Including Everything Blog

Posts Tagged ‘cloud’

Rackspace has been building and supporting Microsoft solutions for years. Now, The Rackspace Cloud is marrying the power of our on demand Cloud Servers offering with our expertise in Windows hosting by bringing enterprise-class Windows to the cloud. Launching early in 2010, the Cloud Servers for Windows Beta will be released specifically so we can gather early feedback from users and have it drive development of features. We have made it a priority to deliver the Cloud Servers for Windows Beta the way it is meant to be delivered- 100 percent customer driven.

If you want to be one of the first to get your hands on the Cloud Servers for Windows Beta, sign up at http://rackspacecloud.com/beta.

Microsoft Backed: Cloud Servers for Windows is based on a Microsoft-supported hypervisor that is part of the Server Virtualization Validation Program.

This means that:

• Customers can benefit from the support provided by Microsoft as part of the regular Windows Server technical support framework
• Customers can benefit from the support provided by Microsoft for subsequent service packs
• Customers will enjoy faster time-to-market releases of Windows versions on The Rackspace Cloud

Sign up for the upcoming Cloud Servers for Windows Beta >> http://www.rackspacecloud.com/beta

Anyone that signs up will also get updates on our progress as we move towards our public beta launch in early 2010. Get yourself on the list today!

About The Rackspace Cloud
The Rackspace Cloud provides on-demand scalable website, application and storage hosting backed by Fanatical Support®. Through its suite of cloud solutions, Cloud Sites™, Cloud Files™ and Cloud Servers™, The Rackspace Cloud enables astute developers and IT managers to minimize the hassles, upfront investments and high costs associated with dedicated hardware while offering the ability to easily scale hosting resources. For more information about The Rackspace Cloud, visit www.rackspacecloud.com or call 1-877-934-0409.

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leader in hosting and cloud computing and is ranked #43 on FORTUNE Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to work for in the United States for 2009. Rackspace provides its customers with Fanatical Support ® in delivering their portfolio of hosted IT services, including Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing and Email and Apps. For more information, visit www.rackspace.com.

Rackspace announced on their blog today that they’re sending out free t-shirts to those that link to them using the below information. Give it a shot to receive a free t-shirt from the world’s leading cloud services provider.

Link and get your t-shirt now: http://www.rackspacecloud.com/tshirt

Here is a cool customer, Michael Fidler, in his Rackspace Cloud T-shirt!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rackspacecloud/3965141868/

About The Rackspace Cloud
The Rackspace Cloud provides on-demand scalable website, application and storage hosting backed by Fanatical Support®. Through its suite of cloud solutions, Cloud Sites™, Cloud Files™ and Cloud Servers™, The Rackspace Cloud enables astute developers and IT managers to minimize the hassles, upfront investments and high costs associated with dedicated hardware while offering the ability to easily scale hosting resources. For more information about The Rackspace Cloud, visit www.rackspacecloud.com or call 1-877-934-0409.

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leader in hosting and cloud computing and is ranked #43 on FORTUNE Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to work for in the United States for 2009. Rackspace provides its customers with Fanatical Support ® in delivering their portfolio of hosted IT services, including Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing and Email and Apps. For more information, visit www.rackspace.com.

So a couple days from the last outage, here we go again with Mosso.  At this point, I have executives knowing about the issue and I’m pulling our site away from Mosso.  We host newsletter content, portfolios and other things that need to be “up”.  Having content linked from an HTML newsletter go offline 10 minutes after sending a newsletter mailing sucks, and that’s happened to me before with Mosso.

Yes, pun was intended.

I have serious doubts about the “cloud” computing concept recently and that it’s a failed concept.  We have yet to see a successful execution of the cloud hosting idea to the point where there is a stable solution in place with such a level of redundancy that applications and websites are not down for any reason.  I’ve experienced outages with Mosso lately that I’ve become discontent with.  The reasoning behind choosing a company like Media Temple, Mosso or Amazon EC2 services is so that you are not experiencing downtime…ever.  

I’m stuck in a difficult place, because I realize the outage discovery phase’s necessity in determining a cause of failure, however, it’s been hours and nobody’s found anything…that sorta causes you to wonder if the idea of cloud computing really works (or at least if it’s been implemented correctly at the datacenter layer).  I know that things don’t just break on their own typically, and so I’m curious if someone rolled out an update that went bad, a switch dead (hey, hardware fails – I get it).  My next question would be: “why did they roll it out before testing in a beta environment?”.

I have optimistically waited for stability in the Mosso cloud hosting service that we’re unfortunately realizing is not there.  Maybe someday down the line it will be, but we’re faced with a scenario where I spoke up for Mosso to sell it to us internally since I have long-favored the Rackspace brand.  I figured that with Rackspace’s financial and infrastructure backing, that it might come with the same types of safety nets we’ve become used to with Rackspace in terms of high availability application hosting.

I’m not normally one to pull the plug inadvertently, but this has become somewhat habitual (8 incidents within the past 7-day week).  Those aren’t exactly excellent percentages.  I think instead of the SliceHost purchase and rolling out of the CloudFS service, Rackspace should be focusing on the stability of the current idea/concept of cloud hosting to make it rock solid before presuming to add more services to a foundation that hasn’t proven itself as 100% stable.

I have a lot of love for the Rackspace family and have been working with their teams both directly and indirectly for 7+ years.  I don’t intend to bow out completely, but I’m not sure it’s logical for us to continue to place trust in Mosso with the types of outages this past 3-6 months.

Maybe I have an incorrect view of what cloud hosting actually is supposed to be.  I imagine that if one piece of the equation is unavailable, that the others failover pieces are are able to serve content, justifying that the services are never really offline to the end user requesting the content.  In my opinion, no services can come offline using this method.  The idea that there is an infrastructure so robust in place behind the scenes is one that will execute this properly.

What do you think?