Are there any reasons to opt for Rackspace vs. its cloud competitors?

Hi, Please find my response as below: Q) Would you please share your take on Cloud Computing & Cloud Services? Ans) Cloud Services is Consumer and Business products, services and solutions that are delivered and consumed in real-time over the Internet Features like 1) Offsite, provided by third-party provider 2) Accessed via the Internet 3) Minimal/no IT skills to “implement” 4) Provisioning - self-service requesting, near real-time deployment, dynamic & fine-grained scaling. 5) Pricing - fine-grained & usage-based pricing capability. 6) User Interface - browser & successors. 7) System Interface - Web services APIs, providing a standards-based framework for accessing and integrating with and among cloud services 8) Shared resources/common versions - the shared asset approach improves supplier and customer economics Cloud Computing is an emerging IT development, deployment and delivery model, enabling real-time delivery of products, services and solutions over the Internet (i.e., enabling cloud services) Features like 1) Infrastructure systems (e.g., servers, storage, networks) 2) Application software that provides web-based UIs, web services APIs, multi-tenant architecture and a rich variety of configuration options. 3) Application development and deployment software 4) System and application management software 5) IP Networks that connect end users to “the cloud” and the infrastructure components of the cloud to each other 6) For all of the above, pricing agreements for cloud services providers that scale technology costs with their cloud services volumes/revenues. Q) What are pro/cons of Rackspace vs. the other leading vendors in this hot field? Ans) Please check our company website blog link given below, where in I have compared the top three cloud providers. http://www.exelanz.com/2014/10/cloud-services-top-3-cloud-computing-providers-comparison-chart-2/ Let me know if you have any queries.

You point out Rackspace as a leader for IaaS. In my eyes this is not true in all points. For our customers and myself it would stick to the following: Rackspace Public Cloud is a developer-centric offering, and has appealed primarily to small businesses seeking a replacement for low-cost mass-market hosting. Although Rackspace now delivers a solid set of basic features, it has not been able to keep up with the pace of innovation of the market leaders, nor maintain a competitive price. Rackspace is refocusing its business upon customers that need expert managed services for mission-critical needs, rather than trying to compete directly for self-managed cloud IaaS against hyperscale providers that can rapidly deliver innovative capabilities at very low cost, or against established IT vendors that have much greater resources and global sales reach. Rackspace is focused on a hybrid cloud strategy, for customers who want managed cloud infrastructure both in their internal data centers and in Rackspace data centers. Increasingly, it will compete against large IT outsourcers that are moving down-market with lighter-weight managed services offerings that use the customer's choice of a best-in-class cloud IaaS offering and are facilitated by inexpensive, offshore labor. Rackspace has made many cloud-related acquisitions, in order to enhance its cloud capabilities and rapidly expand the number of developers it employs. However, Rackspace has not integrated these acquisitions into a cohesive whole. Many of these acquisitions actually can manage or operate with multiple cloud IaaS providers. While this potentially positions Rackspace for future multicloud management, and enables it to take advantage of the growth of competitors, it does not create a compelling value proposition for using Rackspace's own cloud IaaS offerings. http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1UKQQA6&ct=140528&st=sb

So, this is actually timely as both AWS and Rackspace do not have “Live Migration”. Only VMWare and Google have this. Live Migration is the feature that would allow instances to migrate from poorly performing VMs to healthier ones

I agree, they really need to work on the implementation of vmotion between the hosts, maybe as a feature of openstack nova-evacuate module. Another thing they should have are heat templates oriented to PaaS solutions, not all the customers want to pay for managed services.