Rackspace launches “Fanatical Support for Developers”
thewhir.com
thewhir.com
Disclaimer: I am a Developer & Community Advocate for Rackspace; this means they pay me to serve developers and engage the hacker and developer community. This means that fundamentally - I serve you.
Any questions you may have, or criticisms, or better yet - suggestions to make Rackspace Cloud / OpenStack more developer friendly and supportive: let me know.
My startup started getting real traction and doing a lot of business. As my user count grew, I started to see slow response times on my server. I checked out the configuration and everything looked ok to me-- but even during times of super slow response, the server was showing vmstats that looked 99% idle. So I figured this is either a network problem, or something else beyond my control, or a configuration problem that is beyond my talent to identify.
My customer base was exploding, and my infrastructure was failing. In that moment, I would have done just about ANYTHING to solve the problem. I filed a support ticket, but I didn't expect that'd help, and it didn't. I started looking around rackspace to try to figure out if I could upgrade to a dedicated server. It's not really clear to me from looking at Rackspace's web page hard for 20 minutes whether they even offer dedicated servers. If you search google for "Rackspace Dedicated Server" you get what to me is a confusing mixed message, and no clear path for getting a dedicated server. It's not clear to me if that page is comparing how Managed hosting is better than dedicated servers, or if managed hosting is the only way you offer dedicated servers, or if getting the biggest server IS the way you offer dedicated servers.
I damn near just took a shot in the dark and migrated my whole service to another provider in a desparate attempt to see if things got better. For all I knew, it was a misbehaving tenant colocated on my machine. That happened before though, and you guys identified it and solved it in hours.
In the end, I solved the problem for myself by pounding my head against it for 24 hours straight and found a configuration problem in Apache. But having an expert there to help me with this-- I would have paid any amount of money. I still would love to know I'm not going it alone in case I get DOS'd or something. But I'm not even sure who to talk to to build a relationship.
I guess what I'm looking for is just general consulting, with people who are smart and know what they're doing. Maybe what I'm looking for is comrades, fellow hackers, or a consulting service. I live in the Bay Area, so you'd think I'd be neighbors with these people.
Any of you out there: if you know of IRC channels, forums, or anything like that where people help each other with this sort of thing, let me know, I want to be part of it. I could totally help people with the kinds of problems I've been through. My wife suggested I talk to HN about the problem I was having, and I had to explain to her that this isn't that kind of community-- we talk about articles and issues, not specific problems usually. If any of you know about a community or consulting service like that or have ideas and suggestions, I'd love to hear about it.
If you want general consulting, consider the Rackspace Professional Services team: http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hosting/services/proservice...
Last time I told them I want to open an account for testing and get rejected:
>> Dear Customer, We reviewed your order request and, unfortunately, we have determined that you are not eligible for a Rackspace account. We apologize for any inconvenience
This is un-cool and please don't do it.
Providing good support (rather then barrier) would definitely help Rackspace to boost its market share. People in the past use Linode mainly because of their great support; on the other hand, AWS is basically no support (unless you pay them or just forum), and not to mention Google...so this is the sweet spot for you guys..
The current signup process for developers remains suboptimal, and a number of teams are working on this, but I thought I would quickly followup. If you still want to try out Rackspace's Cloud, I can connect you with the people needed to help debug why the verification service failed - if it failed for you, it can fail for others in the same way, and is therefore a bug.
I understand prevent spammers or misuse is hard, but other providers I have used like Slicehost (acquired by RS), Linode, AWS, DigitalOcean...and more) don't have any issue preventing people from signing up. (AWS even give people 1yr free tier usage)
Could you comment on a high level what your experience has been so far, and what the attitude of developers, management, and culture there is like?
Thanks!
This is why so much has been materially invested in OpenStack (http://www.openstack.org/) which powers our Cloud offerings, why we have http://github.com/rackspace, http://rackerlabs.github.com and are internally looking at more and more projects to contribute back to the developer community. This is also why more and more projects lead by Rackspace are really being designed in the open and incubated in the OpenStack project (Marconi, for example: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Marconi, Heat and others).
