StackStorm And Rackspace: Partnership

February 25, 2015

by Evan Powell

We are really excited to share that OpenStack co-founder and managed cloud company Rackspace will start publicly talking about their use of StackStorm at Rackspace::Solve March 4th in San Francisco.

We’ve developed a good working relationship with Rackspace. In fact, Eric Brinkman, product manager of the Rackspace DevOps Automation Service and Caleb Groom, director of Cloud Product Engineering at Rackspace, will be demonstrating StackStorm on March 4 at the Rackspace::Solve event, highlighting the use of StackStorm for autoscaling and continuous integration and continuous deployment.  Eric and/or Caleb will then join us on March 5 in our Online Meetup, during which James Fryman of StackStorm will run through the autoscaling pipeline in more detail.

StackStorm for auto scaling is different than other auto scaling approaches and these differences help in a few ways:

• It’s Cloud neutral. Whether it’s any cloud or no cloud, it does not matter. If we can connect to it and we can connect to CLIs, APIs and GUIs, then we can control it.
• It lets you embrace your legacy. Whether it’s your infrastructure, your tooling, your inherited and difficult to replace systems – your heterogeneous snowflake of wonder – if we can connect to it, we can control it.
• It’s human-centric. Don’t forget the humans – our workflow engines allow us to wrap around your processes for approvals and human check-ins. Thanks to infrastructure as code, you can treat the autoscaling logic in the same way you treat other code. Try that with black box automation vendor A or B.
• It offers ChatOps. Along the same lines, when your automation starts to interact with you via your commonly used tools and especially chat, it begins to be seen as a member of the team. Simple idea, profound in practice.

We’re excited about this partnership because of the talent and experience of the Rackspace team, as well as their market reach and credibility. If you want to join Rackspace in person in San Francisco to see the StackStorm demo and plenty more – such as presentations from their customer Walmart – be sure to register.

The main takeaway here is that large-scale users are finding tangible benefits when using StackStorm.

We at StackStorm are also publishing detailed and technically useful case studies. You can read one on how a large first generation SaaS provider used StackStorm – plus some masterful operational architecture – to boost their agility as measured by deploys per developer per day by over 50x here.

Incidentally, we welcome guest blogs and posts. We need everyone’s input to continue to stitch together today’s heterogeneous environments into highly automated pipelines that remain trustworthy, auditable, and controllable via ChatOps and other systems as well.

So please continue to share your experiences, requests and, yes, bug reports and fixes. You can learn how to do all of that – and how to use StackStorm itself – at our StackStorm Community site.

If you haven’t already, we invite you to check out our product by installing StackStorm and following the quick start instructions — it will take less than 30 minutes to give you a taste of our automation. Share your thoughts and ideas via moc.spuorgelgoognull@mrotskcats, #stackstorm on irc.freenode.net or on Twitter @Stack_Storm. You can also reach me directly on Twitter at @epowell101.