the Web portal to manage non-Rackspace environments,
Cloudkick
wrote on its blog.
"We are committed to continuing support for multiple clouds within the
Cloudkick tools," Cloudkick wrote.
To support the momentum that Cloudkick has created, Rackspace will continue
to use the Cloudkick brand, a Rackspace spokesperson told eWEEK.
Cloudkick's team has big plans post-acquisition. The monitoring and
management tools will become more sophisticated, "capable of keeping an
eye on, literally, entire clouds at once," Cloudkick wrote. The user
experience will become deeply integrated into existing and new Rackspace
products, according to the blog.
The acquisition expands Rackspace's team and product portfolio to make IT
infrastructure management "more seamless across various platforms,"
said Moorman.
Rackspace will integrate Cloudkick's product into Rackspace Cloud so that
the "superior management tools" are available to "Rackers"-Rackspace
customers-the company said. Cloudkick customers will also gain access to
Rackspace's "Fanatical Support" service and additional products,
Cloudkick said.
"We built Cloudkick to make the lives of system administrators
easier," said Alex Polvi, founder of Cloudkick.
As a result of the acquisition, all basic monitoring checks, including HTTP,
HTTPS, PING/ICMP, SSH, DNS and TCP, are now
"100 percent free" on an unlimited number of servers for all
accounts, said Cloudkick. This free feature allows administrators to perform
"any amount of basic checks" on an "unlimited number of your
servers" on any cloud and data center, from a single interface, Cloudkick
wrote.
The accounts range from the "free forever" developer plan to the
1,000-server plan, according to the blog post. While the current offerings will
remain the same for the "foreseeable" future, no decisions have been
made about keeping the "free forever" accounts for the long-term
future, said the Rackspace spokesperson.
The Cloudkick product road map is in ongoing development and will be closely
aligned with its integration into the Rackspace portfolio, according to the
Rackspace spokesperson.
Cloudkick, a San Francisco-based startup, has more than 1,500 customers and
its tools have been used on more than a million servers, according to
Rackspace. The customer list includes Mozilla and National Instruments.
Cloudkick is also an active member of the
OpenStack
community, an open-source cloud project jointly led by Rackspace and NASA to
foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability.
Originally a managed hosting provider, Rackspace has been focusing on cloud
computing and hybrid hosting recently with Rackspace Cloud and the
CloudConnect
service. The company also announced
Cloud
Servers, a managed cloud offering, earlier this week. With Cloud Servers,
customers receive proactive monitoring of cloud computing environments and
troubleshooting services.
Cloud Servers includes operating system and application infrastructure
support, including Microsoft Windows, Ubuntu Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
CentOS 5.5, Apache, MySQL, PHP, .NET/IIS and
Microsoft SQL Server Standard Edition 2008 R2.
Rackspace will also expand its presence in San Francisco
by turning Cloudkick's headquarters into "the latest outpost" for its
Fanatical Support services, the company said. Cloudkick currently has 12
employees but said it is hiring new staffers.
The acquisition closed Dec. 15. Financial details were not disclosed.
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