Rackspace Cloud [EOL] Reviews

Some of you may have noticed that my blog experienced some technical difficulties yesterday morning.

For some reason I couldn’t find out the IIS still served static files, but anything that had to do with code like this Blog, my TeamCity, YouTrack, Stash and Fisheye applications did not respond anymore. The sad thing was that I even couldn’t RDP into my VM, and so I had to trigger a reboot through the hosters web interface.

What I really disliked was that I noticed the problem only when I wanted to log into my blog to check for comments and spam.
To improve that I thought about monitoring my server or better the services it runs. So I asked Google to suggest some monitoring solutions that could help me out.

First hit

The first hit was Rackspace Cloud Monitoring. The price of 1.50 USD / month is great because I don’t want to spend a lot for checking my private stuff, but everything at about 5€ / month would be okay for me. The feature set described on their homepage was okay for me. What I really need is some service that makes a request against my blog and checks if it returns a 200 status code, and alert me if this is not the case.

So I signed up for a Rackspace cloud account. After a few minutes I got called to verify my account and the guy on the other end of the line offered help for getting started with them. I really like this approach, because it really takes down the barriers.

My first and single difficulty

After I signed up and was activated I logged into the management portal and looked for the monitoring options. Guess what? Nothing there. Their homepage stated it should be easy to configure the monitoring through the portal, but I could not find an option.

I tweeted about that and almost immediately I got a response with a link to a getting started video. Honestly, this was the point where I was really impressed. The Rackspace community obviously is very strong and willing to help. That’s great.

So, watching the video I learned that I could set up monitoring for a VM that I host on Rackspace, but if I delete that VM the monitoring setup would vanish too. Nothing for me, because I don’t need a VM but just the monitoring.

After tweeting about that I got this very helpful response:

I didn’t want to use the API, because I actually wanted to easily click together my simple 200-check. So I tried out this labs-GUI.

The setup

I didn’t dig into the documentation before I started. Actually I thought it should be possible to figure out how to set up a simple HTTP monitoring by just clicking through it. The labs GUI is a very basic Twitter Bootstrap interface that just enables you to access the functionality. Right now there is no real UX, but that’s okay. ;-)

First I entered an ‘Entity’. I thought this would be the thing to monitor, so I entered ‘Gallifrey’, the name of my server. Turned out I got it right. What I could do additionally is to install a monitoring agent on Gallifrey to have it send data about CPU, memory and disk usage to Rackspace that I could use for my monitoring too.

For this entity I now could add a ‘Check’. I named it ‘Blog’ as I wanted to check the blog on Gallifrey.

Here I could configure that this is a HTTP check, the URL to test and from which locations Rackspace should test this. I checked London and two U.S. locations as 3 zones cost the same as just a single one.

Now, this check alone won’t help me. I need to tell the system what to do after a check and what are the error and ok conditions: Enter ‘alarms’.

Alarms are the actual thing I want: A mail, whenever something goes wrong. The alarm is fed with the information from the check, evaluates it by rules I enter (the something) and where to mail the information to.

I started with my status code check (see screenshot on the right).

For the check language I had to check the documentation, but the samples are very self-explanatory so that I had this check running in minutes.

I then added another step that should notify about the performance of my blog. For this I used this check:
(Go to my original post to view the code)

The values may seem a bit high, but since two of the three check locations aren’t in Europe I have to take some transatlantic latency into account. These values seem to work, because with lower values I already got quite some mails warning me that the performance seemed low ;-)

Noticing the alerts

To be really notified I created an filter in my e-mail account that marks the mails with ‘critical’ or ‘warning’ status as important. This way I get notified directly because I don’t let my phone notify me of every mail I receive.

Conclusion

Rackspace is very fast, easy to use and has a great community that helps you getting started in minutes.

With just about 15 to 20 minutes effort and a current investment of 1.50 USD / month I have a very easy to set up and hopefully reliable monitoring for my personal blog. This way I can react faster when something strange happens.

Disclaimer: I’m just a new customer of Rackspace and not related to them in any other way than that I’m paying them to monitor my blog.

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

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