Rackspace is open-sourcing the specs for its Cloud Servers and Cloud Files APIs under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license, enabling third-party developers to copy, implement and rehash them as they see fit.
In addition, The Rackspace Cloud (formerly known as Mosso) has made available Cloud Files language bindings along with technical guidelines for Java, PHP, Python, C# and Ruby under the MIT license through GitHub. Rackspace aims to offer a reference implementation in Python soon and in a press release casually mentions it “is aware of Ruby, Perl, Java, and Twisted Python Cloud Servers bindings”, which are all in the process of being developed.
With the approach, the company hopes to compete better with cloud computing giant Amazon on its own turf – and also Microsoft with its upcoming Windows Azure service – by generally being more open to developers as far as their client-side tools go. In case you were not aware, Rackspace also recently released its Cloud API for Cloud Servers, which allows users to write code that detects a workload in the cloud and scales up the number of servers meeting it as needed, in public beta. The company is heavily trying to position itself as the best alternative to Amazon, which it acknowledges is bigger in size but lacking an open strategy towards the cloud and standards.
On a sidenote, we’re hearing the company is preparing the launch of a new iPhone application that will let customers manage their Rackspace cloud accounts from their iPhone devices. It should be arriving some time in the next few weeks.
Will Rackspace’s efforts in breaking open their cloud offering be enough of a differentiator to compete effectively in an increasingly saturated market? Time will tell, but judging by its stock performance investors are taking quite a liking into the hosting company and its growth strategy.
Big fan of Rackspace Cloud (Mosso). Been on them for a year now with zero problems!
Whoah Robin – 5 posts in a row.
You’re like butter – you’re always on a roll!
As an existing Rackspace Cloud user this is great to hear.
Am just hoping they’ll do an Android app and perhaps a basic mobile control panel website too – not everyone wants to live in Apple’s walled garden.
I gave a demo of the iPhone app at OSCON yesterday and there was definitely interest in an Android port, so I’ll likely do that after the iPhone app is published.
vps.net
What about Slicehost? Rachspace bought it last year.
SliceHost is now Rackspace CloudServers.
Cloud Servers is a lot like Slicehost, but Slicehost still exists at a flat monthly fee with bandwidth included. Cloud Servers starts cheaper, but you pay for bandwidth.
@alexnautilus I think slicehost/mosso all integrated into Rackspace-Mosso
Actually, Slicehost remains an independent brand with their own focus: http://www.slicehost.com/ The Rackspace Cloud and Slicehost do share some underlying technologies, which is why the offerings look similar in some places.
Cloud Files is awesome. Used them to distribute video – and users are really happy with it.
Been a fan of Slicehost (the guys doing the Cloud Servers). What’s also awesome is that new Slices have 0 bandwidth charge to Cloud Files since it’s on the same network.
The Ruby source has been a life saver
Cloud computing is a disruptive technology to companies like Rackspace and Softlayer; it’s got the danger of crowding out their existing business, so they’re going to have a hard time against companies like Amazon, for which it is the core of their business.
And here I thought that Amazon’s core business was to sell books, or shoes, or something…
I will be looking on with interest
What good is opening up specs for APIs when they don’t open up the important details of the service itself?
I couldn’t get an answer out of ‘em about what kind of CPU power I should expect per instance, what kind of hard drive performance to expect, etc. How am I supposed to know how much capacity I’ll need, and therefore how much I’ll need to spend, if they can’t answer these questions?
Amazon’s transparent where it matters. I know exactly how much CPU power each instance will have, exactly how much RAM each instance will have, exactly what operating system it will run, what IO performance will be like, etc.
And I don’t have to commit to anything to start up a few Amazon Elastic Block Storage virtual disks to benchmark the disk IO performance.
With the AWS Console you don’t have to learn any command line tools, so there’s no need to open source the code behind any tools. You just manage your whole virtual server farm from a browser window.
I’ve replaced 5 expensive custom services by a handful of EC2 instances, with auto-scaling automatically starting up more during peak hours. Saves me tons on hosting costs.
