Rackspace Developer+ Program
rackspace.com
rackspace.com
Back when they launched it after having had acquired Slicehost, Rackspace Cloud was the only alternative to AWS and had one significant differentiator back then: the local storage on the instances wasn't ephemeral - it was permanent. The benchmarks and pricing were competitive, so the growth was phenomenal and life was good as a result. And that's when Rackspace dropped the ball by losing some focus and getting obsessed with launching platform services one after another ignoring the compute. They even launched what I believe was the first PaaS ever and gave it an unfortunate name of "cloud sites" (and confusing plenty of developers at that point, who couldn't tell "cloud sites", significantly less powerful service, apart from "cloud servers")
As a result, for a few years the lineup of VMs they offered hasn't changed, while AWS was launching new types all the time.
So about two years ago Rackspace ended up with a great control panel (easiest cloud CP to use IMO), a comprehensive set of back-end services: block storage, object storage, MySQL-as-a-Service, email sending and receiving, MongoDB-as-a-Service, cloud deployments, CDN and many more... But the selection of virtual servers was small and the hardware was getting obsolete at that point.
Since then I've seen tremendous investments being made into the core: the compute. Rackspace launched "performance" line of VMs. They still feature persistent (backed by RAID-10 SSDs) local storage, latest Xeons and ridiculously performant network. In a way it's "advantages of backwardness" at work: the performance line of compute is all fresh latest&greatest gear: the servers, the networks, etc. The performance, particularly on disk I/O, is awesome. I hope they'll keep the ball rolling by keeping it up to date by launching new generations in time.
Moreover, Rackspace hired (or acquired) some brainy engineers out of Bay Area who've pushed for "at scale" compute offering which is now called OnMetal (http://rackspace.com/onmetal) - because that's how internet giants internally do compute, container-based architectures without virtualization, running on highly specialized high-uptime servers (open compute). So... Rackspace cloud today is the only way to experience "facebook-style" infrastructure by renting it by the minute.
The culture of "true web scale" infrastructure is very strong internally, that's why Rackspace has been a huge supporter and believer of Docker, and some Rackers - having grown tired of the sad state of Linux distribution - founded CoreOS (http://coreos.com), the fresh look at running massively scalable infrastructure from the operating system point of view. Today, Rackspace is the only cloud where you can run Docker containers on top of CoreOS natively on highly efficient (performance per dollar) instantly-provisioned OpenCompute gear without noisy cpu/disk/network neighbors and without virtualization tax.
What could be better?
Well... Rackspace is not the cheapest for undersized deployments [1]. They've never been known for doing things like selling the over-provisioned VMs running on the cheapest machines on consumer-grade SSDs in RAID-5 arrays. A typical Rackspace customer treats a server outage as a big deal, "engineering for failure" for many (most?) cases is actually more expensive than just outsourcing reliability into a higher quality infrastructure. They love to make everything redundant and tend to go with higher spec and high-MTBF parts. Another component of the higher pricing is the support organization. The culture of bending backwards to make customers happy is insane, here's an example: if a customer asks for help resolving problems with Sendgrid (a competing email sending service), Rackspace support people will gladly assist, without bothering them with showing off the superiority of Mailgun - my company Rackspace acquired. I was blown away by that, customer gets help with whatever they feel like getting it.
You can even go as far as asking Rackspace to just run certain components of your infrastructure for you, saving on Devops positions. That's their bread&butter.
While Rackspace offers alternatives to most AWS services, they're not 1-to-1 equivalents. CBS (alternative to EBS) is vastly superior in my opinion because (based on what I know about EBS from public sources) CBS is simpler, has been delivering more predictable and higher performance/uptime experience, Cloud Files (S3 alternative) is comparable, ObjectRocket (MongoDB-as-a-Service) is absolutely phenomenal - the only DBaaS I can recommend anywhere, but there're no Redshift or Glacier counterparts.
I guess what I'm saying is this: Rackspace Cloud has evolved into a grown up contender with a solid feature set matched only by AWS, with multiple DCs all over the world and some unique capabilities (like OnMetal flavor of cloud servers), which differentiates by over-investing into hardware infrastructure and support. So if those qualities matter, take a look. The program Jesse is announcing only makes it easier for you.
[1] Once you cross $10K/mo hosting spend, they're very competitive especially when you factor in the cost of running/managing the infrastructure.
One other big differentiator compared to AWS, and the reason I went to Rackspace in the first place: straightforward pricing. Figuring out how much an AWS machine was going to cost was, back then at least, like trying to figure out how much it'd cost to buy a hundred Yen next Monday, for someone who has no experience with currency markets. Amazon's pricing was very complex, but with Rackspace, it was easy for me to tell how much a month would cost for what I needed.
> if a customer asks for help resolving problems with Sendgrid (a competing email sending service), Rackspace support people will gladly assist... I was blown away by that, customer gets help with whatever they feel like getting it.
While the uptime and performance of the machines I have on Rackspace has been great, the "fanatical support" claim is empty marketing B.S. in my personal experience. A year ago, I had a machine's performance tank while my startup's traffic started to simultaneously ramp up. It turned out there was another host on the same machine slurping too much disk resources, they moved it away. That improved things some, but I ended up needing an expert to take a look at my Apache configuration. I begged Rackspace to help. My startup's life was hanging in the balance: traffic was going up, and performance was going down. I desperately needed help from an expert, and asked Rackspace for help, and offered to pay. They did nothing for me.
I started researching it for myself, and basically trained myself to be much more of an Apache configuration expert over the next 48 hours. I needed help, I had money, I was super desperate, and they did nothing for me.
I guess the real problem was that I didn't need help with SendGrid, or perhaps I couldn't figure out the right people to ask.
From this perspective Rackspace definitely has not performed a devops role for us. Network administrator? System administrator? Yes, absolutely, and great support for both. But devops is where the application meets the server, and IME Rackspace has stayed away from that.
I do see the reason for it--what does Rackspace know about our application? It's not fair to hold them responsible for that. But it created a gap in our professional support.
edit: words
http://www.rackspace.com/managed-cloud/
Fundamentally; support has to become systems level, and not single instance level, and that means gaining knowledge and expertise (which we have in house) about the nuances of a given application stack.
I was hoping to come up with ways that companies with poor brands can recapture a lost audience. But I'm drawing a blank because it's a competitive market. It's like the car industry an the generational memory people have about various manufacturers. So, the only advice I have is: don't fuck with your brand.
> Rackspace is a tarnished brand for me. I immediately associate it with ridiculous pricing and bad "cloud" (mosso). With closed eyes it refused to see the quicksand of commodity it built its tower on.
You know what? I agree. Several years (4+) ago when RSC (Rackspace Cloud) came out I used it. My job was breaking the limits of cloud providers, and I did my job quite well. I was unimpressed with the cost and what I saw.
But - as old-gregg said much more eloquently; things have changed. From OnMetal to OpenStack, we've improved in capabilities, understanding the developer and hacker markets (my job, basically) and you're actually probably representative of the precise group of users I built this program for because this type of feedback, raw, unfiltered about technical capabilities and failings is what we need.
As someone on the inside now, I am proud to see the changes - the Managed Cloud launch was all about finally making the public statement "here are the infrastructure prices and here is the support you get". It's a clarifying move but a fundamental shift from the bundled pricing you had several weeks ago.
For example, when I went to developer events, people would ask me "do you have a cloud" - Yes I would say, and it has all these great features and capabilities and heck, we can do crazy topologies that mix dedicated gear with cloud stuff. People would be excited...
Then pricing would come up: and I would have to write down the prices and then explain that those prices included support - from 24x7 phone, to everything else you can imagine. But that triggers the uncanny valley when talking to developers as you probably know.
So now, here we are: we've separated our the cost of support from infrastructure. Our infrastructure prices are competitive with other providers (we lowered compute pricing for example), and now I have a channel with developer+ to try to win back - or get that raw feedback I need to make our products much better.
developer+ isn't evil, it's not got crazy ulterior motives: it is us saying developers are important, and we haven't done well for them. I want you to sign up, I want you to try the services, SDKs, Docs, dev portal for a spin. If it sucks, or there are bugs, I want to know directly from you.
In my mind, rebuilding a brand is much like rebuilding a relationship. It takes time, energy, honesty, candidness to regain trust.
And I'm saying we're here to do that. I can't promise everything is perfect, or we're not without flaws. I can't say developer+ is 100% to where I want it to be. But I'm aiming for that.
And I would honestly welcome you and your feedback, no matter how tough that love is.
My biggest suggestion? Drop your 24/7 support or hire competent people. We had to contact support numerous times (a point I'll get to in a minute) and the experience was infuriating each and every time. It was the equivalent of talking to Comcast's tier-1 tech support. You guys would have blatant network outages and your "fanatical" support would be asking if I could ping servers (I had to point out the status page presence to them). We always had to waste time dealing with your ticket-jockeys before we'd get escalated and someone would actually solve the issue. I'd rather wait on a response than deal with an incompetent person asking for ping logs or suggesting I reboot a server.