I've been continually impressed that everyone is behind the idea of truly giving back, getting involved in and supporting open source and the community. Rackspace is a company that already supports its local community (http://www.rackspacefoundation.com/), gives employees time off for community service, etc.
From a strategic standpoint, this is why Fanatical Support for Developers is such a crucial piece to this. We want Rackspace's Open Cloud to be a fantastic experience for developers internally, and externally. We want all want to make Rackspace services the ones that every developer wants to use, and make Rackspace’s Open Source projects the best of breed solutions in their areas.
This vision; and Rackspace's values are why I joined - they may not be where they want to be today, and this vision takes time to achieve, but everyone is actively invested in it.
I've been using an open source project from Rackspace (python-cloudfiles) for a couple of years now and suddenly the repository has disappeared from _rackspace_ GitHub account. I found the repo on the _rackerlabs_ GitHub account with a notice:
"The python-cloudfiles bindings are no longer being maintained and their use is deprecated. They will not be available after August 1, 2013."
I'm a little bit surprised and not very happy with how this is being handled. First because the old repository is now a 404 HTTP error with no information whatsoever (in fact, the PyPi page still points to the old repo: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-cloudfiles), and second because PyPi wasn't updated (207004 downloads of the latest release). A final release would be nice, specially to inform your users that the project is unsupported and what is the alternative.
I'll migrate my stuff to python-swiftclient. I already knew Rackspace wasn't very interested in that library, so it's not a big deal for me.
Looks like an honest mistake, but I'm not sure if I can trust Rackspace's open source projects in the future.
EDIT: typo
First, although it was before my time, let me take responsibility and apologize. You're completely right - this was not clearly communicated, its confusing, it is misleading and should have been handled much differently.
I will get the needed information in place, and handle this properly. I personally apologize for the confusion.
As you noted, the officially supported Python SDK(s) are: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyrax and the https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-swiftclient/ which pyrax leverages internally and https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-novaclient/ for compute.
If you have further questions, let me know - @jessenoller on twitter, or jesse.noller@rackspace.com if you need it.
As it turns out, we're announcing our node.js SDK plans (with support) today:
* https://github.com/racker/node-elementtree
* https://github.com/racker/node-cassandra-client
Progress is kind of slow at the moment, but is proceeding more or less steadily. It's also the newest language binding, so it will of course not be as feature complete as, say, the Python or Node bindings.
BTW, Mark Internate is an old friend. Tell him I said Hi.
Just a head's up though -- I'm considering migrating the repository to the github.com/rackerlabs organization within a week or so, for consistency with other, more officially supported, API bindings.
(I vote for Go.)
Please see the project page at github.com/racker/gorax. Thanks!
I find this hard to believe-- as a current Rackspace customer (I'd kill to switch) I can say I've had nothing but horrible customer support. Save, one guy named Mark Lessel-- who is a fucking boss (had to give him props).
But I only get to someone like mark, once I've gotten so fed up, I start being an asshole and then, only then, does anything get done (they send Mark to help me). I don't like being an asshole, but spending 3 days going back and forth before getting a resolution is too much.
They've too often had people without technical ability (or it so it seems) attempt to assist me, then blow me off because they don't understand the true nature of the problem.
They say you can "move a slider" and increase the size of your VPS. Which couldn't be further from the truth; more often than not you have to get on the line with their support to figure out why the instance failed to build. Only to drag it out for another 30 minutes telling you to wait; before actually investigating the god damn problem.... Makes scaling quickly very easy (sarcasm).
Rackspace is made even worse by the outright lies about their 'fanatical customer support.' Biggest bullshit marketing lie from a, somewhat respectable, tech company I've seen. If they just advertised middle of the road support and service, I think I'd be less upset. It's just the lies that get to me. Don't over promise and under deliver, that's a bait and switch.
Maybe they should start giving away lipstick with every VPS; so we can all look pretty while we get fucked ;-)
Our relationship became so toxic that they flew me down to SA for some customer appreciation event. Which oddly enough, was about 50% new happy customers, and 50% disgruntled existing customers. And boy was my experience with their support reinforced repeatedly by the others...
Not to mention I went through more than dozen "dedicated" account teams. They were all so earnest at first, but by the time I left, I had basically scripted the conversation for a new account team, pointing out all the custom things on our account and with our configuration that they absolutely couldn't mess with under penalty of death.
