Rackspace has today announced its acquisition of Cloudkick and all of the company's cloud-server management web applications in a bid to improve its branded "Fanatical Support" offering. Describing Cloudkick's technology as a "cockpit for navigating complex cloud environments," Rackspace is aiming to provide developers and system administrators with a single information and control panel to deploy and manage cloud environments.

Cloudkick's tools are designed to manage and monitor servers across multiple providers from a single dashboard — no matter how large or complex the deployment. That dashboard lets customers manage a hybrid infrastructure, across both multi-tenant virtualized servers and dedicated hardware.

"Until now, the cloud has been about automating hardware and making it more agile and efficient,” said Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer of Rackspace. “But as cloud computing has made it easier to launch servers, companies launch a lot more of them and use many of them inefficiently — and even lose track of some. Cloudkick brings order to that chaos and sprawl."

With this acquisition, Rackspace is hoping to define a new category of hosting in the shape of what it will call the "managed cloud" through superior management tools that will be available directly to customers and also to the so-called "rackers" who serve them.

In the two years since its launch, Cloudkick has grown rapidly and is working with well-known companies such as Mozilla and National Instruments. Cloudkick has been an active member of the OpenStack community, an open-source cloud project founded by Rackspace, and will continue to serve as an option to monitor and manage OpenStack clouds. Rackspace will now broaden its presence in the San Francisco Bay Area, making Cloudkick’s headquarters the latest outpost for delivering its cloud computing services.