Rackspace is now running a developer discount, so I thought I’d give them a try. Once I signed up for the account and got my credentials, here’s how I got up and running with the command-line tools. I got this info from Rackspace’s Getting Started guide.

First, install the OpenStack Compute client with rackspace extensions.

sudo pip install rackspace-novaclient

Next, create your openrc file, which will contain environment variables that the client will use to authenticate you against the Rackspace cloud. You’ll need the following information

1. A valid region. When you’re logged in to your account, you can see the region names. In the U.S., they are:
   • DFW (Dallas)
   • IAD (Northern Virginia)
   • ORD (Chicago)

2. Your username (you picked this when you created your account)

3. Your account number (appears in parentheses next to your username when you are logged in to the control panel at http://mycloud.rackspace.com)

4. Your API key (click on your username in the control panel, then choose “Account Settings”, then “API Key: Show”)

Your openrc file should then look like this (here I’m using IAD as my region):

export OS_AUTH_URL=https://identity.api.rackspacecloud.com/v2.0/
export OS_AUTH_SYSTEM=rackspace
export OS_REGION_NAME=IAD
export OS_USERNAME=<your username>
export OS_TENANT_NAME=<your account number>
export NOVA_RAX_AUTH=1
export OS_PASSWORD=<your API key>
export OS_PROJECT_ID=<your account number>
export OS_NO_CACHE=1

Finally, source your openrc file and start interacting with the cloud. Here’s how I added my public key and booted an Ubuntu 13.04 server:

$ source openrc
$ nova keypair-add lorin --pub-key ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
$ nova boot --flavor 2 --image 1bbc5e56-ca2c-40a5-94b8-aa44822c3947 --key_name lorin raring
(wait a while)
$ nova list
+--------------------------------------+--------+--------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| ID                                   | Name   | Status | Networks                                                                            |
+--------------------------------------+--------+--------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 7d432f76-491f-4245-b55c-2b15c2878ebb | raring | ACTIVE | public=2001:4802:7800:0001:f3bb:d4fc:ff20:06ab, 162.209.98.198; private=10.176.6.21 |
+--------------------------------------+--------+--------+--------------------------------------------------------------------- 

There were a couple of things that caught me by surprise.

First, nova console-log returns an error:

$ nova console-log raring
ERROR: There is no such action: os-getConsoleOutput (HTTP 400) (Request-ID: req-5ad0092b-6ff1-4233-b6aa-fc0920d42671)

Second, I had to ssh as root to the ubuntu instance, not as the ubuntu user. In fact, the Ubuntu 13.04 image I booted doesn’t seem to have cloud-init installed, which surprised me. I’m not sure how the image is pulling my public key from the metadata service.

EDIT: I can’t reach the metadata service from the instance, so I assume that there is no metadata service running, and that they are injecting the key directly into the filesystem.