Rackspace Cloud Computing & Hosting

Cloud Computing with WebLogic Suite at Rackspace

abartels — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:30:06 +0000

Interview with Lew Moorman, President of Cloud, Jim Curry, VP of Corporate Development and Mark Collier, VP of Business Development at the recent Oracle OpenWorld 2009. They talk about Cloud Computing, Hybrid Hosting and WebLogic Suite.

How Cloud Computing is Driving the Next Wave of Productivity

abartels — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:59:02 +0000

Lew Moorman, President of Cloud, recently wrote an article that appeared in News Week Japan, “How Cloud Computing is Driving the Next Wave of Productivity.”

He discusses how cloud computing is certainly a trend that is gaining traction but there is some concrete reasoning behind it.

“The movement of IT hardware and software out of offices and factories and onto the web promises to deliver huge cost savings, create new business models, and threaten incumbent technologies and the global corporations that deliver them.”

He goes on to say that companies are using cloud computing to save money, be efficient and be creative. Cloud computing is transforming businesses and allowing for a high level of productivity. Start-ups are also able to get their businesses off the ground quicker and at a lower cost.

Companies are using cloud computing in every aspect of their business, including Rackspace. We utilize tools like Salesforce and Omniture. Historically, it could take up to 10 weeks to provision servers and in turn stalls your project that amount of time from getting off the ground. We have seen cases at The Rackspace Cloud taking minutes to get a project off the ground. We see it everyday.

Read full the post here.

Cybernautic Launches High Traffic Extreme Makeover: Home Edition Site on the Cloud

abartels — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:23:14 +0000

Angela Bartels, Cloud Maven

In a previous post, we announced that Rackspace Cloud Customer, Cybernautic was selected to lead the Brady Homes web project for Extreme Makeover: Home Edition which aired this past Sunday, October 25th on ABC. Senior Producers of the show told Chad Parker, CEO and President of Cybernautic, it was inevitable the website will go down once the show aired.

The show aired and ExtremeBradyHomes.com performed flawlessly, serving millions of visitors continuously throughout the life of the project without a single failure. In the press release, Conrad Ricket, Executive Producer at Extreme Makeover: Home Edition quotes:

In over 150 shows, it has been rare to find an Internet hosting company that was equipped to handle the traffic of thousands of people coming to a builder’s website. No doubt this is a testament to The Rackspace Cloud for handling what, in most cases, is an impossible task. And, without failure, The Rackspace Cloud was able to keep the pipeline open to hundreds of subcontractors and trade workers, and thousands of volunteers who wanted to step up to help a family.

The site handled over 300,000 hits since going live including a spike of 41,000 users at once during peak times, such as during taping and construction, and immediately following the house “reveal.”

Cybernautic not only launched and managed the ExtremeBradyHomes.com website, they also managed the Facebook and Twitter accounts for some 13,000 fans which served as hub of all online activity associated with the episode. Extreme Makeover released a minimum of two news releases per day through the site, and reporters covering the project depended on the site for these news updates. Over 5,000 volunteer applications were submitted via the site for roughly 2,500 available positions.

Check out this cool video they did on the recap of the project.

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition - Philo from Cybernautic Design on Vimeo.

Congrats to Cybernautic on a successful project!

Read the full press release here.

How do you put a Database in the Cloud?

Jonathan Bryce — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:45:50 +0000

By Jonathan Bryce, Founder

There’s a lot of buzz in the cloud world around Amazon’s new Relational Database Service. With this move, Amazon inches up one level from pure infrastructure to also owning the operating system and base server software (you can’t SSH into an RDS EC2 instance). More interesting than the announcement itself is the discussion it’s generated, a frequent question being, “Is it really cloud?”   Techcrunch provides coverage and an intelligent discussion in the comments.

Rightscale makes the point that RDS instances are basically MySQL appliances, at the core just EC2 instances running MySQL. This is a capability RightScale has offered for years on top of the same infrastructure. The RDS instances then have some valuable, automated services layered on top to back up and scale the resources available to that EC2 instance. This is similar to the value added services Rightscale has offered as well as similar to the snapshot backups and in-place scaling Cloud Servers offers for all server types. A side note is that this is obviously a step that will be worrisome for some of the Amazon partners who are building businesses on top of Amazon’s infrastructure services.

Database != Cloud?

Back to the original question: How do you do databases in the cloud? This is a question we’ve been consumed with for years. We are are running thousands and thousands of applications, most of which are back-ended by a MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server database. At Rackspace, we have a few basic philosophies that influence how we approach our product offerings from managed hosting to cloud to email.

First, we want to give users a variety of options that start very low in the stack and go all the way up to software services. Customers can pick where in the stack they want to work to match their needs for customization, ease of use, and required technical skill.

Second, we want to try to make the transition from one type of service to another as smooth as possible. I applaud Amazon for implementing this in a way that preserves the standard MySQL protocol. We’ve taken the same approach with our Cloud Sites database capabilities.

The third goal, though, is the hardest: smooth scalability. One of the primary promises of the cloud is elasticity. For something like our web application servers, we run custom versions of web server software that allow us to reach a level of scale that will meet practically any need. Relational databases, though, are much more difficult to scale infinitely. Amazon’s approach is to give their users the building blocks and ask them to handle the scaling. We’ve taken a different tack, trying to handle scaling as seamlessly as possible.

