Since launching the service last year, we have heard constantly from you that you are dealing with MySQL databases of increasing complexity and size. To assist you with those requirements, we have updated Cloud Databases to include:

• Higher memory flavors: We are adding the option to create 8GB and 16GB instances, four times what was previously available. The new flavors have more memory, CPU, network bandwidth and I/O priority, which give you greater performance for your workloads and, as you can see in the Cloud Databases pricing page, they are competitively priced.
• Triple storage: With more I/O comes larger datasets, so we are also tripling the maximum storage for instances from 50GB to 150GB.
• Storage capacity alerts: To help you avoid inadvertently reaching your storage limit, we will automatically send you a ticket when you consume more than 90 percent of your storage allocation.
• Enhanced user management: We are giving you the ability to perform password changes and to assign user access on existing database users via the API (coming soon to the Control Panel).

We ran SysBench, the popular performance benchmark tool for MySQL, across all flavors to do a quick performance spot check and give you an idea of what to expect from our new and existing flavors.  As you may know, SysBench has several test modes, including CPU, threads, memory, File IO, OLTP, etc. We used the OLTP test mode, which is used to benchmark the performance of a database under transactional loads. The test involved point value queries, ranges, SUM(), ORDER BY, UPDATEs, DELETEs, INSERTs, etc. In other words, it tries to emulate the type of workloads your applications are currently handling.

Below is the five-run average of what Sysbench reported in Transactions per Second (TPS) on an OLTP workload with binary logging off and 64 threads on all flavors:

Of course, your mileage will vary based on your workload’s individual characteristics, but the above should give you a good idea of what you can expect.

WHAT OTHERS ARE DOING: BUILDING BEAUTIFUL CHARTS WITH YOUR DATA AND CHARTIO

I love to hear what others are doing with Cloud Databases. Today, I would like you to learn from Dave Fowler, founder of Chartio. Chartio provides data analytics and visualization tools for business intelligence applications, and allows you to bring data from Cloud Databases and other data sources together into beautiful visualizations. Read the guest blog that Dave wrote about how to use Chartio with Cloud Databases, or visit Chartio directly.

As usual, let me know what apps you are building these days with Cloud Databases or any one of our products @jrarredondo.

At Chartio we focus on creating the best visual interface to databases. We connect to databases or services (like Saleforce and Google Analytics), extract the schema and create an intuitive drag and drop interface for creating the queries, charts and dashboards that you need to effectively understand what’s going on in your business. Chartio makes data accessible to anyone in the organization. Anyone on your team can explore the data, build beautiful charts and dashboards and share their findings.

Chartio has interactive and playful charts, an intuitive and powerful query builder, a beautiful and customizable dashboard and is easy and fast to connect to data. We spend a large percentage of our time building connectors for different databases and ensuring that getting connected is as secure, fast and painless as possible for our customers. We also work hard to provide the same data exploration experience from data source to data source.

Rackspace Cloud Databases also makes it easy to connect to data. The special integration we did with Rackspace enables Cloud Database users to simply authenticate with their API Key. No shell commands, port forwarding or user permission granting is necessary. The developers at Rackspace have exposed everything we need via their APIs and for the first time ever you can now connect to a database with the ease of authenticating you find in connecting other third-party APIs.

Traditional BI data integrations take days to weeks to set up. With Chartio and the Rackspace Cloud it literally takes seconds. In addition, the data in your charts and dashboards is always as fresh as the data in your database.

Connecting to Rackspace Cloud Databases is so much easier than any other method that we host all of our demo databases on the Rackspace Cloud. We also encourage anyone wanting to do their analytics on a backup database to spin an instance up on Rackspace as it’s by far the easiest solution.

How to Connect

For the short version, you simply need to get your API key and username from the Rackspace console and provide them when adding a new database in Chartio. For the full explanation continue reading.

1. Getting the API Key and Username

Log into your Rackspace Control Panel and in the upper right menu labeled with your username select API Keys.

You’ll be brought to the following page with the information you’ll need. Click “Show Key” to display your key and copy it. Be sure to only copy the text and not the space afterward.

Also note your username displayed on that page as you will need it as well.

2. Connecting

Next you’ll need to log into or create a Chartio account if you haven’t already. Once logged in visit your Settings and click + New Data Source. You’ll be presented with all of the different connections provided. Choose the one labeled Rackspace Cloud Databases.

