Rackspace Cloud [EOL] Reviews

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Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for alluring IT customers. This article give brief history of these cloud hosting service providers and compares the cloud services provided by them.

-- Amazon Web Services --

It's hard to find someone who doesn't agree that Amazon Web Services is the market leader in IaaS cloud computing. The company has one of the widest breadths of cloud services - including compute, storage, networking, databases, load balancers, applications and application development platforms all delivered as a cloud service. Amazon has dropped its prices 21 times since it debuted its cloud six years ago and fairly consistently fills whatever gaps it has in the size of virtual machine instances on its platform - the company recently rolled out new high-memory instances, for example.

There are some cautions for Amazon though. Namely, its cloud has experienced three major outages in two years. One analyst, Jillian Mirandi of Technology Business Researcher, has suggested that continued outages could eventually start hindering businesses' willingness to invest in Amazon infrastructure.

That sentiment gets to a larger point about AWS though - the service seems to be popular in the startup community, providing the IT infrastructure for young companies and allowing them to avoid investing in expensive technology themselves. But Mark Bowker, a cloud analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group, says Amazon hasn't been as popular in the enterprise community. "Amazon's made it really easy for pretty much anyone to spin up cloud services or get VMs," he says. Where is Amazon getting those customers from? Some are developers and engineers who get frustrated by their own IT shops not being able to supply VMs as quickly as Amazon can, so they use Amazon's cloud in the shadows of IT. "Taxi cabs pay for a lot of VMs," says Beth Cohen, an architect at consultancy Cloud Technology Partners, referring to users expensing Amazon services on travel reports. The point is there's a hesitation by some enterprises to place their Tier 1, mission critical applications in a public cloud.

Amazon is looking to extend its enterprise reach though. In recent months the company has made a series of announcements targeting enterprises and developers. It rolled out Glacier, a long-term storage service, while it's made updates to its Elastic application development platform and its Simple WorkFlow Service, which helps developers automate applications running in Amazon's cloud.

It has expanded partnerships as well, including with private cloud company Eucalyptus, allowing customers to create hybrid clouds that span their own data center and Amazon's cloud. Amazon has also forged new agreements with BMC and F5, which add on top of the robust marketplace of software applications that are already available on Amazon's cloud. More partnerships expected into the future could push Amazon further into the enterprise market.

-- Rackspace --

Behind Amazon, the rest of the market could be described as "everyone else," but there are some leading candidates to take on Amazon in the cloud and one of the strongest is Rackspace. Powered by the OpenStack cloud computing platform, Rackspace is positioning itself as the open source alternative to Amazon, and the company's executives make no shame in aiming critiques directly at its chief competitor.

Bowker, of Enterprise Strategy Group, says Rackspace has a leg up on many of its other competitors because of its history as a managed hosting and collocation provider. It's been in the enterprise business before.

Others believe that Rackspace's OpenStack involvement allows it to compete at the scale and capacity of Amazon. Rackspace is attempting to build a cloud that can scale to just about anyone's needs, says financial analyst Pat Walravens, and he believes with the OpenStack backing the size of deals that Rackspace is able to land will only continue to increase.

"If Amazon is going for scale, cost and breadth of services, Rackspace is going for its services, including what it calls its fanatical support for customers," says Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti. "They're really trying to make the play that they're the safer enterprise choice and with OpenStack, they want to be known as the non-Amazon."

The open source aspect of Rackspace's cloud appeals to customers concerned about vendor lock-in, Bartoletti says. An open source architecture may give customers additional freedom to move workloads among OpenStack-powered clouds, although Gartner has disputed the significance of that.

One Rackspace strength is its ability to roll out the latest and greatest OpenStack features. The latest OpenStack code, for example, incorporated virtual networking capabilities, which Rackspace has since rolled out, and hopes to advance the functionality of it in the coming months.

There is a view by some though that Rackspace has married itself to OpenStack, perhaps to its own detriment. As the Gartner report on OpenStack states, OpenStack can be successful independently of Rackspace's success now that the company has ceded control of the project to a foundation. Overall, Bartoletti says Rackspace's involvement in OpenStack is positive for the company and will only help to position it as a leading alternative to Amazon.

-- Microsoft --

Microsoft is inherently part of most conversations regarding enterprise IT, says Bowker. "I've been super impressed with the level of knowledge enterprise IT shops have with Azure," Bowker says about Microsoft's cloud platform, which he says is still maturing. "People are keeping tabs on what's going on with Microsoft, so the company really has a halo effect on any conversation we're having with clients."

And for good reason, he says. Microsoft owns a lot of back office IT operations for enterprises between Office, Exchange and SharePoint. Because of that real estate the company already has in the enterprise market, Microsoft has an opportunity to extend those customers into its cloud, Bowker says. Microsoft has been more aggressive than ever in recent months about encouraging customers and partners to join its cloud. Earlier this year the company rolled out on-demand Windows and Linux-based virtual machines and cloud storage to accompany its platform as a service as well.

Combined with the release of Windows Server 2012 and Windows System Server this year, Microsoft is also making a play for powering private clouds behind a company's firewall. That will help Microsoft craft a story for customers to have hybrid cloud deployments all powered by Microsoft and its Hyper-V virtualization software. "Amazon doesn't have as strong of a play in the hybrid cloud conversation," Bartoletti says, which - combined with Microsoft's strong relationships with a large number of enterprise IT shops - could be an advantage for the company moving forward.

-- Google --

If anyone can compete with Amazon on scale, it's Google, says George Reese, founder of enStratus, a cloud management company. Amazon may have the largest scale in the industry, which Rackspace is attempting to match. But Reese says Google has a lot of data centers that are optimized for massive scaling, which is heavy artillery in cloud battles.

