“Rackspace is defined by service to our customers,” said Adrian Otto, distinguished architect at Rackspace, Inc., defending the company’s decision to support MS Azure. “In the Microsoft space, customers love Azure.”

As one of the cofounders and long-time leaders in the OpenStack Foundation, Rackspace wants to extend its vision to allow customers to experience Rackspace’s support experience on whatever infrastructure they choose. The choice depends on the customer’s needs.

Speaking with Jeff Frick cohost of @theCUBE, during OpenStack Silicon Valley 2015, Otto discussed the collaboration between Rackspace and Intel Corp. He said that it is “more than developers working together. It is the largest test cluster ever put together for OpenStack” and that they are both committed to OpenStack as an innovation driver.

Describing Rackspace’s Magnum project as “Containers as a Service experience for customers,” Otto said that customers can trust Magnum to be a multi-tenant solution that allows isolation: “Magnum is a way to orchestrate your container system in a way that is safe.”

Imperative vs. declarative

Otto defined the difference between imperative and declarative systems, as well as how each different system appeals to different customer needs. A declarative system requires specifying just the result, and therefore the instruction set is simple. An example of this is Kubernetes, an open-source orchestration system for Docker containers. Imperative is the opposite and requires a more complex instruction set, which may be more appropriate for some customer needs. An example is Docker Swarm, native clustering for Docker.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the OpenStack Silicon Valley 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE