Recently, I moderated a webinar with the team behind the new Cloud Control Panel, and we have the full recording available for you to watch. During the webinar, you’ll learn how we designed the new Cloud Control Panel to give customers a better experience; we’ll walk through using the New Cloud Control Panel; we’ll all geek out on new speeds and feeds; and we’ll tell you what’s in store for the future. You’ll learn fun facts about the Cloud Control Panel and its team members, and be sure to stick around for the last 20 or so minutes for the Q&A – we had approximately 50 questions asked and we go through almost all of them!

Tune in and hear Brian Harstock, Product Manager, Cloud Control Panel; Jacob Puckett, Manager, User Experience Design; and Erik Carlin, Director, Product Strategy; and Jim Battenberg, Cloud and Partner Evangelist dig deeper into our new Cloud Control Panel:

The requirements of interactive online applications are dramatically increasing, with users demanding ever-higher levels of availability (up-time). At the same time, data centers and cloud infrastructures are becoming increasingly complex and failure prone. Network connectivity issues and natural disasters all add to the uncertainties surrounding cloud availability.  The only solution able to provide 100 percent availability is distribution of the database across geographically separated data centers (geo-distribution).

Limitations of Current Failover Technologies

The prevalent availability solutions built around traditional databases such as MySQL have architectures that never contemplated application environments distributed across multiple data centers, regions or clouds. By fundamentally changing the way databases are replicated, synchronized and maintained in a distributed cloud environment, the roadblocks to continuous availability and faster response times can be removed for users anywhere in the world. This design also builds the foundation for next generation applications and unlocks the full potential of distributed cloud environments like Rackspace Cloud.

Challenges with Traditional Database Replication

Standard MySQL replication is either setup in a master-slave configuration, or in a master-master/ circular replication configuration. Under either configuration, transaction logs are communicated from the master to one or more slaves in a process known as log shipping. Data is thus always out of date on the slaves, a condition referred to as slave lag. The extent of the slave lag depends on the workload, network bandwidth and network latency. In the event there is a failure of a master server (typically not if, but when), MySQL offers the possibility of promoting a slave to become the new master, but this is very painful to do in practice. The cluster has to stop taking any writes while it waits for all existing slaves to catch up and apply the failed master’s logs, effectively quiescing the cluster. Then a new master can be assigned and all clients need to connect to it for writes.

The situation is further complicated if a master server fails leaving different slaves at different bin-log coordinates. Circular replication allows writes at more than one node and thereby introduces a new potential problem: conflicting updates to the same record. The challenges of this conflict resolution have significant implications at both the database and application layers, and the scope of this problem is well documented. A particularly interesting discussion is found in the post on the Facebook Engineering Blog. Facebook ultimately redesigned its application and load balancer, creating a custom version of MySQL to overcome these inherent challenges. Additionally, the loss of any single server while using circular replication is highly problematic, as MySQL does not offer a solution for recovery from a single failed node other than manual re-configuration/restart.

Beyond Failover: Seamless Multi-Data Center, Multi-Cloud Database Distribution

GenieDB has written a whitepaper specifically focused on multi-region, geo-distribution of MySQL to ensure high availability in the cloud, so that an outage in one geographical area or cloud (for example Hurricane Sandy) does not affect application availability. GenieDB solves the conflict resolution challenge utilizing a modified Lamport time-stamping approach that also enables automated healing after a failure or after a period when nodes are disconnected, allowed to receive updates, and then reconnected. You can read more of the whitepaper at http://www.geniedb.com/beyond-failover.

GenieDB is implemented as a plug-in storage engine, working within existing MySQL installations. Our patent-pending technology enables seamless master-master replication across data centers, providing better response times to users anywhere in the world and 100 percent availability during server, network or cloud failures. GenieDB’s automated healing algorithms and plug-in architecture dramatically reduces the total cost of ownership for multi-region deployments and lays the critical foundation for next-generation cloud-enabled applications.

Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace partner RightScale recently added new capabilities to its cloud management platform that will enable you to use and manage multiple clouds with ease. You can now manage Rackspace Private Cloud as well as Rackspace first- and next-generation public clouds, including our managed cloud offerings. You can even manage other cloud deployments you may have.