Just got off a live chat with them and asked about the CPU power. They were very straight forward:
“We run each machine with 2.2 Ghz dual quade sore procs”
“you will have a percentage of that computing power”
“the smallest instance (256) will supply you with 1/64 of that processing power”
“the next will be 1/32 and so on”
“You are guaranteed that with the ability to burst if the resource is available”
Why do you even have to ask? Amazon just puts it on the webpage. You know what you’re getting.
Dan –
Thanks for the comments. I agree we need to do a better job of communicating the specs of differently sized cloud servers and we are actively working on that. There are certain aspects of a multi-tenant system that are fixed while others are shared. The fixed ones are easier to spec. The shared ones are more difficult. With EC2, memory, CPU, and “high” disk i/o are fixed resources. High disk i/o means you get a dedicated SATA drive. Moderate means it is shared. I would argue that making up a relative label like “high” doesn’t really tell you “what disk IO performance will be like.” We routinely here that EC2 disk i/o performance is poor. Note they also don’t spec network i/o because it’s shared. With cloud servers, memory is the only thing fixed, so right now, that’s all we advertise. As I said, we are actively working on creating specs for the shared aspects of the system, but it’s much more difficult to do without making up an arbitrary label.
The pro of shared resources are that you are able to “burst” and use much more than if you have a purely fix amount of that resource. When combined with a usage floor (i.e. a guaranteed minimum amount), we think that is the better way to go (although a usage floor may not always be possible). For example, Amazon “caps” CPU so when you hit your limit, even if there are spare cycles on the box, you can’t use them. The average server runs at around 15% CPU utilization so we think fixing CPU strands lots of resources and is anathema in the cloud. With cloud servers, you get a guaranteed minimum amount of CPU and can burst to all four vCPUs. CPU benchmarks for similar sized cloud servers vs. EC2 instances show us performing better as a result. Another example is disk i/o. EC2 doesn’t RAID disks. We use RAID10 which provides higher disk i/o performance, but it is variable because it is a shared resource. In general, we fair better on disk i/o tests as well. In our opinion, you get more for your money with cloud servers, but I agree, we need to do a better job of getting the message out.
Also note there is no commit on cloud servers and we have a browser based graphical console to manage cloud servers as well.
Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Feel free to reply here or e-mail me at erik.carlin at rackspace.com. Would also like to know who you spoke with when you “couldn’t get an answer out of ‘em?” We have no problem telling people how stuff works. We’re just trying to quantify that and get it up on the web site so people don’t have to ask.
Regards,
Erik Carlin
Rackspace Cloud
Hopefully this doesn’t mean more outages in the DFW area.
+ 1
I cringe when I see a press release from Mosso/Rackspace and the influx of new customers it’s going to mean. Obviously I want them to do well and as scalable as the service may or (may not) be, it is after all shared resources, and fits and starts of new customers certainly affects us.
I am an existing Rackspace cloud user I tried hosting http://www.appgiveaway.com on the Rackspace cloud service when it was called “MOSSO” but it just didnt work.
I had so much problems with the Cloud service that in the end the Technical staff at Rackspace didnt know what was up and apologised saying that the service is new and in testing stages.
I do like the idea of Cloud hosting but I think I will wait until it has been thoroughly tried and tested
Many thanks for your comments. We are sorry that your application did not work on Cloud Sites, our Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud offering. With an integrated development environment like Cloud Sites where the underlying software and hardware layers are preset, not all web applications will be compatible. That is the trade-off one makes. In general, to see if Cloud Sites will meet the requirements for your application, click here: http://www.rack.../sites/isitafit.
Always feel free to reach out, and we’ll be more than happy to help you.
Krisana Puccio
The Rackspace Cloud
this is a good move.Let us see how it progresses.
What are the prices for storage, bandwith and CPU compared to Google App Enginbe, Amazon and Windows Azure?
@Charbax – prices? too much. Compare the storage cost of Diomede Storage, Amazon S3, and Cloud Files:
Cloud Storage pricing comparison chart (just threw this together):
http://dio314.d...eComparison.png
Diomede Offline Storage is still more than 10x less expensive than our nearest competitor for backup and archival applications (5 TB and 24 month term). It’s amazing that Amazon has been able to maintain virtually the same storage pricing (base @ $0.15/GB) for 3+ (?) years.
