Last year Rackspace said it planned to support OpenStack distributions from third parties as part of what was called Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition. The offering included Rackspace-defined reference architectures for building private clouds plus specified hardware and software options that were compliant with the architectures. If businesses used the reference architectures and the specified hardware vendors, they could sign up for Rackspace’s support services. But that was last year, and times have changed.