Rackspace gobbles Exceptional Cloud Services for Redis smarts

Just a month after chowing down on MongoDB provider ObjectRocket Rackspace is announcing plans to devour another company, this time gobbling up a Redis hoster Exceptional Cloud Services.

The folks at the Texan cloud company just can't get enough NoSQL, and Thursday's acquisition sees them absorb a team familiar with both Redis and online error reporting.

Redis is a fast open source key-value store designed for large datasets with lots of transactions. It frequently faces off against Cassandra and CouchDB and comes out favorably in terms of access speed, though it lacks some multi-datacenter capabilities.

As per the terms of the acquisition, Rackspace will acquire Exceptional Cloud Services' three main products: error tracker and aggregation services Exceptional.io and Airbrake.io, along with Redis hoster Redis To Go.

ECS's development and product manager teams will move into Rackspace's cloud monitoring office in San Francisco, and the company's sales and support teams are being asked to move to Rackspace's hub in San Antonio.

All three of ECS's businesses will continue to be run in a standalone format, but Rackspace hopes to use the company's Redis expertise to add to its own services as well.

It's likely that the error tracker and aggregation services will get hooked up to Rackspace cloud monitoring over time, while the company has more ambitious plans for Redis.

"We've been doing quite a bit of evaluation of cloud-utilized datastores," Bret Piatt director of Rackspace's corporate development and strategy, told The Register. "The ObjectRocket team was looking at building their own Redis service to go along with the ObjectRocket service – this [acquisition] is a chance to accelerate that. We're very excited about those two groups working together very closely."

So, with Redis and MongoDB due to make their way into the Rackspace cloud proper, what other technologies are catching the web hoster turned cloud whisperer's eyes?

Piatt admitted that continuous integration technologies like Jenkins and Garret are of interest to the cloud provider as well.

"Getting these technologies into a multi-tenant as-a-service offering is something that would be very valuable to developers, and something that Rackspace would be interested in," he said. Get that, CloudBees?

Financial terms for the deal were not disclosed, as the cost of the acquisition was "non-material", Piatt said - legal speak for coming in just low enough that Rackspace isn't legally required to disclose how much money changed hands. ®