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Comment by jnoller | Hacker News Reader

And like always: I'm around to answer questions.

Any chance that you're going to improve the instance startup time soon? It's really bad now - even compared to a naïve setup of devstack on small spinning medium. I'm sure that lots of your customers use the latest release of ubuntu as a base image so I'd expect it is cached locally on most hosts... I don't get why it would take minutes to spawn a new instance in that case :( (Openstack dev's perspective)

Yes. This is an extremely high priority

Is there any possibility Rackspace may add a spot market to their product offering? Indeed if you or anyone else has any insight as to why Amazon remains (to my knowledge) the only "cloud" hosting vendor to offer spot pricing I'd be very interested.

I'm going to apologize - but I can not comment future-looking/roadmap items like this. I can say I would like it - but beyond that not much else.

I expected that, thanks anyway. Really I was just checking there wasn't some sort of "Rackspace is fundamentally opposed to the concept of spot pricing" belief I had missed somewhere. Cheers.

Why not Germany :( Or rather why is it restricted to the US and the UK?

It's not: I just pushed a change to master and I am waiting on the cache to invalidation. Anyone anywhere can use either the UK or US clouds. I made a mistake saying "I am in..."

From what I see there is no restriction if you are an existing rackspace customer to get this discount for anything new.

So you may want to consider a way that the discount can be applied on any new services signed up for in the existing cloud panel.

While it's trivial for someone to sign up for a new account, it would make more sense (for your tracking purposes) to have people just enable the discount (once again on additional services) in an existing RS cloud account.

Besides would like to just manage everything from the same account generally.

I agree; in a perfect world (and the one I'd like to see) we would be able to apply this to existing accounts. Given internal limitations though, it's not as simple as it should be. Let me talk to customer service and see if we can do this if a user contacts us.

Cloud Files invalidations: Is it technically possible to make invalidations that are performed in just a couple of minutes or even seconds? That's a feature I really miss both on Cloud Files and on CloudFront.

Checking with the product team right now.

Hi, I work on the cloudfiles team. I'm assuming that you are talking about the TTL setting for the container that is exposed to the CDN. Currently, the minimum that it can be is 15 minutes. We partner with Akamai for the CDN functionality, so while we get all the benefits of the Akamai network, we also have to work within the parameters of their systems. Would you mind sharing more about your use case for needing shorter TTLs?

I'm assuming that you are talking about the TTL setting for the container that is exposed to the CDN

Actually I'm talking about what you refer to as edge purge (http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-files-cdn-gets-edge-purg...) and AWS refers to as invalidations.

Ahh, sorry. Yes, there are limitations around edge purging (how many you can do at a time, and how long it takes for the purges to occur). All of these are also dependent on parameters defined by Akamai. I'll pass the feedback on to our product team as we try to make that experience better. Thanks!

I've signed up to about 4 different hosts recently (including Rackspace) to test them out. If I wanted to take you up on the offer would I have to sign up for a new account or can it be back dated?

Thanks!

I apologize; new accounts only - we can not back date or apply to existing. Limitations! :(

Understandable, cheers!

Will I be able to sign up for developer discount next year?

We do not have an end date for this discount right now. Hopefully we can just continually improve it.

Can you fix apps.rackspace email? I've been using it for 2 years now and I am unable to compose emails on iOS devices. The compose pain won't respond to the device keyboard. Otherwise great.

Sent to the product team

ujsfdo, try https://app.rackspace.com/mobile and let me know what you think.

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