I disagree with this being an admission of Rackspace losing, and think it's more that Rackspace is finally embracing the ideals internally communicated for over

I disagree with this being an admission of Rackspace losing, and think it's more that Rackspace is finally embracing the ideals internally communicated for over a decade now -- Rackspace isn't a technology company, but rather a service company that heavily leverages technology. The cash cow at Rackspace isn't running servers or even VMs in a data center. It's providing management of those resources. It's also woth noting AWS is only the latest 3rd party RAX supports, following Azure, Office365, and Google Apps. It's quite likely other environments are supported in one-off arrangements.