Here are just a few benefits of the Rackspace and RightScale solution:

Multiple Clouds – Single Pane of Glass

• Uses a single interface for Rackspace Public and Private Cloud, and hybrid environments

Auto-Scaling

• Scale out when you need to. Monitors automatically trigger the creation of additional servers to keep your application running

Application Lifecycle Management

• Provision, configure, monitor, automate, audit and govern

Manage with Control

• Oversee cloud resources with role-based access controls, usage reporting and self-service provisioning. Respond quickly and often automatically with powerful monitoring and auditing

The new RightScale functionality now includes support for:

•  All Rackspace regions – Chicago, Dallas and London
• First generation, open cloud, managed and core Cloud Servers
• Cloud Files
• Cloud Block Storage
• RightImages and MultiCloud Images for CentOS 6.3, Ubuntu 12.04
• RightImages and MultiCloud images for Windows 2008 R2
• 15-plus compatible and tested RightScale ServerTemplates from LAMP All-In-Ones to PostgreSQL Server

Check out the case study from one of our joint customers, Behance. “We provision any new Cloud Servers through RightSclale’s central console. It’s very simple, and very effective. We don’t have to spend a whole lot of time or money to experiment with new applications…we are able to keep our team focused on the customer-facing products and features that are our core business,” said Behance’s CTO Chris Henry.

To take advantage of the new RightScale features to manage scalable and highly available applications on the Rackspace Open Cloud, sign up for a free trial of RightScale. Check out this solution brief for more information on management and automation from RightScale on the Rackspace Cloud.

Also, see RightScale Sales Engineer Ryan Geyer’s post “Building A Rackspace Private Cloud … In My Garage” for more insight into how to use RightScale on the Rackspace Private Cloud. We’ll demo how Ryan set up his Rackspace Private Cloud on April 11 during the webinar Build a Better Way of Delivering IT for Increased Choice and Flexibility. Find out more and register today!

If you’re a mobile app developer, you know the challenges of getting your app to market. With over 1.5 million available apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play alone, the competition for user adoption is fierce. The difference between a successful app and one that fails can come down to speed to market, application performance and a high quality user experience.

You need a way to have actionable insight into the performance of your apps. With multiple points of possible failure, whether deep within the application code, in the mobile device itself, or in calls to third party APIs such as Facebook, PayPal and Twitter, you can only guess at the quality of the user experience and the precise location of performance bottlenecks.

New Relic for Mobile Apps changes that by providing real-time performance data for your native iOS and Android mobile applications so you have in-depth insight into real users, sessions and finger swipes as they happen.

With New Relic for Native Mobile Apps, you can:

• Gain visibility into the health of your native mobile apps
• Provide faster, more reliable apps to your customers
• Constantly monitor the health of services that your app depends on for its success
• Get detailed network and web server level error analysis

New Relic for Mobile Apps is deeply integrated with New Relic for web and mobile browser applications. It shares the same one-screen view, allowing you to monitor software no matter where it’s running in an app server, browser or mobile device.

For a limited time, you can try New Relic for Mobile Apps Enterprise free for 30 days. If you’re already using New Relic for web apps you already have New Relic for Mobile Apps. Just log in to your New Relic account and click on the new Mobile tab to get started. Once the trial is over, you’ll get New Relic for Mobile Apps Standard, for unlimited apps and users, free through our long-standing partnership. It takes just a few minutes to sign up and deploy the New Relic Mobile SDK into you application. You’ll quickly start seeing data and wonder how you ever got by without it.

In the UK, there’s a growing need for vast database capabilities that traditional IT models are unable to accommodate. To meet these demands, we’ve partnered with Cloudant to offer customers a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) solution based on CouchDB and served directly from Rackspace’s UK data center.

Cloudant’s DBaaS is a managed service that helps developers eliminate the delays, costs and distractions that come with handling databases and their administration.  This local service allows customers to reduce the cost and complexity of managing a database on-site while providing flexible scalability, availability and performance. It also frees developers from the mechanics of data management so they can focus exclusively on creating great applications.

Cloudant joined the Rackspace Cloud Tools program in December 2012, making its NoSQL DBaaS available for web and mobile applications across the Rackspace Open Cloud. Through our new partnership, Cloudant’s DBaaS is available to customers and developers who want to host some (or all) of their data locally in the UK through the new Rackspace data center in Slough, Buckinghamshire.

The collaboration with Cloudant is significant for Rackspace as it broadens our scope to serve our European customers. It’s also notable because Cloudant offers the world’s first globally distributed DBaaS for loading, storing, analyzing and distributing application data. Developers using the Rackspace Open Cloud can easily select Cloudant as an application data layer that scales up or down on-demand as needed using a simple management interface.

Cloudant’s DBaaS is a win-win partnership for Rackspace that will help us bring world-class solutions to all of our mutual customers.

Enterprise technology leaders face significant pressure to develop new and innovative strategies for cloud adoption, whether it’s private, hybrid or public. These pressures all come with a range of priorities, such as IT agility, collaboration for dispersed teams, cost reduction — the list goes on. However, IT leaders often lack the tools necessary to make data-driven decisions on which products or IT services should remain in-house, and which should be moved to the cloud.

Regardless of the delivery model, varying subscription levels and complex SLAs muddy the waters for determining how much it actually costs the business to run these cloud services. In fact, according to recent research from Gartner, “cloud contracts rarely guarantee reduced costs over time and present a range of hidden costs that can lead to adverse pricing variations.”

While IT leaders are spearheading their organization’s cloud strategy, there’s also increasing demand from outside business units for immediate access to the services they depend on. CIOs we have talked to have stated their problem simply: if IT is unable to deliver in a timely manner, the on-demand nature of cloud services makes it easy for individual users to adopt these solutions without the proper approvals of the IT department. These shadow IT implementations often fly under the radar, and, as a result, the ability to track cloud costs and utilization is even more complex. Without clear insights into the cost of cloud services, business leaders are unable to accurately calculate their value to the organization.

While a number of cloud-costing point products exist on the market today, these tools do not provide IT executives the control and level of understanding that they require to effectively communicate value to the business. With Cloud Express by Apptio, users can view their Rackspace Cloud costs in an itemized bill format and identify and aggregate spending outside of IT’s approval. They can also perform “what-if” analyses to quantify the economic impact of shifting in and out of the private cloud.

Rackspace has been at the forefront of the cloud computing movement. We’re happy to partner with them to help companies get even more value out of their cloud deployments — customers that count on Rackspace to provide best-in-class public cloud solutions will find that the Apptio integration enhances their ability to track cloud spend and utilization in a scalable, simple manner. This partnership paves the way for more advanced integration between Rackspace and Apptio’s Technology Business Management (TBM) solution, and we looking forward to strengthening our partnership in the months to come.

You’re moments away from a huge presentation and you’re ready to knock it out of the park. You open your tablet. You’re going to wow the audience. But, uh oh, the file you need isn’t there. It’s on your laptop, which is in the car … in your garage at home.

This may be an extreme example, but it just goes to show that when you don’t have access to all the files that you need, it can lead to frustration as well as a drop in productivity. Yes, cloud services can help with this, but even still, you may be lacking some of the necessary technology to truly make a difference.

It’s frustrating when you can’t find the files you need. Maybe they’re stored on your home or office computer. Maybe you may want to access a file from your mobile device but with your current setup that’s not possible.

TappIn changes that. At TappIn, we have developed a service that allows you to access files stored on any computer, server or cloud. Not only can you access and securely share files, but you can do so from any web browser and from virtually any mobile device, including the Android, iPhone and Windows phones.

Our app allows users to access their existing storage devices in a secure manner with the use of TLS/SSL encryption to safeguard the content.

If you already have the Rackspace Cloud, we can help you make the most of it. If you can’t access all the data you need from all the devices you use, you aren’t being as productive as you could be.

“Instant access to your data doesn’t have to be a luxury,” says Bill Buie, our executive vice president of sales and marketing. There’s no substitute for having data in the here and now, which is why we are excited to offer Rackspace customers access to their data quickly and securely.

It doesn’t matter where your data is stored. You can have access to your data no matter where it might be located through the combination of the Rackspace Cloud and the technology in the TappIn app.

As a Rackspace customer, after you download the TappIn app you will receive a 30-day free trial of the TappIn ProEdition. This gives you unlimited access to data and also allows you to manage additional accounts as a group to ensure only certain groups have access to certain folders of data. The ProEdition also gives you unlimited content source connections, including the ability to link in your Salesforce account.

We use the term content source because you can access and share files from your computers and servers, including Windows, Mac and Linux. You can also access network attached storage (NAS) devices, your Salesforce account (with more SaaS apps on the way), an EFT server by Globalscape and your Rackspace cloud account.

After you try out the ProEdition, you can continue using it for $39.99 a year or opt for TappIn’s standard edition for $19.99 a year. Even if you choose the standard edition you receive no in-app banner advertising and the ability to share unlimited photos, stream unlimited music, use with unlimited mobile devices and computers and access any size document or video.

You can download the application from the Cloud Tools Marketplace using your Rackspace Cloud login. For more information regarding TappIn by Globalscape, please visit http://info.TappIn.com/rackspace-offer/.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve highlighted some of the key issues and questions surrounding security in the cloud. We’ve touched on everything from partners and compliance to physical security and lines of responsibility shared between the customer and us, their hosting provider. Here is a summary of the posts that were a part of the cloud security blog series.

The Many Faces Of Cloud Security
Cloud computing inherently introduces a number of questions around security. To many, it’s a new model, and in a shared-tenancy environment certain questions are bound to arise. And as I engage with our customers, it’s clear that cloud security means different things to different people. Essentially, cloud security has many flavors – and they all should be considered when thinking about “security in the cloud.” There are not only concerns around the security of the server and data itself; but network security, account and access controls, compliance and regulations and other questions come into play. Here, I breakdown of some of the levels of security and how Rackspace provides them to our customers.

The Customer’s Role In Cloud Security
I like to think of cloud security as a team sport: Ultimately, both the cloud provider and the customer have to work together to ensure security best practices are followed and met. Given the role of the customer in the configuration and consumption of their cloud environment, it’s imperative for the cloud provider and cloud customer to both put controls in place to manage the risks that multi-tenant environments can present. Both the cloud provider and cloud customer must accept responsibility for different aspects of the system and both must implement a range of controls in order to properly secure the service. When the team collaborates well, we’ve seen many architectures pass audits and assessments.

Cloud Security Gets Physical
Cloud computing is virtual. It happens, well, in the cloud. Because of that it’s often easy to forget that somewhere data and information reside on real physical servers in brick-and-mortar locations that need to be secure. At Rackspace, we ensure that our data centers are highly secure, impenetrable fortresses and have put into place a number of measures to protect our cloud customers’ data and sensitive information. We’ve been incessant on this point since we first opened our doors over 12 years ago and we’ve learned a lot along the way. Here are a few of our standard security measures.

Network Security In The Cloud
In the cloud, traditional network security measures are still applicable – a secure cloud must be supported by a strong network. For added security, we at Rackspace have implemented additional steps to manage the risks posed by web-scale virtualization and to manage the scope of our cloud environments. We can provide you services and guidance to assist with the management of additional risks posed by your operational model.

Compliance Standards And Regulations That Keep The Cloud Secure
To ensure that your data is secure in our data centers and our cloud, Rackspace must adhere to certain compliance standards and regulations. These standards ensure that you can trust us with your data and that our security practices are up to snuff. There are a host of security compliance standards and regulations out there. This is a primer on some of the ones to which Rackspace adheres.

Cloud Security: Don’t Go It Alone
Cloud security isn’t a sprint – it’s a marathon. It can also be thought of as a relay: strong cloud security comprises products and services from various players. At Rackspace, we offer numerous cloud security options, but we also rely on partners to further fortify your cloud environments. Through our Cloud Tools Marketplace, we offer you access to some best-in-class tools to tighten cloud security. Here, I offer a glimpse at some of them.

Cloud Security: Create Security Groups For Your Rackspace Servers
This is a guest post written and contributed by Roy Feintuch, Co-founder and CTO at Dome9 Security, a Rackspace Cloud Tools partner. Dome9 Security automates server firewall management to provide secure, on-demand access and make your Rackspace servers virtually invisible to hackers.

That’s it for this week. I hope you found it informative. Bookmark this page or follow me @jimbattenberg to keep up with security and other cloud developments at Rackspace.

This is a guest post written and contributed by Roy Feintuch, Co-founder and CTO at Dome9 Security, a Rackspace Cloud Tools partner. Dome9 Security automates server firewall management to provide secure, on-demand access and make your Rackspace servers virtually invisible to hackers.

You have loads of really powerful Rackspace servers – maybe a mix of dedicated and cloud machines with a variety of operating systems, and each has its own built-in firewall that needs to constantly be tweaked and tuned. What do you do?

Do you manually configure each server’s firewall one by one? That’s tedious and complex, especially if you’re adding lots of rules into iptables via CLI and spending a great amount of time scripting your policies.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could create powerful security groups for your Rackspace servers and consolidate policy management with an easy-to-use front-end GUI? And wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to leave ports like SSH and RDP open and exposed to brute force attacks and exploits?

Well, let me introduce you to Dome9 – a cloud firewall automation service.

Dome9 lets you create security groups for all of your Rackspace servers and configure access for specific users and services. You can centralize firewall policies for all your web servers into one security group, for example, and all of your databases into another. Then you just have to update two security groups from time to time, instead of each individual server manually.

In addition to grouping security rules, you can also group user access. You can quickly give your web developers access to the web servers security group, for example, and your DBAs access to the database servers group with just a few clicks – no command line or repetitious rules.

To set up security groups for Rackspace servers, simply:

1. Create a Dome9 account at https://cloudtools.rackspace.com/apps/485?2134865784
2. Install our lightweight Dome9 Agent on your Rackspace servers (Windows or Linux; dedicated or cloud)
3. Create a Dome9 Security Group in Dome9 Central and create your rules
4. Join your Rackspace servers to the new security group

Once your Rackspace servers are joined to your security groups, they automatically inherit their group’s policy. Make a change to your security group policy (e.g., open MySQL on 3306), and the policy immediately propagates to all of the servers joined to that group.

“We use Dome9 security groups to manage and secure our servers on the Rackspace Cloud”
– Scott Donald, Co-founder and CTO of NodeSpot, a website and server monitoring service

You can create an unlimited number of security groups across operating systems and machine types (e.g., dedicated and cloud), and you can develop re-usable policy objects like IP whitelists (e.g., a set of trusted office IPs) that can be used in any of your security groups. You can even create blacklists that take effect across your entire cloud.

Security groups make it easy to consolidate policy management for your entire Rackspace infrastructure. They let you create powerful controls for security, access and compliance, and, frankly, they make your life a lot easier!

What’s more? When you use security groups, you also get access to loads of other powerful tools like secure access leasing, compliance auditing and real-time alerts and notifications.

To learn more, check out Dome9 in the Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace, and try our service free for 30-days and start creating security groups for your Rackspace servers.

Thank you, Roy. That’s it for this week. I hope you found it informative. Bookmark this page or follow me @jimbattenberg to keep up with security and other cloud developments at Rackspace.

Cloud security isn’t a sprint – it’s a marathon. It can also be thought of as a relay: strong cloud security comprises products and services from various players. At Rackspace, we offer numerous cloud security options, but we also rely on partners to further fortify your cloud environments.

Through our Cloud Tools Marketplace, we offer you access to some best-in-class tools to tighten cloud security. Here, I’ll offer a glimpse at some of them (the full line-up of security partners in our Cloud Tools Program is here).

CloudPassage

With its Halo offering, CloudPassage offers a robust cloud server security platform. Halo focuses on security at the server level and comes equipped with all of the security functions necessary to safely deploy servers in public and hybrid clouds. CloudPassage delivers dynamic firewall automation, multi-factor authentication, event logging and monitoring, RESTful API access and more to ensure your cloud servers are secure.

Check out an overview of CloudPassage Halo here:

Dome9 Security

Dome9 Security offers automated and centralized firewall management to secure cloud servers. With secure, on-demand access, Dome9 vows to make your cloud servers virtually invisible to hackers. Dome9 locks down the cloud with a multi-prong approach to security that includes secure remote access to all servers; centralized cloud security management; secure access leasing; account activity auditing; automated policy administration; zero-day security for vulnerabilities; and more.

Learn more about Dome9 security in this video:

Gazzang

Got big data security issues? Gazzang wants to help you solve them. Gazzang’s zNcrypt offers multi-factor data encryption and operational diagnostics solutions for the cloud and big data that help enterprises protect sensitive data and maintain performance in cloud environments. Gazzang provides easy, cross platform encryption and access controls while offering you assistance in enabling regulatory compliance.

Get a brief introduction to Gazzang zNcrypt here:

StillSecure

With its Cloud SMS (Cloud Security Monitoring Service) tool, StillSecure delivers a cloud instance-based security offering for cloud, hybrid and dedicated environments. Cloud SMS can quickly and easily secure cloud environments – no security experience required. Cloud SMS offers simple firewall control, single-policy management, IPv4 and IPv6 support, auditable configuration management and more.

Take a tour of Cloud SMS from StillSecure here:

If your company offers cloud-based security solutions and would like to learn more about becoming a Rackspace Cloud Tools partner, click here.

That’s it for this week. I hope you found it informative. Bookmark this page or follow me @jimbattenberg to keep up with security and other cloud developments at Rackspace.