You will now be presented with the form to input your Rackspace username, API Key and an option of where the servers are located (the default is United States).

After submitting you’ll be presented a list of all of your cloud databases and you can choose which to connect.

3. Chart!

That’s it! Below is an example of a Chart you can create with Chartio. Chartio has pulled out the schema of your database and created a drag and drop interface for you to visually build the queries, charts and dashboards of your database data. Visit your dashboards, click Add Chart and start charting away!

If you are interested in learning more about Chartio, please click [here] and sign up. Or watch our interview with Robert Scoble to learn more about Chartio:

Chartio: Building Beautiful Charts with Your Data, An Interview with Robert Scoble

In order to show those common elements, we created a reference architecture that you can read about in the whitepaper “Reference Architecture: Enterprise Security for the Cloud.” There, we discuss some of the security challenges we see across our customer base and a conceptual design to address them. Take a look and let us know what you think.

SAVE MONEY

We are also giving you the opportunity to deploy this reference architecture at up to a 30 percent discount on the security solutions compared to acquiring one or two parts of the solution. The components in the solution are:

• RackConnect:
  • Cisco ASA Firewall
  • F5 Big-IP LTM
• Threat Protection Bundle:
  • Alert Logic Threat Manager (includes Vulnerability Assessments)
  • Alert Logic Log Manager
  • Imperva Web Application Firewall

To take advantage of this opportunity you need to just sign-up and activate Cloud Servers if you have not already done it. Just call your account manager to discuss. We don’t have restrictions on how much to provision, but notice that a 12-month term is required.

If you already have several parts of the solution, you may complete the solution and receive discounts on the parts that you are adding. You can also upgrade anything in the Threat Protection Bundle to meet your customer’s needs. For example, you could add HA, or upgrade the firewall or F5 load balancer, or add throughput or log sources to Threat or Log Manager, or upgrade the device or service level on the Imperva Web Application Firewall.

Let us know if you have any questions. We are running this opportunity until the end of April 2013.

At Rackspace, we believe that Security is a Partnership, a shared responsibility between us and you as the owner of the application.

Please read this white paper to learn more.

Click here to download the white paper.

• We are lowering the base price for bandwidth across our entire cloud portfolio (including Cloud Servers, Cloud Files and Cloud Load Balancers) and CDN by 33 percent, from $0.18 to $0.12 per GB in the US and from £0.12 to £0.08 per GB in UK. If you are interested in our plans for volume discounts, please reach out to us to learn more.
• We are implementing automatic tiered pricing for our Open Cloud product portfolio, starting with Cloud Files, which will have the following pricing tiers:

As always, there is never a charge for transaction requests in Cloud Files (PUT, POST, GET, etc.).

Your CDN usage starting March 1, 2013 and your outbound bandwidth usage starting on your March account anniversary date will receive the new prices; while Cloud Files tiered pricing will be effective today, February 22, 2013. Rackspace will roll out automatic tiered pricing for additional products throughout 2013.

No nickel and diming

While we will continue to drive prices down as we scale, we also are committed to a core philosophy: Price simplicity is a feature of the Open Cloud. As the cloud matures, the complexity and hidden charges in many cloud offers have become a problem for users to decipher and understand.

Simplicity is one of the reasons why we don’t charge you for many little things that are almost impossible to estimate when you deploy your application. Here is a sample list of things you get for free at Rackspace:

• Free bandwidth from the datacenter to the CDN edge location
• Free PUT, POST, LIST, HEAD, GET and DELETE requests of Cloud Files object storage
• Free HTTP CDN requests
• Free SSL delivery over the Akamai CDN
• Free I/O for Cloud Block Storage
• Free DNS usage and API requests

Take a look at the screenshot below, borrowed from the pricing calculator of AWS, specifically from their default “Large Web Application (All On-Demand)” pricing scenario:

If you look closely at the row labeled “EBS IOPS” you will see that in that default configuration, out of the $718.32 monthly total charge for the compute service, $105.41 is the cost of storage IOPS. While that looks like 15 percent of the total compute cost category, it is really an 87.8 percent premium over the raw storage cost (or $105.41 for IOPS divided by $120.00 of actual volume storage). Your scenario may vary from that default one, but the point is that at Rackspace you don’t pay for I/O.