Your private networking at ORD was problematic. We had our internal subnet at ORD which would very often just straight up fail. Server A could route to B, but the reverse was not possible. It appeared to be some sort of ARP fuck up, I dunno. We ran into issues every couple weeks and most often would resolve itself by the time we actually got a tech response. Which of course was closed with an equivalent of "could not reproduce"
Your MySQL-as-a-service is abysmal. It's running 5.1 (Do you have any idea how old that is?) and the performance is beyond horrible, I don't think the config was tuned whatsoever. Cloudfiles we routinely broke due to our write concurrency being too high (we were told you use sqlite?). This caused us to simply to manage our own software and completely avoid your pre-packaged SaaS offerings.
Since we switched to AWS we couldn't be happier and with reserved instance pricing we're actually saving money (annualized) on a superior platform.
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-databases-introduces-enh...
So yes: we're acting on the limitations.
It's a marketing tactic. Unavailable to existing customers? Pure marketing.
"devs are important unless they already have an account"
I have dozen of servers with them (both cloud and hardware) and in terms of support and network they are pretty good.
If you used them back in the day, give it another shot. Totally different picture now.
> But I'm drawing a blank because it's a competitive market.
I don't think there is much competition when it comes to hosting mission critical applications.
Typical options are AWS or Rackspace. If you require any sort of dedicated hardware Rackspace is the only solid choice.
I tried putting stuff on DO last month for another start-up and so far their NY-EAST went down more than any of our cloud instances within Rackspace.
But here's the kicker, even if Rackspace was better than all the other ones and you were ok with paying the hefty price, in this not-so-new commodity reality, reliability and scalability is mostly a software issue, not an infrastructure issue. A lot of it comes down to getting a reliable messaging infrastructure in place (trivial) and writing software code that lives and breaths asynchronous messaging (not so trivial).
So is Rackspace the only choice? Not even by your definition. Softlayer's a clear alternative, for example. But beyond that, reliability goes way beyond the provider, it's 96% your code.
The provider pool that offers a mix of both (and has proper integration between cloud and hardware network) is pretty limited.
Their cloud offerings (without managed support) are pretty reasonable priced in terms of $/bang. This is my opinion.
> reliability and scalability is mostly a software issue
Your software is not going to save you if your network is cheaply build and maintained. Your auto-scaling setup will not do anything if your provider is having network degradation issues.
I never said the Rackspace is the only choice, but it's one of the better choices when you look at the big picture.
Especially if you require actual hardware to be part of your infrastructure.
I have been Softlayer customer for 4 years (when they first started, during EV1 days). Their network and support is superb. I also recommend them to people who want to take the hardware route.
I did not mention them in my post because I have never played around with their cloud offerings.
They were a bit late to the game and I have already invested into integration with other cloud providers (API, etc).
Cheers.
Do you have any pictures of OnMetal infrastructure? What do you guys have between the servers and the API layer?
Can you expand on this with some examples? We're currently spending a ton of time getting a RabbitMQ-based message infrastructure to work reliably in EC2 and I wouldn't really call it trivial.
Maybe you're doing something I consider atypical..maybe you're pushing more messages, have lower latency requirements, than I'm used to. But at that point, nothing "cloud" is going to help (at least, certainly not something like SQS).
For what it's worth, we essentially treat a write to our queue as fundamentally important as a write to our DB (wrapping the latter in a transaction of the former). This helps make sure that reliability issues shouldn't go unnoticed (I've personally never seen RabbitMQ swallowing messages, though it is something I've heard about, but seemingly always from relatively outdated versions).
Not sure where I mentioned that I don't how to do that. But thanks?
> The savings is exponential.
For a lot of start-ups rolling their own infrastructure is generally a giant waste of time and money in both short and long term run.
Exactly. Which is why people go to Rackspace: not having to hire their own in-house DevOps guy (which doesn't scale as your servers grow) to take care of their servers.
The control is complete, as is the obliteration of your infrastructure and/or your data. Because let's face it, unless you invest the same millions(in money and hours) as Rackspace(or any equivalent company), the odds are against you :)
The knowledge is indeed priceless, if you're into that sort of thing. Some people just need to host their application... reliably.
The place I am at now has servers at Rackspace and we can't even get ticketing and other alerts to go through systems like PagerDuty from your own internal systems.
* 911 style issues answered in seconds over phone or chat * Integration with our ticketing system with PagerDuty / other tools.
Question: Cloud Monitoring is now free for all customers - AFAIK (we use it) CM integrates well with PagerDuty (which cough I use a lot). Are you looking for ticketing responses into the PD API, or all monitoring/etc?
EDIT: I'm just realizing now that the product manager is Jesse Noller, prolific Python and PyCon contributor... so maybe it's not evil at the root after all.
> Want two 1GB CPUs or one 2GB?
