Erik Carlin from Rackspace sent me a heads up that the new Rackspace CS API is now live. In the email he also noted that they are planning to open source both the Servers and Files API specifications later in a separate announcement.

According to the CS API press release; The Rackspace Cloud solicited feedback and conducted intensive testing with its partners and cloud developers to help ensure that the community shaped the API. With today’s announcement, users now have control panel and programmatic access to the company’s cloud infrastructure services: Cloud Servers, Cloud Files and Slicehost.

The Cloud Servers API will introduce four new features including:

Server Metadata – Supply server-specific metadata when an instance is created that can be accessed via the API.

Server Data Injection – Specify files when instance is created that will be injected into the server file system before startup. This is useful, for example, when inserting SSH keys, setting configuration files, or storing data that you want to retrieve from within the Cloud Server itself.

Host Identification – The Cloud Servers provisioning algorithm has an anti-affinity property that attempts to spread out customer VMs across hosts. Under certain situations, Cloud Servers from the same customer may be placed on the same host. Host identification allows you to programmatically detect this condition and take appropriate action.

Shared IP Groups – While Rackspace has always supported shared IPs, it’s been made simpler with the creation of Shared IP Groups and the ability to enable high availability configurations.

> Press Release is here

> API docs are here

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