Storage is one of the cost variables you would know before deploying your application. Unfortunately for many, I/O is complex and less predictable. This fact makes it hard to understand the price you are actually signing up for when you launch a service. It also makes it difficult to perform an “apples to apples” comparison among providers. Our goal is not only simplicity but a competitive total price net of all these small (but often real) charges.

The usage of the Open Cloud is driving efficiencies of scale and we are happy to share those gains with our users. And we will always work to make the Open Cloud simple to use and simple to budget for.

As usual, let me know what kinds of cool projects you are working on. You can comment here or reach out to me @jrarredondo.

However, even if you advocate for conservative approaches in IT, you likely recognize that the cloud represents a unique opportunity to not only support the business with more efficient and cost effective infrastructure, but also to lead the organization and help it accelerate the creation of business differentiation powered by the next generation of technology.

The question then becomes: where should you start?

I believe your initial cloud project should have three distinct characteristics. First, this initial project should provide quick and visible business impact. Select a project that aligns with your organizational priorities, possibly a new application that supports new business opportunities, or a cost reduction initiative that aligns with your CFO goals, or maybe a solution that helps you drive better customer engagement for your sales or marketing organizations. Whatever your organizational goals are, make sure that your first project relates to them. The impact does not have to be large, but it should be visible. The project should be small enough to be done in a reasonably short amount of time (maybe under six months) to avoid getting forgotten by the collective memory of the organization.

Second, the project should represent a manageable risk. While any new initiative has inherent risks, the introduction of cloud computing may create additional ones. Avoid starting with projects that depend significantly on complex regulatory, compliance and data sovereignty issues. As with any other IT initiative, minimize the risk of end user rejection by selecting a project that can get the support of the business user or department’s actual users and engaging them early. Projects with complex data integration requirements or projects that automate complex cross-organizational processes also increase the risk. From a technical perspective, ensure that the technologies (operating systems, databases, development tools, languages, frameworks, runtimes, etc.) used on the cloud project are those with which your team is already comfortable. Be sure to engage not only the development arm of your organization, but also operations (systems management) as they must be comfortable with managing the new cloud service running on somebody else’s infrastructure.

Finally, it is important that your first cloud project generates cloud-specific learning. Select a project that actually benefits from the unique characteristics of the cloud: self-service, elastic, scalable, programmable and metered infrastructure available as a service and at utility costs.  Appeal to those existing complaints and negative stereotypes of IT by empowering an organization or department to utilize infrastructure on demand, or provide transparency of service delivery costs to departments, or reduce capital costs by leveraging the cloud utility model, or automate IT processes with manipulation of infrastructure via APIs. The learning that you derive from implementing a project that actually leverages the unique attributes of the cloud will be crucial when the time comes to repeat the success in subsequent projects.

What are some good candidate projects to use as a first step in your cloud journey? Here are some ideas:

• Application development and testing: While developers love their rich IDEs, the cloud can be used to expedite provisioning of development and functional test environments, or to generate synthetic loads to verify application performance and behavior under traffic spikes.
• Marketing self-service: Your marketing organization needs to drive revenue acquisition or email campaigns to your customer base, and the cloud is an opportunity to empower them to design these campaigns, create the required web content on their own, test variation of the campaigns, and retire them, while the cloud’s scalable nature provides a buffer in case their campaign goes viral. Marketing is naturally skilled at communicating, which can help spread the word about your successful initiative across the organization.
• Batch projects: Most batch processes use infrastructure only periodically. Business intelligence analysis, reporting, end of month or end of quarter processes, among others, are good candidate projects as they eliminate the need for dedicated infrastructure that sits unused for significant amounts of time.
• Mobile and social apps:  “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) is a reality. A mobile or social application for your internal users has immediate appeal because of that. For your own customers, single task-centric mobile apps have become a natural way to engage with users on mobile phones or tablets.
• Corporate entrepreneurs: Not all entrepreneurs work in house garages. Your organization has many corporate entrepreneurs that just want to get their idea done, without the infrastructure becoming the bottleneck. Providing them with Infrastructure as a Service ensures that they spend more time driving innovation in your organization.

In the end, there are no “technology projects.” Your organization only wants to drive business projects. These require technology and the cloud may just be the right ingredient. Your journey to the cloud will be more uneventful if you don’t boil the ocean. Select a single visible, business relevant project that can become a quick win and that allows your organization to learn about the unique value of the cloud. With this first successful project, your organization will have built the confidence necessary to take the second step, repeat the process, and continue learning.

OUR CUSTOMERS SAY IT BEST
First of all, I really appreciate the comments we have been getting from our customers using the product in Preview. Here is one from Greg Arnette, the CTO of Sonian Inc.:

“Based on our internal benchmarks, we’ve been impressed with the ability of Cloud Block Storage to steadily perform at a high level. For our customers, the capacity to effectively archive large amounts of email data is critical to their business.  As a result, we look for storage solutions that give us maximum agility, scalability and enterprise readiness.  We are excited that Rackspace is now providing a new block storage alternative service for running our large scale email archiving deployments.”

Thank you Greg!

Now, let’s talk about the service itself.

1. RELIABLE PERFORMANCE FOR YOUR APPLICATIONS
The main piece of feedback we heard from you is that you are looking for a service that delivers consistent and reliable performance. Inconsistent performance has been a stumbling block for many block storage services. We heard numerous stories of customers using existing block storage solutions that have very erratic and unpredictable performance, with applications sometimes “crawling to a halt” for no apparent reason. We decided to make consistent performance the focus for our engineering efforts. I feel that the tests confirm our design goals. For example, in our tests we were able to obtain five  times to six times better performance in our SSD volumes when compared with Amazon Provisioned IOPS. In the case of Standard volumes we also see a drastic reduction in variability of latency. See the performance section below.

2. CHOICE BETWEEN STANDARD VOLUMES OR SSD VOLUMES FOR HIGHER PERFORMANCE
Another thing we consistently heard from you when we were designing the service is that you want the flexibility to choose between two very distinct scenarios that require different performance and price characteristics of storage, including the option to combine them for the same application.

On one hand, you need large amounts of “everyday” storage. The Standard volumes of Cloud Block Storage target those applications that require the traditional performance of standard drives, implementing file systems to access large volumes of files, archiving solutions, or serve small to medium size websites. A very common use case is the need to scale storage without scaling compute nodes.

The second scenario we heard of is when you require even higher levels of performance than what you can get from standard drives. Here, our SSD volumes helpthose of you serving more demanding applications that require the performance characteristics of Solid State Drives (SSD) such as self-managed relational databases, MongoDB, Cassandra, indexing and caching.

3. SIMPLE PRICING MEANS NEVER HAVING TO PAY FOR I/O
The third constant theme from our talks with you is that you want simple pricing. It seems from your input that pricing rules from some other vendors look like the Tax Code of the United States (or from any other country for that matter). Well, Cloud Block Storage comes with FREE I/O. You read that right: it’s all you can eat, and you will pay ZERO in I/O! You pay only for the storage of the volumes you provision.

This table summarizes the differences between the two services:

One important thing to mention is that you can use both Standard and SSD volumes regardless of the size of your server instance. With Rackspace, you don’t have to buy the larger sizes of servers just to use the SSD volumes: the services work with whichever size of Cloud Server you have. This gives you a lot more flexibility to deal with I/O bound vs. CPU bound applications.  Also, note that both types of volumes start at 100GB and that Cloud Block Storage is available for our Cloud Server next generation customers (Cloud Servers based by OpenStack).

DON’T LET YOUR DATA BE STUCK IN A PROPRIETARY ARCHITECTURE
Deciding where to store your data is not a decision that you should take lightly. You wouldn’t want to get stuck and be held hostage by a proprietary architecture. Cloud Block Storage is built on OpenStack as part of the broader community. For example, our provisioning engine is built on the OpenStack Cinder project, and our snapshots are saved to Cloud Files, based on the OpenStack Swift project. All of this means that you can stay with Rackspace because you want to, not because you have to.

Let’s now discuss the performance we are seeing in the SSD and Standard volumes. Now, remember that in performance, the only benchmark that matters is that of your own application. So don’t assume that you will get exactly these same results. At the end of this blog there is a description of how we tested the service. I always recommend that you create your own tests and benchmarks that are specific to the application that you are going to deploy.

PERFORMANCE: SSD volumes tested 5x to 6x faster than Amazon Provisioned IOPS
Let’s discuss our SSD volumes. The first thing we wanted to see was their performance compared to EBS Provisioned IOPS (1000 IOPS). Here we saw a performance improvement of five times for WRITES and six times for READS.

In throughput, more is better, but when measuring latency, the opposite is true. We saw that Cloud Block Storage SSD volumes had latency that was about 85 percent lower in both the READ and WRITE scenarios than EBS Provisioned IOPS.

Variability of Cloud Block Storage Standard volumes is up to 99 percent less than EBS Standard volumes
Next, let’s discuss Cloud Block Storage Standard volumes. Here, we wanted to test the performance consistency, or its opposite, the variability. There are a few ways to measure variability, and they all have their own weaknesses and strengths, applicability based on distribution, etc. We could have used Standard Deviation to calculate variability, for example, but the Standard Deviation does not account for the fact that some variability is “good” and some is “bad.” For example, if the latency falls below a certain level, then that is “good” (because lower latency means faster apps) but if it goes above a certain level then that is “bad.” To account for only the “bad” variability we used the Semi Standard Deviation, which is calculated just like the Standard Deviation (square root of average square differences from mean) but it only uses the points up to a certain threshold. In our case, we define this threshold as the average.

As you can see below, in the case of WRITE, Cloud Block Storage Standard had 30 percent and 89 percent less “bad” variability than each of the Standard volumes from EBS. In the case of the READ scenario, the Standard volume of Cloud Block Storage had up to 99 percent less variability than the EBS Standard volumes we tested.

In terms of performance of our Standard volumes, in synchronous read scenarios Cloud Block Storage performed 1.2 times to 1.6 times faster than EBS Standard. In the synchronous write scenario, there was a significant gap of about 11.5MB/s between the two EBS Standard volumes we provisioned, and Cloud Block Storage throughput fell between those two levels.

COMPARING CLOUD BLOCK STORAGE VOLUMES: SSD delivered 11 times more IOPS (read) than Cloud Block Storage Standard volumes

In our test, in synchronous write scenarios, our SSD volumes delivered the equivalent of four times the IOPS of our Standard volumes (about 6300 IOPS). But in the synchronous read scenario our SSD volumes delivered the equivalent of more than 12 times the IOPS of our Standard volumes (about 7000 IOPS).

One of the things I like about having this level of performance and consistency for Cloud Block Storage volumes is that it is less likely that you will need to complicate your architecture with RAID just to get more performance since you have a higher IOPS ceiling.

ADDITIONAL DETAILS ABOUT CLOUD BLOCK STORAGE
Cloud Block Storage is available immediately for Rackspace accounts based in the U.S. and UK in all regions. You can interact with the service via the Control Panel, the API or the command line.

You can attach multiple volumes to your Cloud Server, and you can mix SSD or Standard volumes. Every volume can be up to 1TB, but you can add multiple volumes up to the limit supported by the hypervisor infrastructure. Obviously, you can create snapshots of your volumes in Cloud Files for the usual fees (currently at $0.10 / GB / month, which is 20 percent less expensive than other alternatives).

IN CLOSING
If you want to give Cloud Block Storage a try, just go to your Cloud Control Panel, provision a volume, and attach it to your Cloud Server. It’s really simple. Then you can do your usual in terms of using your favorite file system or configuring your database. We welcome your feedback. Let us know how things are going with the apps you build on the Rackspace Cloud.

Our test
We hired an independent third party company to help us benchmark the performance of Cloud Block Storage (both Standard and SSD volumes) with Amazon EBS Standard Volumes and Provisioned IOPS (1000 IOPS) volumes. We will write more and in more detail about this later, but in summary, we wanted to see a common scenario, and chose an EXT4 file system running on CentOS, both under synchronous READ and WRITE loads. Volumes used 4k block sizes, and we did READ and WRITE operations of 16k. The Cloud Servers we used were the 15GB RAM instances with 6 vCPUs, with 500GB SSD (“RAX-SSD”) and Standard volumes (“RAX-STD”). For Amazon we used m1.xlarge EBS optimized instance with 15GB RAM and 8 EC2 Compute Units with 500GB EBS Standard volumes and EBS Provisioned IOPS volume with 1000 IOPS. For Amazon EBS Standard, we created two volumes (“West-2a” and “West-2c”). We used Sysbench to execute the tests, and R and Excel to get charts and calculations. All values mentioned above refer to the synchronous I/O tests at 16 concurrent threads. We will talk about how we ran the test in the next installment of this blog.

In this short video we talk a little more about this:

For more details, take a look at this short white paper that describes what container-based virtualization is:

And be sure to check out the previous installments in our Cloud Databases video series.

In this short video we talk a little more about Cloud Databases and its API: