I'm very pleased about the public beta release of the new Rackspace Cloud API. Rackspace has done a great job with Slicehost since the aquisition and the Rackspace team is very passionate about their work. I have been a Rackspace partner on and off for years and am even in the process of launching a interesting new application into the Rackspace Cloud soon. So, I'm looking forward to digging in deeper and seeing what interesting things may surface.

So, if you haven't checked it out yet, take a look at the API, here's the short list of features from the API developer web site with a few links:

Launch and control Cloud Servers programmatically using a RESTful API
Customize server instances with the ability to dynamically inject files into the file system.
Assign server instances custom metadata using your own key/value pairs.
Reboot servers with soft or hard (power cycle) restart options.
Rebuild servers from any image you specify.
Create custom images and schedule backups of your cloud servers.
Resize servers up or down, choosing from a variety of configurations. Your server instance is copied to a new Cloud Server, with the original server left for a period of time just in case.
Share IPs. Create a collection of servers that can share public IPs with other members of the group.

For a full list of available features, be sure to check out the Cloud Servers development guide.

Now, off to the races!