On-demand services company rPath has announced the launch of its OpenStack Compute Appliance, a release designed to enable developers to deploy and upgrade OpenStack-compliant cloud applications faster.

rPath uses a combination of version control and a model of the appliance itself to control the set of software to be released. As part of this initiative, rPath will be donating staff time and company technology for a test cloud based on equipment from Rackspace.

This new appliance (downloadable free of charge in either ISO or VMware format) should allow developers to automatically deploy, configure, and update to the OpenStack cloud platform on both physical and virtual infrastructures. The theory here being the provision of a route towards reduced barriers to building and maintaining private clouds in the enterprise.

"While building and deploying OpenStack compute servers has been somewhat of a challenge for the OpenStack dev team, this arduous process is both unavoidable and essential for continuous test purposes," said Brett Adam, CTO and SVP of engineering at rPath. "Since automated build, deployment, and configuration of complex, multi-tier applications that include full OS and middleware stacks is precisely what we specialize in here, we knew that we were in a great position to help."

"Up until this point, there has really never been any type of easily-consumable, up-to-date 'OpenStack appliance' that programmers can simply 'grab and go'," continued Adam.

"We are well on our way to building a continuous integration solution for OpenStack, and are looking forward to hearing feedback from the open source community regarding what additional improvements we can be making to simplify their lives a bit more," he said.