Facing fierce competition in the market for cloud services, hosting provider Rackspace has pledged to help its developers by offering a new $300 over six months Developer Discount program in the US and UK.

Upon signup, new developers will find their developer account credited with $50 a month for six months. With $50 a month, developers will get 10GB of SSD-backed storage for $7 a month, 100GB of outgoing bandwidth for $12, and two 20GB Linux server with 512MB of RAM, 1 vCPU, 20GB of disk storage, and a relatively slow public network connection of 20Mbps and 40Mbps for $32.12 a month. Rackspace said the offer is not applicable for the company’s “Cloud Sites” or “Managed Cloud” offerings.

“Developers, hackers, devops people and makers of the digital age – you are the engines of the tech world,” the company said in a statement. “Rackspace is dedicated to making all developers’ lives easier and we’re passionate about supporting collaborative open source projects and communities.”

Specifically, Rackspace wants to make it easier for developers to understand Rackspace’s OpenStack platform, how their applications can interact, in their native languages, with OpenStack and the Rackspace Cloud service, through the use of Rackspace’s APIs and SDKs. The OpenStack API has a ton of capabilities and some things are very simple such as provisioning a storage volume. But there are other things that are more complicated, such as resizing a volume, replicating a volume, or providing stats on usage.

In the past few months, Rackspace has released SDKs for running .Net, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby based programs in a Rackspace OpenStack environment. The SDKs will help developers provide documentation to create code for cloud applications.

The Developer Discount program could come in handy in developing applications that interact directly with cloud resources. As OpenStack gains widespread adoption, Rackspace wants to both foster the adoption of the OpenStack standard and make it easier for businesses to use its private cloud. The company recently rolled out a product certification program for partners using its private cloud service. The Technology Alliance Program designed for hardware and platform vendors selling products and services with Rackspace Private Cloud. The Built For Program is for software vendors building applications that run in virtual machines or vendors that manage the application workloads on a Rackspace Private Cloud.

Rackspace seems to be having a hard time competing with Amazon Web Service, whose business has been growing faster than Rackspace. The company’s public cloud business grew 36.4 percent to $99m last quarter, but in the expense of higher sales and marketing costs. That’s why, programs like Developer Discount can create bigger qualified pool of technical workers on the market. The more developers backing OpenStack – the more Rackspace can sell its vision of a standards-based, open approach to cloud services.