Their dedicated pricing is non-competitive these days... I think they rely on the fact that once you're past a certain size, moving to another provider would be so painful that you'll happily pay their ridiculous rates.
Surely this audience is aware of OpenStack and our commitment to such having open source the first major components a few years ago. With such knowledge you can logically assume that we want to be interoperable with other companies' offerings on the same platform.
We really believe in this "fanatical support" thing and we believe we can compete with others on a fair playing field because of it. We do this in part by paying attention:
If our support fails in areas and it's made public in places like this website, trust we are reading about it and discussing it at various levels. Furthermore, we are always striving to get it right. Take that from someone who isn't paid to read this, but paid to write software.
FTR, these are my opinions as someone in the Rackspace culture. Take it for what its worth.
Tell us what we suck at so we can do it better (like you did, drfritznunkie). Thanks.
We had a particular project that we needed to use the VPS for and noted the page on the SMTP policy. The sales staff were all over us with emails and follow ups but when we posed the question regarding something specific with the SMTP policy (pointing to the particular page) they went silent. No answer, no follow up no reply to our follow ups.
Sent an email to the page that says "if you have any questions write here" and got a link back to that same page (iirc or something literally that worthless).
The lack of follow up (for an important issue) and reply ( to questions) made it a non-starter to use Rackspace for this purpose.
Found it. So in other words we sent an email to abuse@rackspace.com. with a question (per what the page says) and got this auto response:
THIS IS AN AUTOMATED-RESPONSE
Please read carefully! This may be the only response we send you.
Thank you for writing the Rackspace AUP Department. We will make every
effort to investigate all reports of abusive activity in a timely
manner. The information that you have submitted will be used to
investigate the incident for violations of our Acceptable Use Policy,
which you can view at:
http://www.rackspace.com/aboutus/acceptable_use.php
When reporting unsolicited commercial/bulk email (UCE/UBE/spam),
please forward the entire message, including full headers, leaving the
original subject line intact.
When reporting scans, probes, hacking attempts, or malicious
activity, please include an unaltered excerpt of your security log files
showing ONLY THE INCIDENTS PERTAINING TO Rackspace and/or its
customer. Please cut and paste it directly into the body of the email
message, including:
Source IP Address
Date and Time
Source/Destination Ports
Any other brief pertinent details
Thank you!
Rackspace AUP Department
If this is still something we can help with, please send details to help@rackspace.com. We'll make sure that this gets to the right Rackers.
I'd like to learn more about your experience with us and figure out how we can improve. Would you mind emailing help@rackspace.com with your details?
However, once on the support site, it falls flat on its face. I am pushed off to one person who doesn't care after another, who doesn't listen or read. I've called 'em out before and that's how I usually get escalated to Mark...
They've got tickets to answer, they're busy, but it's blatantly obvious most of your CS reps goals are not to fix my problem but to get through tickets.
I've done high-end technical support, and I know that people 'believe' in it while they're in the office, talking the talk, but not in their actions. That's your problem, culturally, and publicly, you all say it so many times people believe they're doing it without actually know what it means.
From the outside: you're failing.
Furthermore: I hate being passed off to an account manager cough sales rep cough who kisses my ass when I don't have problems then can't do shit to help me when I do. I don't want a reach around, I want my problems solved. Phone support? A joke. Within 30 seconds of the person on the phone realizing the problem is actually technical, they push you back to the support site.
You guys should signup for a Linode account, file a ticket, and learn from that experience. It's baffling that Linode doesn't boast about its support, like you all, but manages to consistently provide better support resolving my issues quickly without a terrible back and forth.
What Rackspace does for the open source community, and in fighting patent trolls is amazing-- I love that about Rackspace. But certainly not your support.
Try getting support when their DC is down or there are networking problems. Then you won't be hear back for hours.
Rackspace and Amazon do this "nickel and diming" and they share the common trait of being rather large, high overhead organizations. On the other hand, places like DigitalOcean or Linode appear to be smaller places that try to keep their overhead as low as possible.
Fanatical support is what makes Rackspace, well - Rackspace.