Along the way, we’ve learned many lessons about scaling, especially databases. The first lesson is that there’s still a limit to how far you can stretch today’s relational database software. We’ve been able to create a MySQL offering for Cloud Sites that has elastically handled massive volume, but we’ve also reached upper bounds and had to help a small number of customers deploy in other configurations. You can throw bigger, beefier hardware at it, but eventually you can’t go any farther vertically. You can scale horizontally using projects like mysql-proxy to load-balance queries, but again, you will run into problems like maintaining consistency across all your nodes. For the vast majority of database usage out there, these problems never appear on the horizon and the work we’ve already done on MySQL is elastic enough. For those cases where the database needs to do more, we’ve been working with two interesting new technologies.

Drizzle

Drizzle is a project that is one step removed from MySQL. It’s primarily worked on by developers who also worked on MySQL, with the goal being to modularize every component of MySQL and build a scalable, cloud-friendly version of the world’s most popular RDBMS. Drizzle is still in early stages of development, but it shows a lot of promise. Bringing real horizontal scaling to MySQL, while maintaining compatibility and relational database functionality will be a huge step forward. And if it won’t require a complete rework of the decades of development time that has been spent on RDBMS-backed applications, that is a big bonus.

Cassandra

Beyond Drizzle, we are actively contributing to and working on the Cassandra distributed database system. Cassandra goes beyond trying to scale a traditional relational database. Cassandra removes many of those traditional concepts and places a priority on scaling. When you are dealing with billions of writes and terabytes of data, you’ve moved into a realm of technology needs that requires you to adopt some new concepts. Truly web-scaled applications, like Digg, have reached this point and started to make the shift. The possibility of reaching hundreds of millions of users worldwide with online applications creates scale problems like never before. We see distributed databases as a key component to solving the next wave of scaling problems and that’s why we are investing heavily into it. If you put in a little bit of extra development effort upfront, they offer the potential for truly elastic, cloud database services.

If the idea of creating infinitely scalable database technology consumes your thoughts, send us your resume - jobs@rackspacecloud.com. We are always looking to add skilled engineers and developers, and will provide an opportunity to work on some of the largest infrastructure systems in the world, handling billions of transactions every month.

Halloween brings a 300% Web Traffic Increase for Costumes4Less.com

abartels — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:26:20 +0000

Angela Bartels, Cloud Maven

It’s that time of the year again - jack o lanterns, haunted houses and gooey candy. It’s Halloween! And what’s the most important part of Halloween? Costumes of course. It’s the only time of the year when you get to put your favorite Star Wars or Star Trek outfit on…well, maybe not the only time of the year.

If you do a search for “Halloween Costumes” right now, Costumes4less.com will show up on your first search engine page. Costumes4less, a long time Rackspace Cloud customer, is a leading online retailer for costumes offering the largest variety at very competitive prices. They’re able to offer low prices by keeping operating costs low such as not having physical retail stores, not spending wasteful money on marketing/advertising expenses or expensive print catalogs and utilizing cloud computing for their hosting infrastructure. And they have very loyal customers.

Although costumes are purchased throughout the year for various occasions, Halloween is unarguably the busiest time for costume retailers. Since traffic spikes up only once a year, Costumes4less needed the option to scale accordingly and not have to set up an expensive dedicated server environment that was only needed for such a short time frame.

When I asked Niranjan (Nick) Pardasani, CEO of Costumes4Less, on why he chose the Rackspace Cloud, he quotes:

We were in shared hosting environment which was OK for all year except the most important time of the year - Halloween season. Shared hosting environment could not deliver the performance during our peak season. We did not want the costs and hassles associated with a dedicated server solution. The scalability claim of The Rackspace Cloud was the main selling feature for us.

On a busy day, Costumes4less receives 54,000 visitors, 479,000 page views and an average time on site of 4.25 minutes.

I checked their Alexa traffic statistics to get a gauge of the percentage increase in traffic:

Amazon CloudFront vs. Rackspace CloudFiles CDN Performance

abartels — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:56:37 +0000

Angela Bartels, Cloud Maven

It’s not enough for us to tell you why you should use our services. We believe that it is more powerful when you hear real stories from customers on how they are utilizing our cloud computing platform. It’s even better when customers are not only using us but also trying out another provider so they can do a comparable analysis. This is the cool stuff.

Chris Meller, an Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Servers customer, chose Amazon CloudFront as his first choice for offloading all his static files to a CDN. Being a fan of our Cloud Servers offering, he didn’t want to rule out Rackspace Cloud Files. So he tried both CloudFront and Cloud Files and compared his results.

He did find annoyances on both ends as he quotes:

“So with one minor annoyance on each side of the aisle I turned to hard quantifiable data, something every programmer loves. I loaded up my stylesheet on both CDNs and pointed a Pingdom check at each. The results were surprising.”

Click here to see his results.

Store your SharePoint Data to Cloud Files

abartels — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:26:02 +0000

Rackspace partner, AvePoint, announced that its DocAve software platform will fully support the delivery of its SharePoint backup and archiving files directly to our Cloud Files platform.

Once you download their software and setup a Cloud Files account – all you have to do is configure Cloud Files as a data repository in the DocAve Manager. After that, data is seamlessly transferred to the Rackspace Cloud but still managed and accessed from SharePoint.

Below are two videos. One that shows a farm being restored from the Rackspace Cloud and the other, files being stored in the Rackspace Cloud but being accessed from within SharePoint.

Restore from the Cloud

Extension Archiver

If you have questions or comments, feel free to contact Jeff Deverter via email: jeff.deverter@rackspace.com

Security Series: 3 Tips on How to Prevent an Attack on the User Environment

abartels — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:52:14 +0000

By Chad Wilson, Security Engineer

Securing your development and deployment environment is equally as important as securing your web server. Over the past few years, the attack vector has shifted away from attacking and compromising servers and is now focused heavily on client side vulnerabilities via code injection and cross-site scripting tactics.

This post serves to provide awareness and recommend actions that can be taken to prevent the outcome of the scenario attack as seen below.

Scenario of an Attack on the User Environment

This is a scenario of an attack targeted at end users resulting in the compromise of their web site. The attack might start when the victim is browsing a legitimate web site that contains hidden iframes, preventing the site owner or visitor from noticing that the site has actually been compromised. The hidden iframe may contain JavaScript logic that determines the victim’s browser version, OS version, etc. to launch an exploit intelligently. In this example, the JavaScript determines that the victim might be vulnerable to an exploit in the Adobe Acrobat browser plug-in. This exploit will lead to arbitrary execution of code. In this case, shellcode is executed that installs a backdoor and registers itself as part of the botnet.

[Click to to see how you can prevent an attack such as this one]

Once the backdoor/rootkit is in place, it registers with the Command and Control (CnC) server. The CnC server pushes a key logger and a program that searches for stored FTP user credentials.

Anything that is found is sent back to the CnC server. The CnC server stores the credentials from the zombie computer and uses them to connect to the Victims FTP server. If only the FTP server name and user name is collected, brute force password guessing can be used to break into accounts with weak and predictable passwords. Once an account is validated it can be loaded into a program that connects and recursively infects all web site content by inserting hidden malicious code.

After infecting the victim’s computer and web site, the attacker now has one more computer in its botnet, and one more web site helping spread the malware. It doesn’t take long before thousands of websites and computers are compromised. These botnets are being rented and sold on black-markets for pay-per-click advertising and other profitable usage.

Here are 3 Quick Tips on How to Prevent this Attack:

1) Turn on automatic updates for your browser and plug-ins

Drive-by downloads and other variants of cross site scripting (XSS) attacks are commonly the first stage of an attack on end users, not servers, in an attempt to infect their computers with malware. In the example above, the victim simply visited a legitimate, but compromised, web site. Due to an unpatched browser plug-in, the victim’s computer and web site became compromised.

The popular browsers offer the ability to integrate add-ons and plug-ins. A browser plug-in is a handler for a media type that the browser itself cannot render, such as Adobe Flash or Apple Quicktime. Browsers usually have an “auto update” option or annoying pop-ups to help alert users about new patches and updates. Historically, plug-ins have been less “active” in notifying the end user about upgrades and updates. Not being regularly patched and updated, yet being common to most all browsers, makes plug-ins attractive targets for attackers.

Client side interpreters like Javascript, ActiveX, and Java all add significant security risk. Be cautious when browsing sites that require them. Although these interpreters are limited in what they can do outside of the browser environment, it is trivial for attackers to write exploits that steal cookie and session data. Also, as in the example provided, these languages are commonly used to trigger and event that can be exploited.

Bottom line: Turn on automatic updates for your browser and plug-ins. Only use trusted plug-ins, and only allow client side execution from trusted sites.

2) Install Anti-Malware

Client side protection is more important now than before, but the reason why is slightly different. Traditionally, people installed anti-virus software to protect their computers from destructive viruses that resulted in loss of services and/or data. These types of viruses and worms have not completely disappeared, but attackers have found that the same methods of propagation can be used for profit by partnering with pay-per-click advertising and such. Rogue software, like spyware and adware, can be delivered with the virus that can open pop-up ads when a user browses certain sites or types key words, for example.

Early spyware and adware collected browsing trends and sent it off to marketing agencies. This malware was usually bundled other software that a user willingly installed. Today, the malware that infects a host usually comes from browsing a web site that was forced on the end user. Instead of creating benign tracking cookies, the malicious sites now aim to exploit a vulnerability in the browser or one of the plug-ins to allow arbitrary execution of attackers choice. Once exploited, the workstation is compromised. Rootkits, key loggers, and trojans help maintain control over the host. Attackers have been using browser add-ons (not plug-ins) to conceal their rogue applications. Browser add-ons load when the browser starts. Staying hidden inside the browser executable, attackers can hide rogue programs from the view of processes running on the host.

Some anti-malware can warn the user about web sites that are suspected to perform malicious activity. Black lists created by Google Safe Browsing, Norton Safeweb, and McAfee Site Advisor often identify these websites.

Bottom Line: Anti-malware software protects your computer from being compromised by malware. Once compromised, it is easy to harvest information from the host about FTP credentials, CMS credentials, stored passwords, etc. All this information could be used to compromise your website.
Extra: Anti-malware products are often the target of attackers. Anti-malware software is common, and in exploiting it, the attacker can bypass all detection. It is this reason that some people run two different brands of anti-malware software.

3) Secure FTP

FTP credentials are the primary target of many new malware attacks. After harvesting FTP credentials, the malware sends them off to a command and control server. The CnC server connects periodically to the FTP server and executes a search-and-inject routine finding all HTML documents and injecting malicious content. This aids in infecting other hosts, steadily recruiting more zombies for a botnet. (see illustration above)

Key loggers or similar daemons can be trojaned on a compromised/infected host so that updates can be sent to the CnC server when passwords are changed or added. Changing the passwords would be futile in this case as long as the host is compromised.

Malware is not the only concern with FTP. Attackers constantly hammer away brute-force password attacks at FTP servers that discover through various non-malicious methods. This is why choosing a strong password is important.

Finally, the FTP protocol is in itself insecure. Login credentials are passed over the Internet un-encrypted. Attackers that have access to the same subnet that this data traverses can deploy packet sniffers and trivially harvest FTP credentials. Always use a secure channel for FTP, such as SFTP. This protects you from such attacks.

Bottom Line: Choose strong passwords for FTP. If you are unsure about what qualifies as a strong password, use publically available password strength analysis tools or password generators, but make sure it’s from a trusted site. Configure your FTP client to always use SFTP instead of plain FTP. Do not store/save your FTP password in your FTP client unless you are positive that it is stored using strong encryption.

This completes this security series post. Look for more security series posts in the near future. If you have comments, questions, or suggestions, please comment here and I will respond quickly.

As always, our support team is available 24/7 via live chat, phone and email so please don’t hesitate to contact us to ask questions specific to your set up.

Fifteen Year Old Launches App of the Day on The Rackspace Cloud

abartels — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:16:02 +0000

Angela Bartels, Cloud Maven

Launched over the weekend, App of the Day was featured on TechCrunch, The Washington Post and LifeHacker for it’s simple set up and highly needed platform in the iPhone App world.

The iPhone API has allowed developers to get creative and develop apps that fulfill all sorts of needs, which gives you tens of thousands of apps to choose from. I just did a search on my iPhone for “WorkOut” and received a selection of over 100 apps. So how do I know which one is best? This is where App of the Day can help.

App of the Day highlights a different application every day for iPhone or iPod Touch users looking to discover high quality applications in the App Store. Founded by Jordan Satok, App of the Day features community-nominated applications that get featured on the home page each day. Users are then able to comment on the application, and provide feedback for potential buyers.

You only get one nomination per day, reinforcing the goal of the site to only feature quality applications. The application that receives the most nominations becomes the App of the Day. Today’s App of the Day: Newstand.

The concept is quite simple which is why I think it’s attractive. Just like our other client, MacBlogz, App of the Day is bringing useful content to the readers. There’s a lot to choose from and App of the Day makes it easier for you to see quality applications useful to you.

I had the opportunity to catch up with Jordan. Based out of Toronto, Jordan is “an entrepreneur who focuses on web startups primarily in the software field. He built jordansatok.com at the age of 9, was blogging by the age of 11, and was podcasting at 12. Today, at 15, Jordan is involved in over 10 different startups.” Jordan built the App of the Day site in less then 10 days and it is hosted on the Rackspace Cloud.

When I asked him about why he chose cloud computing and specifically The Rackspace Cloud, he quotes:

The Rackspace Cloud made it easy for me to launch my site, App of the Day, with minimal server configuration required. I scaled from a 256mb Cloud Server to a 2gb Cloud Server for the launch, and at no time had any concerns relating to the server. App of the Day was solid through three major articles, TechCrunch, Washington Post and Lifehacker. I highly recommend the Rackspace Cloud, and wouldn’t consider any other hosting platform for my future sites.

At just 15 years old, Jordan has already accomplished so much and he definitely has a bright future ahead of him. We are flattered he chose The Rackspace Cloud.

Please provide Jordan with feedback on App of the Day at http://rypple.com/appoftheday/improve. Click here to see what feedback Jordan has already received and what his next steps are.

Follow Jordan on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jordansatok

Joining the Cloud Security Alliance

abartels — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:23:54 +0000

By Josh Zachry, Systems Security

The Rackspace Cloud formally joined the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) in September 2009 as a Corporate Member and Solutions Provider Advisory Council Member. Participation in the CSA will further expand and support the Rackspace Cloud’s vision of creating an Open Cloud. As a member on the Solutions Provider Advisory Council, The Rackspace Cloud will provide guidance and recommendations on strategic initiatives undertaken by the CSA and participating organizations. We believe engaging with the CSA and member organizations is an important step in an effort to provide unique insight into the security challenges facing The Rackspace Cloud, and to learn about security concerns organizations and individuals alike share in regards to Cloud Computing.

The Rackspace Cloud is one of the largest Cloud Computing providers and we understand the need for transparency and to act as a responsible steward. Cloud Computing continues to emerge as a significant technology enabler for many small to medium size businesses, start up ventures and individual consumers. In many cases the savings realized by using an on demand pay as you go computing platform are significant. Cloud Computing is becoming a preferred option for hosting and we do recognize there are inherent security challenges that come with shared computing environments. Some are naturally addressed by existing technology while others may require more research to determine a feasible approach. In both cases it’s important that they be discussed, researched and clarified all in an effort to bring stability and reliability to Cloud Computing. This is why the CSA was created: to bring industry, non-profits, consumers and government together in an effort to educate, discuss, research and resolve Cloud Computing Security concerns.

Jim Reavis and Nils Puhlmann initially idealized the CSA in late 2008 to confront the overwhelming security concerns from the industry and the public at large surrounding Cloud Computing. This concept quickly caught on with other information security professionals, which led to the establishment of the CSA in December 2008. In less than a year the CSA has arguably emerged as the global leader promoting collaboration and research for addressing Cloud Computing security. The Rackspace Cloud is proud to participate as a leader in this forum and we look forward to providing valuable insight as a member organization.

Kaavo’s IMOD Now Supports The Rackspace Cloud

abartels — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:33:31 +0000

Kaavo Inc., an innovative provider of solutions for deploying, managing, and securing applications in the cloud, has announced its core product IMOD will support one click deployment and automated run-time management for complex custom applications on the Rackspace Cloud.

By tapping the capabilities of cloud computing, IMOD enables Rackspace Cloud customers to manage all resources required for running applications as a unified system and provides the following benefits to the users:

• Application centric n-tier configuration: With one click, IMOD automatically brings online one or multi-server systems, configures middleware, deploys application/workload, and starts all dependent services in a specified order

• Automation: Ability to automate complex workflows to handle run-time production exceptions without human intervention

• Effective monitoring and alerts: Users can monitor resources used by their applications and set up alerts to proactively manage application service levels

Kaavo invites individuals and businesses to sign-up for a free 30-day trial at https://imod.kaavo.com.

The below video is a demo demonstrating how to deploy and manage applications on The Rackspace cloud using IMOD.

We spoke to Jamal Mazhar, Founder and CEO of Kaavo about his experience working with The Rackspace Cloud and he quotes:

“We were delighted by the ease of use of the Rackspace Cloud API, as it enabled us to quickly integrate with our offering. We look forward to continuing to provide innovations for making it easier for the users to deploy, secure, and manage their applications in the cloud.”

Oracle In The Cloud

abartels — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:09:26 +0000

We are participating in Oracle’s premiere partner event, OpenWorld, which started yesterday at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Oracle OpenWorld puts together over “1,800 sessions, 400 partner exhibits, keynotes from the world’s technology leaders, hands-on labs, several special networking events, and more.” It’s an opportunity to get hands-on experience with a span of Oracle technology, and preview what’s coming next from Oracle and its partners.

Hasan Rizvi, Senior Vice President, Oracle Fusion Middleware showcased for the first time an Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic running on a Rackspace Cloud Server environment during his Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g—Foundation for Innovation address. We believe combining technologies with Oracle will contribute greatly to the advancement of cloud computing and serve as another milestone to assure businesses that the Cloud is ready for prime time.

We’ll be providing support for the new Oracle solution in the coming months. For more information and to sign-up for beta access, please visit http://www.rackspacecloud.com/oracle.

Lew Moorman will be participating in a cloud panel at the Leader’s Circle, an exclusive executive forum at OpenWorld where he will discuss cloud computing trends and issues. The Rackspace Cloud team is also doing demonstrations at Booth #221 in the Cloud Pavilion. For more information on the Cloud Pavilion, please visit http://www.oracle.com/us/openworld/018170.htm#saas.

The Rackspace Cloud and Oracle are also collaborating on the first Java-based public cloud based on Oracle’s WebLogic Suite and Cloud Sites. The new beta platform will be available for a private pilot in the coming months. For more information about Oracle product availability in The Rackspace Cloud and to sign-up for the private beta of the java-based public cloud, please visit http://www.rackspacecloud.com/oracle.

We’ll be doing a post to recap the Oracle event so stay tuned!

Here’s the video of Hasan Rizvi discussing Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Innovations

Listening to every Tweet up in the Clouds

abartels — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:13:32 +0000

Angela Bartels, Cloud Maven

I attended the 140 | Twitter Conference in LA a couple of weeks ago, hosted by the Parnassus Group. The purpose was to bring the Twitter community together – novice and experienced – to discuss how they are using Twitter, what it means for your brand, best practices and tools and what we believe the future of Twitter will be.

There were many high profile individuals there that avidly use Twitter including – Levar Burton, Tony Hawk, Tyrese Gibson, Dr. Drew, Guy Kawasaki among others. Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter and motivational speaker, Tony Robbins, did the Keynotes. And yes, we had a guest appearance from Pee Wee Herman himself and witnessed his first Tweet.

Twitter has opened a whole new avenue of communication between businesses and their clients. The Rackspace Cloud has been an early adopter of Twitter and we continue to utilize this platform to listen to what our customers are saying as well as share useful information with our followers.

Many large companies are utilizing Twitter – Best Buy, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines. Unlike these companies, you cannot walk into your nearest Rackspace office and speak to a rep in person (although if you were in San Antonio, you could). Rackspace, from the beginning, wanted to change the “accepted” way customer service was being done in this industry. We have made ourselves easily and always accessible - and the experience should always be fanatical. We have long-term personal relationships with our customers and we don’t even meet most of them in person! Twitter has allowed us to engage with customers at an exponential level.

When using @rackcloud, here are a few rules of thumb we follow:

· Be Real – We are a unique group of individuals with lots of different interests, talents, and quirks. We are not afraid to show them.

· Be Transparent - Do not be afraid to engage customers directly, honestly, and openly.

· Engage – We believe Twitter is a 2-way communication channel, not a one way.

· Highlight customers, and their experiences– This is really what it’s about.

· Share valuable information – Not just about us but industry related information that’s useful & helpful.

As we grow, more and more clients are talking about us on Twitter – mostly brand and product related but there are times when a customer tweets about a technical issue. We offer 24/7 live chat, phone and email support and it is very important that customers utilize these channels of communication for both security purposes and to ensure a timely response for their particular support needs.

The most important key elements are #1 Set Expectations – While Twitter is a great tool to listen to clients, it is not a substitute for a technical support channel, #2 Always publicly respond- We are listening and it’s important that the community knows we are listening and genuinely care.

You may have read the recent post from Chris Brogan - it’s a great justification that what we do works.

GitHub Moves to Rackspace!

abartels — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:44:48 +0000

Emil Sayegh, General Manager, The Rackspace Cloud

With our strong commitment to being an open cloud, we couldn’t be happier to officially welcome a leader in the developer community, GitHub, to the Rackspace family. When we needed a way to build a collaborative relationship with developers interested in using our Cloud services, we chose Github over other source-code hosting solutions due to its robust and feature-rich service. They are leading the way in moving the community toward distributed version control which is a perfect model for community-based development.

