As the co-founder and standard-bearer for OpenStack, Rackspace gets a lot of questions from users, journalists, analysts and vendors — about how we run OpenStack at scale, whether we use upstream code or have forked the project, and how we decide what code to contribute back.

Given that Rackspace runs the oldest and largest OpenStack public cloud in the world, was the first to offer OpenStack private cloud as a service and runs some of the largest private clouds in production, it’s important we address those questions.

In this post, I aim to do that by describing how we operate OpenStack in our public and private clouds, as well as the philosophy that guides our choices. I’ll explain how we decide which projects to include and what to contribute back to the community while running clouds that are hosting hundreds of thousands of instances.

Most importantly, I want to talk about how the approach Rackspace takes benefits both end users and the OpenStack community at large.

This post is a little longer blog than I usually write, but I believe it will be valuable to readers — so sit down with your caffeinated beverage of choice and get comfortable.

To read more about why I think OpenStack as a Service is the best consumption model, please click here to go to my article on the Rackspace blog site.