No 1.5 GB CPUs? Disappointed. Hopefully they offer 0.25 Terrawatts of RAM at least. That would be nice with 314159 kilohertz of cloud.
It's a pity that Rackspace is taking away its cheaper, smaller sized instances. Oh well - at least Linode and Digital Ocean still want my money.
On the pricing: You are right; we are not attempting to be price competitive with VPS providers. We can discuss the difference between Cloud servers (in general) and VPSes as a whole, but they really are meant for different things and will always be priced differently.
Also, as of the 15th, that 8gb box costs $186.88 /mo for a full 730 hour month now. Of course, that doesn't compare to the Linode offering. But then with cloud block storage, autoscale and other features rolled into the application it's a bit different
When I was writing an API client for their cloud infrastructure (before they rolled their own)
> https://github.com/AlekseyKorzun/rackspace-open-cloud-php
I had to spin up instances for testing purposes on my own dime, luckily I had disposable income.
In my case, if I money was an issue, their Developer+ program would let me (technically) release 1.0.0 but I would never be able to release 2.0.0 that uses their new API specification because my credit would expire.
The same applies here, except we don't dictate which products or APIs you use; you will get the credit, for one year, applied to the services you need for your application.
Also, if any time you're writing OSS bindings to our APIs, or openstack, let us know. We'll hook you up for free to get that support in there.
I use and recommend them for projects but I'm still not sure about running production grade stuff on their infrastructure.
I would suggest that this and the time left is somewhere mentioned because I'm not exactly interested in paying a "infrastructure charge" for spinning up a few test-servers.
Second, I signed up via "International Customer" and according to the Dashboard I can't create servers in London - the only Datacenter in Europe. I'm in Europe so I would want to run my servers in Europe...
(I have opened a support ticket to confirm that I am indeed a Developer+ before I start creating anything.)
Linode, whom we use but need a second cloud for DR, answers to these types of questions in minutes.
jnoller: Where in the dashboard can I verify that I have a Developer+ account?
I guess this isn't targeted at people like me.
Looking forward to that latency :)
Of course it's not your fault, but if UK is the only sensible choice for people in the EU (and needs a seperate account), please don't call the other offer "International".
What this is 50$/month for 12 months (600$) off your cloud usage. There are no support fees or minimum, you have direct access to developers here, etc. There are no limits to what you can consume, no rate limiting, etc.
For anything you use - say, OnMetal, that goes above that credit (which could increase in amount or time) you pay competitive infrastructure only rates.
As a dev; I much prefer the "let me build what I want to, or need to" versus being stuck in a sandbox or worse, surprise costs if I do something crazy.
Obviously you'd hope to be bringing in enough to cover hosting by year 1 but out of curiousity really
Edit: A second question, is it possible to attach developer+ to an account that already exists? Reason my account's a bit unloved at the moment is because I'm not at a point where I can afford Rackspace prices
> 2.1. Company is a New Cloud Customer. "New Cloud Customer" refers to a Company that does not have a Cloud Account prior to becoming a Cloud Services customer in accordance with Section 2.2 below.
I guess if the time comes it'll be registered under its own entity so I'll pop back at that time! :)
If this is an attempt to get to the section of the market currently filled by the likes of Digital Ocean (to name but one) then this might be the wrong way to go about it. Personally, I want to be able to start small (VERY small, like FREE), and scale it up as I get customers. Digital Ocean and the like are great for small but I worry that they won't fit if I need to scale.
So maybe you could offer something cheap and small as opposed to the "big or nothing" attitude that Rackspace seems to have. If I knew I could start miniscule but go all the way up to massive with the same provider then that's a big selling point for me.
Agreed, and feedback like this will help me hone the time limit and other things. The program isn't ending any time soon, but I hear you loud and clear on the 12 month limit.
> If this is an attempt to get to the section of the market currently filled by the likes of Digital Ocean (to name but one) then this might be the wrong way to go about it. Personally, I want to be able to start small (VERY small, like FREE), and scale it up as I get customers. Digital Ocean and the like are great for small but I worry that they won't fit if I need to scale.
Bluntly: It's not. I've put comments in other threads, but this is not an attempt to go after VPS providers. It is not an attempt to dissuade people from adopting VPS providers. A cloud server and the associated technologies is different than what a VPS typically offers, and is designed for different architectures. The costs and the way you build your application (should be/are) different.
> So maybe you could offer something cheap and small as opposed to the "big or nothing" attitude that Rackspace seems to have. If I knew I could start miniscule but go all the way up to massive with the same provider then that's a big selling point for me.
For me, ideally we remove the time limit. That's my goal.
Might try this out, but pretty happy with AWS.
Note, the minimum fee only triggers if you use Cloud Servers, or OnMetal.