In this move to Rackspace, Github will be using dedicated gear for now but they’re thinking about using cloud computing in the future to offload specific workloads. This highlights the power of choice that Rackspace brings to its customers. Just as Freshbooks, Pangea Foundation, and Razorfish discovered, there are huge advantages of utilizing the cloud to offset workloads and still keep dedicated gear for other custom configurations. In addition to Fanatical Support of course, this is really another true advantage of hosting at Rackspace. Lew Moorman, has gotten to know the founders of Github this past year and he just authored a blog post on Github’s move to Rackspace. Read his full post here.

Talent Flying to The Rackspace Cloud

abartels — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:00:33 +0000

Dear Harper, John, Mark, Michael, Nick and Rick:

We’d like to send each of you a Warm (and by warm we mean Texas warm) Welcome to the Rackspace family! We are so excited to have you join The Rackspace Cloud, and become bona fide Rackers. There are many reasons why we are excited, but here are the top four:

1) All six of you are Geeks, with a passion for customers. So again “birds of feather flock together…”
2) You all have been there and done that before, and are the best at it. You bring deep expertise in data centers, infrastructure scaling, product dev, globalization, and ecosystem development. You are all true innovators, and we can’t wait to see each of you in your element and in action.
3) It makes us feel all gooey inside, knowing you left leading tech companies (Yahoo, Canonical, Microsoft, Threadless, etc) to be a part of our Cloud mission of spreading Fanatical Support to the Cloud.
4) I can’t forget to mention your good looks…and awesome hair (yes, I am a little jealous…;))

Read the full press release here to learn more about these great new hires. (And check out their nice photos below.) We are always looking for new cool cats with a passion for technology, and customers. If you’re interested in joining the cloud computing movement and helping us solve complex technical problems, while having fun please visit our jobs page. And be sure to check out our video to get a little glimpse of what our culture is like.

- Emil and The Rackspace Cloud Team

Nick Longo on an Underwater Treasure Hunt

Michael Foster

Rick Clark

Harper Reed

John Purrier

Mark Collier and Family

Core Industries Created 1st Mandela Day Website - Receiving 100,000 Unique Visitors Worldwide

abartels — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:31:54 +0000

Angela Bartels, Cloud Maven

Imagine a day dedicated to celebrate the “idea that each individual has the power to transform the world, the ability to imprint.” – this day is Mandela Day and it occurs annually on July 18th, Nelson Mandela’s birthday.

Rackspace Cloud Customer, Core Industries, landed the first Mandela Day web project that occurred this past July. Core Industries is an interactive marketing, design and development firm and has a strong environmental, socially conscious mission. When Gotham Ad Agency approached them about the Mandela Day web project, regardless of the task, they knew this was something they could passionately and successfully work on.

Though Core Industries has a pretty in depth portfolio, this web project was like no other they had ever worked on. Mandela Day was launching the concept of the first worldwide holiday and so the website needed to speak to a global audience. Further, they were on a 4-month time frame and with a very limited budget. In addition to launching mandeladay.com, Core Industries completed the following:

- Created and managed the social networking platforms including the blog, Facebook, Twitter and VolunteerMatch.

- Created and sent updates via weekly email newsletters and daily SMS broadcast messages

- Created a real time, digital hand wall, where people could add their “imprints”

- Coordinated and filmed celebrities such as Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Naomi Campbell, Christie Turlington, Forest Whitaker, and many others for a customizable music video set to “In Our Own Two Hands” performed by Jack Johnson and Ben Harper.

- Set up a free and pay per view video simulcast of the star-studded concert held in front of a sold out crowd at Radio City Music Hall

Wow, what a task list! According to Corey Szopinski, founder of Core Industries, the other impressive statistic was that mandeladay.com received 100,000 unique visitors over the 2 months that the campaign was in full swing. Those visitors were almost exclusively organic since they had no paid media running during that time. That’s a great reflection on the hard work of Core Industries to be able to drive that amount of traffic primarily through word of mouth and viral marketing in such a short time frame.

Why they chose Cloud Computing

Corey is a long time Rackspace dedicated hosting customer of 8 years. Given the nature of a single day event, he knew that he was going to need a solution that was scalable and affordable which is why he chose Cloud Computing for mandeladay.com.

“We needed something that could scale up seamlessly. We couldn’t justify the expense of building a load-balanced cluster just to handle a few days worth of traffic, so a ready made cloud solution was perfect for us.”

They had originally planned on using Amazon’s EC2 for this project, but went with Rackspace Cloud Servers instead. They weren’t new to Rackspace’s Fanatical Support and they really liked how easy it was to get set up.

“The Rackspace cloud is vastly easier to use. We also have the added ability to create a cloud server for more specialized applications where we need full root access. I prefer the cloud server option over EC2, since it stores data permanently even during reboots. On EC2, all data is lost.”

We are thrilled that Core Industries chose the Rackspace Cloud to host such a phenomenal and historic event. Everyone at Core Industries had the wonderful opportunity to attend the event at Radio City Music Hall and saw President Obama give his commitment speech along with all the other great performances – “a truly epic event” according to Corey.    I asked Corey what kind of inspiration he received from Mandela Day and he quotes:

“The campaign reminded me of how important interactive marketing is. Since we’re in the business of crafting a message, and then distributing it, this project, and the substantive meaning behind it, was a great outlet for our creativity and know how. And I hope it inspired a few people to keep in mind that we can each make a difference… we don’t have to be a celebrity, or wealthy or anything else… we just need to stand up for what’s right and take matters into our own hands.”

The Rackspace Cloud Welcomes Harper Reed, Nepholologist

abartels — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:28:34 +0000

Emil Sayegh, General Manager, The Rackspace Cloud

You may have read from Silicon Angle yesterday that former CTO of Threadless, Harper Reed is joining the Rackspace Cloud as our very own Nepholologist - What is a Nepholologist? Feel free to look it up. ;) He’ll be working on cool technology for our customers, evangelizing The Rackspace Cloud, and serve as an all around technical expert to help customers on board The Rackspace Cloud. I am personally very excited to have him join the Rackspace family and on behalf of myself and the entire team here, we would like to give him a very warm welcome.