Google's play thus far has been focused on application development and hosting. It got into the game with Google App Engine, a development platform, and has since - like Microsoft - expanded into the infrastructure-as-a-service space with Google Compute Engine, giving customers an on-demand virtual machine and storage service. It also has a consumer cloud-facing service in Google Drive, seen as a competitor to Microsoft's SkyDrive.

"Google's not trying to displace Microsoft or Windows developers, nor are they necessarily trying to displace Rackspace," Barontelli says. "They're really going directly after Amazon on pricing and capacity saying 'Hey, we've got scale too.'"

But Amazon's been in the cloud game longer than Google, and both companies suffer from a lack of perceived support for users. But the strengths of Google's platform, and its activities in the startup community, could make it a viable competitor in the cloud market.

Disclosure: The company I work for is a Microsoft Partner - http://www.q3tech.com/facts.html

Last saturday we switched Wedoist from Rackspace's Cloud to Amazon AWS. In this post I will present why we have done this and why we picked Amazon AWS instead of Rackspace's Cloud or dedicated hosting.

Why not Rackspace's Cloud?

We initially used Rackspace because we thought they had lots of experience and expertise in hosting. Now we are not so sure and we don't have a huge trust in their systems or their network.

Our problem was that a lot of users had reported performance issues. Wedoist is used in about 50 countries and each time we debugged these issues they were from users that came from "remote countries" such as Brazil, Hong Kong or Taiwan. Having developed web-applications for a long time we were sure it was a network issue and even I could reproduce this issue in Chile. This was our main reason for moving to Amazon AWS: Rackspace's network does not seem to work that well in "remote areas" of the world.

The second reason is that Amazon AWS seems to be a superior product that offers more solutions such as:

• Amazon RDS: Managed SQL databases
• Amazon SES: Simple Email Service
• Amazon DynamoDB: Fully managed NoSQL database

Amazon AWS also seems to be in rapid development, for example, Amazon DynamoDB was released last week (and it seems to be an awesome database solution!)

Why not dedicated hosting?

You will get a lot more hardware by going for dedicated hosting (either buying or leasing servers). For example, if you read pinboard's article on dedicated hosting, A Short Rant About Hosting, you will find prices that are much cheaper than Amazon's.

Here are our reasons why we didn't go the dedicated hosting route:

Cost isn't everything:
For us cost isn't the only thing we care about. Our focus is on building software and serving our users in best ways possible. Setting things up ourselfs would save money, but would require a lot more work, be more limited and possible produce more errors.

We don't have resources to use multiple data centers:
Some things would not be possible at all, because setting it up would be very expensive - - an example is minute snapshots of our databases that are stored in 3 different data centers and can be restored with a few clicks. Implementing backup strategies is complex, especially if you have a lot of data, and Amazon AWS saves us a lot of headaches in this area.

We can easily scale:
With Amazon AWS scaling up or down is easy: we can add servers, we can upgrade to bigger machines, we can downgrade, we can script everything so extra machines are added in the morning and shutdown in the afternoon. All this with a few clicks or a few scripts and in matter of minutes.

Our focus isn't on managing servers:
The bottom line is that we can focus on building great software. Using Amazon AWS is more costly than dedicated hosting, but our products aren't free, so paying for premium hosting isn't a huge deal.

Amazon AWS seems to be a marketleader
Amazon AWS has an impressive customer base that includes Dropbox, Netflix or Yelp (just to name a few). We feel in good company by being there as well.

How has it helped my organization?

What is most valuable?

AWS:

1. AWS releases new features really fast. This is obviously an opinion, but every time I turn around there is a new region, or a new database solution, or a new feature on the management console etc.

2. AWS has had some stability problems last year and even now there have been some minor ones, but overall, if you use good management of your zones and have failover on your systems, it should not be a problem.

3. There is a "free tier" to experiment with. So if you are not sure if you like it, you can boot up some servers for very cheap or even free.

4. Amazon has set it up where, if you want, you can scale any portion of your stack. Starting with Route 53 for your DNS, moving to an ELB for your load balancer, going to RDS for your backend. I don't necessarily use all those services, but they are available to you.

5. Good experiences with their support team.

6. Nice variety of instance sizes and an easy way to mix and match your storage solution with your processing power.

7. Many resources on the web to solve questions and problems.

Rackspace

1. I have not had as much experience with Rackspace as I have had with AWS because early on I made this same decision and did not really look back. But I have been to some Rackspace meetups and what they are doing is really cool. Openstack (Rackspace's cloud technology that they are moving all their servers too and helped build) in particular will allow you to build your stack across multiple clouds almost seamlessly. Although there are technologies out there for AWS API integration with Openstack and Eucalyptus (AWS clone basically) is coming in as a contender (which is fully compatible with the AWS API) you will most likely be able to spread your stack across more clouds, public and private, with Openstack. For example, HP just released a cloud on Openstack. This is just my market guess, but if you have the need to be across multiple clouds, Openstack is most likely the way to go.

2. Great support at Rackspace. The nature of the beast is that Rackspace is getting beat by AWS, but with that comes the intangibles that Rackspace needs to offer to compete. Support is definitely one of them. Price and speed on individual instances is another.

Overall, Amazon has not disappointed me, other than the few outages they had last year and that really just got me more disciplined on how I setup my stack. Amazon also recently lowered their prices, so that was nice to see as well.

I hope that helps, and I hope someone can give the opposite side of the story since I really don't have too much to say about Rackspace.

This comment was originally posted on Stack Overflow here by chantheman