Rackspace Buys Cloudkick For Cloud Management

Rackspace Hosting has acquired Cloudkick, a developer of Web applications for cloud-server management.

Cloudkick offers a dashboard for managing complex cloud environments. The company said, “We are committed to continuing support for multiple clouds within the Cloudkick tools. This means no matter which cloud infrastructure vendor you choose or what data centre you have physical servers in, you can continue using Cloudkick.”

A Single View Of A Complex Cloud

Cloudkick claims its software manages and monitors servers spread across multiple providers no matter how large or complex the deployment. The dashboard lets customers manage a hybrid infrastructure across both multi-tenanted virtualised servers and dedicated hardware.”

“To ‘kick’ things off,” the company said, “starting today, all basic monitoring checks (HTTP, HTTPS, PING/ICMP, SSH, DNS, and TCP) are now 100 percent free on an unlimited number of servers for all our accounts – from the free-forever developer account to our 1,000 server plan.”

The company added that it is already recruiting extra staff for its San Francisco offices but will still adhere to the open source community.

Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer of Rackspace, said, “Until now, the cloud has been about automating hardware and making it more agile and efficient but, as cloud computing has made it easier to launch servers, companies launch a lot more of them and use many of them inefficiently – and even lose track of some. Cloudkick brings order to that chaos and sprawl.”

Earlier this week, Rackspace announced the extension of its managed hosting “Fanatical Support” initiative to its cloud computing services. Cloudkick is the missing link that will enable Rackspace to make good its promise.

“We built Cloudkick to make the lives of system administrators easier,” said Alex Polvi, founder of Cloudkick. “With the support of Rackspace we look forward to fulfilling our vision, while getting our tools directly into the hands of customers as they adopt cloud computing.”

Financial details of the acquisition were not made public.