Harper brings a wealth of experience in technology and business development as one of the first employees at the trendy and highly successful start up Threadless (and a long-term loved Rackspace customer). He has accomplished great things at Threadless (selling something like 5M shirts during his time there) and is ready to take on new challenges. As a matter of fact, this is how we met him. He was an amazing customer of both our Cloud and Dedicated businesses, always helping us get better by providing critical feedback. We loved his passion and I’d say he loved our passion as well. Harper is joining us because he is eager to put what he has learned over the years to use by helping start ups solve their computing problems:

“I’m excited about companies that are solving creating products which are simple and easy to consume. A lot of iPhone developers are doing great solving addressing this problem challenge – creating a simple app that solves a simple problem that I could explain to my mom over the phone. I want to help the next generation start ups of companies reach the scale of Twitter, Facebook, and of course Threadless. That’s cool.”

Harper has told me, and many Rackers he speaks with frequently here, that joining the cloud computing movement, specifically The Rackspace Cloud, is an exciting opportunity for him. He is just fascinated with cloud computing and how it’s democratizing hosting. Harper also has always been a great culture fit with Rackspace - he’s fanatical about what he does, and so are we. With his experience in infrastructure, and passion for helping customers, Harper is going to be a great advisor to both startups, and established companies on how to leverage the cloud for their businesses.

“Making hosting and server technology cheap and accessible will hopefully get more people building better products and launching them without losing their shirts. I’m into that!”

We’re excited to have him join our cause and can’t wait to see all the cool things he will bring to the table – and yes, they will be cool. He also plays YoYo professionally. Check it out.

The Cassandra Project

abartels — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:44:39 +0000

By Jonathan Ellis, System Architect

You may have heard about the Cassandra distributed database in recent articles or conferences. I’d like to explain what advantages Cassandra offers over traditional relational databases like MySQL or Oracle and why Rackspace has committed resources to the Cassandra project.

The Cassandra project was started by Facebook in 2007 to scale their internal applications, particularly Inbox Search. Earlier this year, they released it to the Apache incubator where other people from the community could become involved and start contributing. This allowed the project to move forward in a direction that is more general to the public than just to Facebook’s needs.

In March, I became the first outside committer to this Apache Incubator project. Eric Evans from Rackspace and Jun Rao from IBM Research soon followed, and we recently added Chris Goffinet from Digg. The community has grown from 5 people in the IRC channel in December to over 60.

Distributed vs. Relational Databases

Traditional relational databases are 30 years old, are well understood and have a huge ecosystem of tools around them. For that reason, it’s a compelling option when building your application. Postgres, MySQL, and Oracle are all relational databases modeling a schema on entities and relations between those entities. That’s a good, powerful programming model with interesting theoretical properties. But companies with large amounts of data have already gone past what you can reasonably fit on a single machine, even on high-end hardware, and it’s provably impossible to keep the traditional relational model, in particular the ACID properties, while scaling across multiple machines. Even if you’re willing to give up availability, scaling reads (via caching and replication) is difficult with relational databases, and scaling writes by partitioning is either very expensive, very painful from an application programming and operations standpoint, or both.

Cassandra is taking the approach that, given that you’re going to have to give up some parts of the relational model to scale, let’s start over and rethink things. Let’s add things like transparent replication and failover, built-in partitioning and load balancing, multiple data center support, and the ability to add capacity without ever disturbing applications running against the database.

Rackspace’s Involvement

The original Facebook team has been busy elsewhere, so the community has had to step up and take the initiative in moving Cassandra forward. Cassandra is open source and I don’t want to downplay others’ contributions, including those from IBM Research, Digg, and Twitter as well as other companies and individuals, but I’m proud that Rackspace’s support has been instrumental in adding many important new features, fixing bugs, and getting out new releases.

Here are 3 reasons why Rackspace has committed resources:

1- As stated in previous posts by Erik Carlin, we are committed to an Open Cloud. With Amazon’s Simple DB or Google App Engine’s datastore, you’re locked in. Cassandra presents an open alternative: you can write against Cassandra and deploy anywhere. That’s important.

2- We have a suite of Cloud products that are productized beyond just the raw Cloud Servers. Cassandra is interesting to us because we can use it under the hood to improve Cloud Sites and Cloud Files. And people are already starting to ask, “When can I just go to Rackspace and deploy a preconfigured Cassandra cluster?” It’s still early, but that’s definitely something we’re looking at.

3- Rackspace itself has a ton of data that we generate from our switches and routers and the rest of our infrastructure. Right now we are getting by with traditional monitoring and logging technologies, searching those logs and so forth. Cassandra will help us a lot with that as our volumes continue to increase. Our Mail & Apps products are also very interested in using Cassandra to store mail messages and other data.

Finally, I want to emphasize Cassandra is not a magic bullet. You can’t just take your SQL app and put it on Cassandra and expect it to work. It’s a different programming model and instead of modeling as entities and relationships and just adding indexes to get performance, you need to think at a more basic level: “What information do I need to retrieve from each query?” and model your Cassandra schema accordingly. It’s a different way of thinking and does require new code to be written. It’s very much for people that have a lot data that doesn’t fit on a single machine and are feeling the pain from traditional approaches to scaling that.

We plan to write some other posts in the future detailing what a switch might look like for some sample applications.

