Rackspace announces AWS managed service offerings | Hacker News Reader

Rackspace announces AWS managed service offerings

blog.rackspace.com

Scoble's press release on this manages to combine a Thomas Friedman'ism, self-congratulations, and even a registered trademark symbol: ®...And it's only available on Facebook, of course[1].

Meanwhile, this all buries the lede: Rackspace has lost to Amazon, and it's trying to pivot into becoming a consulting business before it completely implodes.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/notes/robert-scoble/rackspace-annou...

I disagree with this being an admission of Rackspace losing, and think it's more that Rackspace is finally embracing the ideals internally communicated for over a decade now -- Rackspace isn't a technology company, but rather a service company that heavily leverages technology.

The cash cow at Rackspace isn't running servers or even VMs in a data center. It's providing management of those resources.

It's also woth noting AWS is only the latest 3rd party RAX supports, following Azure, Office365, and Google Apps. It's quite likely other environments are supported in one-off arrangements.

How is Rackspace still a thing?

Their customer support is shit, takes days to get back to you -- then without any real explanation, "Our engineers were able to fix the issue that our cloud server engineers caused."

Worse, let's say you have them look into your actual code (as I've seen some clients do), and 1/2 the time Rackspace just outsources the work to whatever crappy dev shop has availability. So then the followup ticket is, "Why are all the permissions on the server jacked up?" And the response, "Oh, we didn't know how to run the provisioning scripts, or read the documentation, so we just set everything everywhere on your production box to 777... cool?" RUN away from Rackspace. Run.

I'm a little surprised by your first comment as I've found their technical support via 'live chat' excellent in both response time & ability. Their first line often aren't able to fix the issue but they've always been able to communicate with some sort of escalation to fix my issues while keeping me up to date in the chat window. I've not used their 'support tickets' anywhere near as much.

I'm guessing you've been using support tickets and found it slower? Have you tried Live Chat? What sorts of questions have you found them lacking in ability to respond?

Hmmm I've a distinctly different experience. In my experience their support is good and their engineers quite knowledgeable. Tickets are dealt with within reasonable time frames. If I really do need something to happen quickly, I can call in and have someone knowledgeable on the phone within 10 minutes, who often will do whatever is necessary right away. During a recent issue they had two engineers in two time zones working on it, to shorten the time to fix as much as possible (still took a long time, but it was a difficult issue so ...).

Clicking that link, I see: 403 Forbidden --- nginx. If that's the service they provide...

http://blog.rackspace.com/newsarticles/rackspace-announces-a...

Still waiting for Rackspace to offer Mac Servers hosting service. The current offerings out there really suck.

Is there a hardware alternative to throwing a bunch of Mac Pro cylinders or Mac Minis into custom-made racks? It seems like the density would be terrible.

Have you seen http://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros ?

I loved that writeup.

Just out of curiosity, what is the use case for/strength of Mac servers vs IIS and Linux servers?

Some software only runs on OSX. Last year we set up a group of mac mini's, for a project that technically could have been rewritten to run on linux, but making it run on OSX was WAY easier / faster / cheaper.

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