Reference (links to prices):
http://www.diomedestorage.com/
http://aws.amaz...com/s3/#pricing
http://www.rack...s/files/pricing
You may want to read the other TC article and comments on Diomede: http://www.tech...on-of-the-cost/
QUESTION:
They open-sourced their cloud–but that makes it so others can go make a cloud elsewhere. It doesn’t make it so we can better control their cloud, right?
Cuz obviously setting it up elsewhere will take tons of work, and it seems the idea is just for developers to know how their cloud is actually doing what it’s doing for them…I guess it just feels as though the breaking news is that Rackspace has just released an application development platform for it’s cloud.
It’s “recently released” cloud API seems to be all that really matters unless you’re planning on building your own cloud based on Rackspace’s open source cloud technologies
…I guess the other piece is that Rackspace hopes lots of developers build their own clouds–that way it will be easy for people to transfer out of those clouds into Rackspace’s clouds (and vice versa–but I’m sure their goal is for it to be the other way around).
Am I on point with my understanding of what’s really going on here?
James –
Thanks for the comments. I wrote a blog post here (http://blog.mos...ource-with-apis) that may help clarify. You are correct that the APIs themselves enable you to better control our cloud. Open sourcing the specs helps lay a foundation for others building on-premise clouds, other public clouds, or those involved in cloud standards discussions, to freely take any of the API spec design work we’ve done and reuse it. I agree it doesn’t benefit the average developer, but is more about the larger efforts of open clouds and standardization.
We believe in a world of open clouds, where people aren’t locked-in and can move workloads from on-premise to cloud, between clouds, federate apps across clouds, etc. Rackspace believes we will compete on other aspects like service, being able to offer a suite of hosting services in addition to cloud, etc. (which has frankly has always been our position in the managed hosting world). We want you to run on our cloud because you want to, not because you initially made the choice to and there is now too much inertia to move away. We have a long way to go, but we are committed to being involved in helping open up clouds. We believe that will benefit the consumer, and in general, make the cloud more appealing for all.
If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to reply here or e-mail me at erik.carlin at rackspace.com.
Regards,
Erik Carlin
Rackspace Cloud
Trying to decide between AWS and RackSpace Cloud for a new online game we’re developing. Can anyone shed some lights on the strengths/weaknesses of both? Cost, ease to develop for, how easy it is to scale servers up in a traffic spike, reliability?
Check out this comparison of Cloud Servers from Rackspace and EC2 from Amazon:
http://www.theb...launch-at-sxsw/
Check out http://www.newservers.com. Just like Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Cloud Servers, but they use physical dell poweredge blade servers instead of virtual servers. Idea for gaming, significantly less expensive than either and with the same on-demand scalability.
Sounds cool, Mosso was a a great service but didn’t seem to sit that well as a seperate brand.
Making it more closely aligned with Rackspace makes sense and rounds out their product offering nicely.
Do the math – it’s really very expensive.
Put it this way:
100GB storage, 6TB bandwidth out:
RS: $1,335.00 per month
Amazon: $1,035.00 per month
Diomede: $687.00 per month~ (5000GB online contract)
There is clearly much better options out there so this is a very weak price offering. After intense talks with staff over live chat, they DO NOT offer tiered pricing.
Unfortunately, #fail.
Ive been on their Cloud Sites product for over a year now. They have the worst product development team – ever. No new features for the control panel worthy of mention in that year, continuous issues with basic site provisioning, performance issues across the board. Moving the domains I have takes an awful lot of effort, if it wasnt for this I wouldve bailed long ago… Their support however does save them, but the day to day working with their tools and platform just screams of amateur night… AWS has zero threat from these guys.
I’ve been using rackspace cloud for all my development for the past few months and Slicehost for around 5 months now. Both have been awesome and 0 problems.
Yo folks,
Cloud Hosting is the same as VPS Hosting!
Example, tap water vs bottled water! lol
It’s a just another marketing gimmicks/renaming! It’s the same shit!
Cheers,
http://www.WirePost.com
No it’s not you tard.