Winner of TechCrunch50 RedBeacon on The Rackspace Cloud

abartels — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 05:24:57 +0000

By Angela Bartels, Cloud Maven

When you need a service done – maybe house painting, landscaping, or even plumbing– it can be time consuming to go out and find the best candidate for your job. You may go through your Yellow Pages, send an email to friends and family asking for a referral or even just Google it. Even then, you have to evaluate each contender – what’s the best value for the price you want to pay. You are the payee so why should it require so much time and effort on your part?

RedBeacon, Rackspace Cloud Customer (on Slicehost), was designed to solve this problem. You can go to their website, enter the service you need and they will update all potential providers in your area they believe can serve you best and invite them to submit a price quote for your job. You will receive a list of service provider descriptions with price quotes interested in doing your job. Choose the best one and you can simply book an appointment with them. The workload is not on you anymore.

It’s no surprise that these guys were the winners of TechCrunh50 this year. When Robert Scoble, also a TechCrunch50 panelist, interviewed them for a Building43 video, Scoble quoted:

“Just interviewed @redbeacon – I am even more impressed with their thinking now (TC50 winner). I was wrong to not pick them.”

I had the opportunity to catch up with Aaron Lee, co-founder of RedBeacon, to find out more about the origin of RedBeacon, their experience at TechCrunch50 and why they chose cloud computing.

As ex-Google product employees, the founders of RedBeacon did take notice that finding local service providers was difficult and unfortunately, they hadn’t leveraged the existing technology to make the lives of consumers better and easier. The idea was to fulfill this need and that’s essentially how RedBeacon came to be.

TechCrunch50 was the perfect platform for RedBeacon to launch their product, receive feedback from the experts and to network. Lee quotes:

“For any startup, TechCrunch50 is definitely a must attend event. It’s a great way for a startup to gain exposure and recognition. We received great advice and feedback from TechCrunch, panel judges, and the audience. The guidance and presentation feedback from Jason and Michael was just phenomenal. They also provide a low cost way for young startups to showcase their ideas to industry veterans and VCs.”

Currently, RedBeacon is signing up service providers (it’s free) to establish a good foundation. Once they seed the database, they will launch in early October to consumers. They will only make money (10% commission) when the service provider makes money. Their next steps will be focused on deploying exciting new features such as leveraging social graph and partnerships with merchants, associations and publishers.

As a start up venture, RedBeacon wanted a cloud computing provider where they could easily turn servers off and on when needed. They chose Slicehost for this very reason but most importantly for the support and the control panel:

“Slicehost has kickass 24/7 technical support - it’s like having a master system admin on your team and only for a fraction of the cost. The UI is slick and intuitive. Bringing up and down servers is a breeze. We spun up a dozen servers easily to handle the load during TechCrunch50. Overall I am very happy with Slicehost and would definitely recommend it to others.”

Congrats RedBeacon!

Coding in the Cloud - Rule 6 - HTTP Includes

Adrian Otto — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:24:17 +0000

By Adrian Otto

This continues my series on Rules for Coding in the Cloud. These are rules I’ve developed after watching applications encounter problems at scale when deployed on Cloud Sites.

Rule 6: Never use HTTP include. Let me explain.

How does a HTTP include work?

You tell your PHP application, “I want to include a file.” For the file name, you supply a URL, which the server must download. A client makes a connection to a PHP web server, the PHP web server runs an application, the application opens a file, and the file type is a URL. The server makes contact with another server, downloads this URL and puts the output into the PHP script.

Why is this a problem?

This results in not only a huge security problem, but also a performance problem. And now you’re faced with a potential outcome that could be disastrous—an infinite loop in an elastic server environment. You can accidentally create an HTTP include which includes something from your own site, which includes something from your site, which includes something from your site, and… well, you get the idea. If you do that, you’ll get a single client connection, which will open a connection to itself, over and over, until you have 50,000 of them running in parallel. The last connection will then hit the limit that you’re allowed to create and the entire thing will roll all the way back. You’ll get a failure, and the whole application will proceed as if it never happened. Unfortunately, you will not be aware of this issue until you receive your bill with an outrageous amount of compute cycle usage. The cloud had to do huge amounts of work that you couldn’t even see! That’s really the scary part about this scenario because the site looks like it’s working just fine. When you browse through your site, it comes up relatively quickly because that just scales through the entire system. Meanwhile, The Rackspace Cloud is receiving alerts. You may not even know that your site has done the equivalent of 50,000 hits for every single hit.

In addition, you may also inadvertently involve someone else’s site. If you have two interdependent sites, the two may end up fighting back and forth, creating a massive loop. And because the server is making the HTTP connection, the browser is completely unaware of it, so the browser’s anti-loop code won’t prevent it. There’s no way to break the loop because there’s no way to see where it starts.

There is more than one way to do an HTTP include. One of them actually allows you to include PHP code from a remote URL and execute it as part of the local application. This feature (gaping hole) in PHP is actually disabled on Cloud Sites. What does work is using an fopen() call where the argument is a URL. This allows you to read data from that file handle and process it (potentially just printing it out to the browser). Try not to be tempted to eval() any of that output.

This may strike you as familiar advice. I mentioned a similar subject in Rule 4 - Avoid External Dependencies and included a code example of how to download content from a remote site on demand, cache a local copy, and provide non-blocking access to that data. The reason why this is a separate rule is I’ve seen it broken repeatedly, but not as an external dependency. It’s a risk of a circular internal (or external) dependency. People find reasons to HTTP include content from their own site but please try not to! What seems like an innocent include eventually leads to the infinite loop situation described above.

Bottom line: Never use HTTP include.

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