(ideas below are from 2015-07-20 email about next steps for the reference architecture project)
On the question of who would use a reference architecture: in building the new userguide at https://developer.rackspace.com/docs/user-guides/infrastructure/, I found 2 places where I would have pointed readers to something like that if I could have found it:
in introducing the idea of a core infrastructure "at a glance" https://developer.rackspace.com/docs/user-guides/infrastructure/cloud-intro/core-infrastructure/, a product manager helped us come up with an overview drawing but I think of that as a stub, cut off too soon, an introductory step that ought to lead to concrete details about what these products are really made of and how they usefully relate to each other and why this is the core of something larger
in pointing to use cases as customer stories https://developer.rackspace.com/docs/user-guides/infrastructure/cloud-intro/customer-stories/, I found a varied collection at rackStories http://stories.rackspace.com/customers, but everything there is very high-level, showing what customers have accomplished but not saying much that would help someone who saw a good match for what they hoped to do and wanted to know what it really took to do it; I linked to some other collections there that had some more-technical fragments, but nothing fully explanatory
Find ways to connect the userguide project to the reference-architecture project (https://github.com/rackerlabs/architectures) and other doc about Rackspace cloud architecture (for example, http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/rackspace-open-cloud-reference-architecture, http://www.rackspace.com/en-us/disaster-recovery-planning/architecture, http://www.rackspace.com/blog/4-reference-architectures-to-optimize-your-ecommerce/)
(ideas below are from 2015-07-20 email about next steps for the reference architecture project)
On the question of who would use a reference architecture: in building the new userguide at https://developer.rackspace.com/docs/user-guides/infrastructure/, I found 2 places where I would have pointed readers to something like that if I could have found it: