Forget the landfill – Recycled Monkey puts debris on the Cloud

// July 31st, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Community

Jason, founder of Recycled Monkey, reclaims wood, license plates, bottle caps, and other found objects, keeping them out of our already polluted environment and incorporating them into various pieces of unique art – all of which he posts on The Rackspace Cloud. RecycledMonkey.com features Jason’s creations, from flora and fauna to geographical representations. Fascinated by the story of these pieces of reclaimed material, Jason invites his visitors to “just imagine if those vintage license plates could talk and tell us about their travels…” and encourages guests to “own a piece of artwork that will surely get people talking and feeling nostalgic, while doing your part to help our fragile planet!”

Jason, inspired by the Pop Art movement, advertising, road trips, racing, comic books, and sci-fi music and movies among other things, has been creating recycled art since childhood. He argues that his bold designs and colorful art can’t really be categorized, but concedes that it has been described as “folky,” “rustic,” “retro,” “Americana,” “modern junk,” and yes – even “Pop!”

Jason and his web designer, Scott Foley of  Avant Innovations, together searched for a place to host RecycledMonkey.com. They were looking for a decent control panel and as little downtime possible and although many companies offered this, they chose the Rackspace Cloud mainly for the customer service - being treated like real people.

“I am loving the zero downtime, brilliant control panel, and INCREDIBLE customer service. It’s difficult in this age of automated hosting and support to find a hosting company (or any company for that matter) like The Rackspace Cloud – they place so much importance on real one-on-one customer service. Being able to talk to tech support via chat, email, or phone at any time of the day, and actually getting a real person who knows their stuff – that’s invaluable.”

Intrigued by the concept of art on the cloud? This is our favorite piece - we love the creative use of the vintage license plates. Check for more art on their website: http://recycledmonkey.com/.

License Plate Map - This map is made from authentic license plates unique to each state and is mounted on wood - $1,250.00

CyberGamer Beats the Boss and Conquers the Cloud

// July 2nd, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Community

CyberGamer, a free website dedicated to competitive online gaming, supplies both PC and console (Xbox360) users with ladders, leagues, forums, file libraries, galleries, and many other features, promoting online community and offering gamers the opportunity to compete against others with similar interests.  Initially inspired by Call of Duty, Jeremy “Asterix” Klaosen and James “sn@p!” Burroughs founded CyberGamer.com.au on April 9th, 2007, building it from the ground up and quickly expanding the site to include a variety of games.

Today the founders spend most of their time adding new support for upcoming titles, and maintaining support for the classics.  They work to balance their site, structuring it to cater to both the hardcore and causal gamers.  And this tactic seems to be working – within the first 6 months of CyberGamer’s release, the site had over 1,000 members, and by the end of the year, this number had risen to over 5,000, reaching 21,000 by the 2 year mark.

To support these numbers and the drastic traffic fluctuations that follow the monitoring of competitive eSports leagues, Cybergamer sent a flare up to The Rackspace Cloud.

“Hosting a website like ours can be a difficult task,” says Richard Lawes, business manager of Cybergamer Australia.  “Not only are we concerned about the traffic flowing through the site, but we also have to consider computing power.  Since the majority of our content is generated from data stored in SQL databases, the amount of queries simultaneously running 24/7 is too much for a single server to handle.  We tried virtualization, but often found the costs to be prohibitive as we were consistently paying for data and hardware that were only being utilized during peak periods.”

Because of the complications of these calculations, when the website did spike to utilize the entire server during peak times, it would often hit a threshold and stop allowing new visitors and members to view content.

“We spent a lot of time investigating other means of hosting,” explains Lawes, “and after many trials and feature comparisons, we couldn’t find a hosting provider that had as many features as The Rackspace Cloud with as good of a pricing structure.  Our trial was successful and we went into our agreement with The Rackspace Cloud with confidence.”

CyberGamer thoroughly planned and executed their transfer to The Rackspace Cloud with virtually no site downtime and a 137% increase in traffic within the first month.

“We were literally stunned by just how much traffic we had unlocked in our hosting switch,” says Lawes.  “It was almost impossible to count how much traffic we were losing on our previous hosting solution due to the site not accepting traffic because the hardware was under high load.”

Lawes describes his favorite moment with The Rackspace Cloud; “It’s that peak time of the night where our server would be hitting critical mass.  I’m watching the amount of users online, dreading the sight of that high load error, and instead watching it rise up to 150% above our previous threshold – and the page loads just as fast as it did with 3 users.”

And the more they exceed critical mass, the more important the role of The Rackspace Cloud becomes.
“With our site taking more and more traffic each month, we depend and rely on companies like The Rackspace Cloud to keep us running as smoothly as possible, allowing us to devote 100% of our passion to eSports.  We thank The Rackspace Cloud for their support and dedication to excellence as we strive to reach our goals.”

Lawes, a network engineer, is pleased with the speed, reliability, expandability, and features of The Cloud; “Not only is our site fast and dependable, but it also includes amazing features that allow us to track and identify coding that needs optimization.  This leads to improved performance and load times, and also reduces the hosting cost by reducing the amount of CPU cycles that we use.”

Overall, Lawes is happy with the partnership, “We have found a new home and are beyond impressed with how flexible our new service has proven to be.”

All of us here at The Rackspace Cloud couldn’t be happier to hear this, and we will continue to be fanatical in keeping CyberGamer alive and well so that they never have to shout, “Medic!  Server down!”

Interested to hear more?  Give us a shout at 1-877-934-0409 or hit us up on Live Chat.  Have your own success story that you want to share on The Spotlight on The Cloud?  Drop us a note at spotlight@rackspacecloud.com.

Coding in the Cloud – Rule 1 - Cache is Your Friend

// June 25th, 2009 // 7 Comments » // Development

Coding in the Cloud
By Adrian Otto

This post kicks off a series on rules for coding in the cloud. I’ve taken some notes – mainly from observing applications fail repeatedly.  And what do I mean by failing? The trouble usually comes in one of three forms:

o Not scaling as traffic comes in.
o Site fails to function under high load, resulting in complete failure.
o Getting a huge, unexpected bill for overages.

These three nasty things can happen on a cloud if your site is not coded properly.  I’ve thought about the things that lead to these tragedies and looked at some recommendations around what not to do and how to write web applications so you don’t end up in those situations.

So what is caching? Caching is saving some reusable entity that you plan on using over and over again.
So let’s say that you make a blog post. That blog post has a page, and when you link to that page it needs to run 50 database queries and generate a whole bunch of PHP/HTML applets, which then get displayed to the browser.  The whole process might take three seconds.  But if you only do that the first time, and then upon subsequent requests you show a cached version of that same output, you can cut those three seconds down to 10 milliseconds to read the cached file and output it to the user. That’s the most resource-saving practice that you can do on Cloud Sites—not repeating the same work over and over again.

Don’t store the cache in a database
Often people attempt caching, but instead of writing the cache to a file they write it to a database.

Saving cache in a database is a bad idea.

It’s trading one problem for another problem, saving one database query and creating another one. Caching in a database creates a scenario with lots of reads and lots of writes, and that comes with a high penalty, obviating the benefit of putting in a cache to begin with.

Use a memory-based or file-based cache
My recommendation is to use a file-based cache.  For a good example of a file-based cache, look at WP Super Cache, a module for the Wordpress CMS.  It uses a file-based cache in coordination with a mod_rewrite that allows you to bypass the PHP code entirely in order to serve pre-generated content.  We see Wordpress blogs getting a 10x improvement in resource utilization on their Cloud Sites deployment when they employ WP Super Cache by simply turning it on, and without changing a single line of code. Every time somebody makes a blog post, it generates the new corresponding page, and saves it in a file based cache. All public visitors to the site see pre-generated HTML instead of generating it on the fly.

Implement event-driven updates
Updates to the cache should be event-driven rather than updating the cache every 15 minutes or every hour. It’s generally a bad practice to automatically update the cache after a period of time.  It’s a much better practice to update the cache when data changes, such as when someone comments on a blog post.

Use a nonblocking design
When you implement a file-based cache, it’s tempting to use a blocking design where you lock the file in order to serialize access to read the files and to write them.  The reason for using a blocking design is to make sure one person doesn’t read while you’re writing and get partial output.  But when you serialize your access and you are making an update, all of your readers are also serializing, and this causes a huge backup of pending requests.  It’s smarter to write your changes to a temporary file, which you then rename. If you’re serving cache.html and you want to update it, you open a new file and write it as cache.html.tmp. Then rename it cache.html. Since renaming is an atomic function, you’re never going to see a partial file, and it won’t interfere with active readers of the file. You also don’t require any locking because you’re the only writer to that temp file.  So by eliminating locking you eliminate all the serializations in file access, and you have no upstream system blockage at all. Recent versions of WP Super Cache work this way.

It is important to realize that blocking, especially in Cloud Sites, costs cash – the money kind of cash.  It means every single person that’s waiting idly for something to happen, is simultaneously consuming a scarce resource and holding onto resources – and you’re getting the bill.  Since Cloud Sites monitors compute cycles, you want to make sure that all those cycles are doing productive work for you, not just serializing access to files unnecessarily.

So remember: cache is your friend.

Stay tuned for the next post and you’ll hear about database writes and how they impact performance in the cloud. Subscribe to this blog to see when the next blog comes out.

Twit App Totals Are In!

// June 25th, 2009 // No Comments » // Community, Events

Last month we kicked off this contest, asking for your vote on your favorite Twitter Applications. The votes are in, and TweetDeck topped the deck with 25% of the overall vote! Tweetie was a close runner-up at 21%, followed by dailyRT at 12% and twhirl at 6%. Some of the other nominees? Digsby, Hootsuite, and Seesmic all made an appearance, as did UberTwitter and Twitterberry. Thanks to everyone who entered and played along – we collected the names of everyone who voted into a fishbowl and drew a name…drumroll please…Special congrats to Cary Mayo, our random winner – you’ve just won 6 months of free hosting on any combination of Cloud Sites (up to $100/month), Cloud Files (up to $100/month), and Cloud Servers (up to $20/month) for a maximum value of $1320!

“I am so excited to hear this awesome news. As an existing customer I have really been pleased with the services that Mosso/Rackspace has provided. It is great to see that they are not sitting still, but constantly moving ahead and thinking of how they can provide a great product to their customers and their customers.   I plan to use the 6 months of free web hosting to continue to grow my company Reformed Design. Thanks Mosso!”

Be sure to check out some of Cary’s work at CalvaryAurora.org, and be on the look-out – her site, ReformedDesign, will be going live in the near future…

Didn’t win today? Keep your eyes peeled – we are constantly updating and creating contests to keep things lively around here!

Questions? Use your favorite Twitter app and hit us up @mosso – we’d love to hear from you.

Hadoop Has Arrived: Hadoop Summit 2009

// June 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // Community, Events

Jonathan Ellis, System Architect for The Rackspace Cloud here. Last week I flew to California to attend the Hadoop Summit and NoSQL conference.

Hadoop is the leading open-source project for MapReduce computation and supporting infrastructure (such as HDFS, the Hadoop Distributed FileSystem based on the GFS design). The 2008 Hadoop summit saw about 150 attendees; 2009 had literally five times that number. I am not a Hadoop expert but as a Cassandra developer, I’m interested in meeting people working with large datasets and there was no better place for that than the Hadoop summit.

Hadoop summit videos are not out yet, but should be soon. My favorite talks were the ones on Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Pig, and Hive. (At The Rackspace Cloud, we compete with Amazon but I have to give them credit for their talk!) Pig and Hive are both projects that offer a higher-level language for writing MapReduce jobs, with slightly different approaches. We use Pig internally.

I should also mention that the first 500 people to register at the Hadoop summit were given a free copy of Hadoop: The Definitive Guide. I would recommend this for anyone looking for an introduction to both using and administering Hadoop.

The NoSQL conference the next day featured an overview of a half-dozen of the most interesting open-source distributed databases, and CouchDB, which is targeting scaling down to mobile devices rather than out to hundreds of servers in your datacenter. NoSQL videos are up, and of course I have to point out the comment calling the Cassandra presentation (by Avinash Lakshman of Facebook) “hands-down the most interesting.” Besides ours, I would recommend Todd’s overview as well as the Voldemort and HBase talks. Yes, there are cases I would use one of those instead of Cassandra, but that’s a subject for another post! (In the meantime, Toby Negrin from Yahoo posted some notes on each.)

Want to know more about Hadoop at Rackspace? Be sure to check out this video interview from building43.com.

If you want to try out Hadoop or a distributed database but don’t have a cluster of your own, visit our Cloud Servers page for more information.