I am pleased to annouce my very first open source project hosted at github. The project, called Rackspace Cloud PHP Library is a simple, single PHP file to easily make Cloud Server API calls. Rackspace have not yet released any libraries for their API, possibly because it is still kind of in beta. If they do, I believe there will be of little use for my project, but right now, it has value.

So what was my motivation for this?

Well the Rackspace Cloud Management Console is severely lacking in features. Things such as creating an image of a server (just like you can in AWS EC2), and sharing an IP address between servers (something you cannot do in EC2 – an IP address can only be attached to a single instance at a time). It is this second feature that I am most interested in because it means I can use a virtual IP address (floating IP) to create a HA (highly available) “cluster” of Tomcat servers. I plan on using keepalived to do the IP switching, and Apache with mod_proxy_balancer and mod_proxy_ajp to talk to multiple Tomcat servers. Without reading the poorly written API documention and learning that I could create a shared IP group, I would not have known this was possible.

This project is very much a work in progress, and what is in there now represents only about 8 hours of work. I welcome any feedback, and anyone else who wants to join.