SD Times reports that Rackspace has bought Cloudkick, a cloud management and monitoring software company.   It’ll be interesting to see how this stacks up against the capabilities that Red Hat acquired with Makara.

Rackspace, as I’ve written elsewhere, is one of the cofounders of OpenStack, the open-source cloud computing platform project that draws substantially from NASA’s Nebula project. It’s doubtful that Cloudkick will be integrated into OpenStack, but it’s probable that Rackspace will use Cloudkick to instrument its own implementation of the KVM-based, Amazon AWS -compatible-ish cloud platform to make it kinder and gentler for cloud hosting customers to monitor and manage their virtual platform services.