Building a more reliable cloud starts with the design of our host servers.  Two of the most common server failures are caused by power supply and hard disk failures.  Through the use of redundant power supplies and RAID 10 storage volumes, we are able to deliver instances that are more resilient. Additionally, our monitoring systems are able to proactively detect conditions that are likely to cause an outage in the future so that we are able to notify customers ahead of time.

Rackspace data centers are also engineered for reliability.  Our UPS power and cooling systems are designed for N+1 redundancy, allowing for failures to occur without interrupting your business.  Rackspace also leverages diverse carriers, which enter our data centers at disparate locations to ensure that we’re able to provide the best possible connectivity to the Rackspace Cloud.  You can learn more about our data center designs here.

The Rackspace Cloud powered by OpenStack is a far more robust environment: by building on a reliable environment in the open that is backed by our Fanatical Support, developers can take their applications to the next level.

While Rackspace provides a great foundation for building a more reliable application, there are several important steps you need to take to maximize the availability of your application with the most important being leveraging multiple Cloud Servers behind a Cloud Load Balancer.  With this configuration, you are able to protect yourself from a host server failure and increased levels of traffic to your application.

These are the same strategies for maximizing availability regardless of the cloud you are hosting on; however, doing this on a platform engineered for better reliability gives your app a significant advantage. For those developers who value the availability of their application, there is a far better value of hosting in the Rackspace Cloud. Developers should be spending more time building a great application instead of working around infrastructure challenges.

While the end result may look easy, it’s actually a large undertaking that requires preparation and collaboration.  We not only had close coordination between our support and operations teams, but also were in in communication with the customer while the event was in progress. Having the only stable and reliable site covering Apple’s new iPad announcement truly demonstrates the power of Fanatical Support™, marrying our knowledge and desire to serve with some great technology.

Ryan Block, cofounder of gdgt, offered some of his insights into what made the event such a success. “We’ve been working with Rackspace on our live event coverage for quite a while now. We continue to work with them because of the great service and awesome support,” Ryan said. “There are plenty of providers who can throw a lot of boxes at a problem, but few can pair that with great support. Rackspace was actually able to deploy technicians to work with our team in real time, which is crucial under incredibly high load. That’s something that you don’t just get anywhere else, and it can make the difference between staying up and crashing and burning.”

Here are some stats of how massive this event was:

•    55,697,141 requests serviced for the event (excluding content serviced by the Rackspace Cloud Files CDN).
•    Over 110,000 Concurrent Connections
•    4 load balancers supporting the site through DNS round robin
•    61 total web servers

The total number of connections for the gdgt web nodes during the Apple iPad event.

As you can see, this was a huge amount of traffic! This event shows that when Rackers and customers work together, we can achieve amazing results.

This isn’t the first time that Rackspace has hosted a successful live event with gdgt, read how we kept their site up during an Apple Keynote in 2011. Check out gdgt for some of Ryan Block’s first impressions of the new iPad.

We’re pleased to announce a major feature update for our Cloud Load Balancers product.   Priority given to these features was largely based on feedback received from customers through our product feedback site.   If you have suggestions on how we can improve this offering further, please let us know.

These new features are now available:

-    Basic TCP Load Balancing – This new feature allows customers to load balance traffic for any TCP-based protocol.

-    X-Forwarded-For Header for HTTP Traffic – The cloud load balancer now automatically inserts an X-Forwarded-For HTTP header for all inbound HTTP requests.  This header will contain the actual source address of the client, which many web applications are already designed to use when determining the source address for a request.  All newly created and existing HTTP load balancers now have this header in the HTTP request.

-    Programmatic Support for Determining Cloud Load Balancer Source Addresses – API users are now able to programmatically derive the source addresses of our cloud load balancers.  This new feature is useful for customers who are automating the deployment of infrastructure and need to determine the IP addresses of requests coming from our load balancers for the purpose of creating more robust firewall rules.

-    Batch Delete of Load Balancers, Nodes, Virtual IPs and Access List Entries – API users are now able to delete multiple items from all list entities, which improves the efficiency of client interactions with the service.

For more information on how to use the new features available in our API, please refer to the Cloud Load Balancers API Developer Guide.

We’re excited to announce that Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers offering is now available as a fully supported product in the UK, featuring an aggressive service level agreement.  Customers of our US Cloud have been able to enjoy this functionality for a while now, and following some rigorous testing we’ve now made it available to UK Cloud customers.

As we’ve designed this product, we’ve aimed to make this service behave as customers would expect traditional load balancers to work, while scaling dynamically based on the elastic demand of cloud applications.  Based on customer expectations, our goals were to build a solution that is simple to set up and use, feature rich, yet powerful enough for the most demanding workloads.

We expect customers will use our cloud load balancers for a variety of scenarios.  Two common uses include:

• Rapidly Growing Customer – In this scenario, a customer is growing rapidly and needs more than a single Cloud Server.  With cloud load balancers, traffic can be balanced across two or more Cloud Servers.
• High Availability – Customers running mission critical business applications on the cloud need to be up 100% of the time.  With cloud load balancers, customers can build a very robust high availability cloud configuration quickly and easily.

Our cloud load balancers offer features our customers have been asking for, with some that are unique in the industry, including:

• Static IP addresses
• Support for multiple protocols
• Advanced algorithms
• Built-in high availability
• Health checks
• Advanced access control
• Session persistence
• REST-based API
• Connection logging
• Connection throttling

If you are interested, check out the Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers information on our UK website here.

If you are a current cloud hosting customer, you can login to your control panel and navigate to the load balancers section to get started. A full-featured API is also available to control this service programmatically. The API Developer Guide for this service is available here.

Pay As You Go Pricing

You pay for each Rackspace Cloud Load Balancer by the hour + the number of concurrent connections + bandwidth; there are no upfront setup fees. Here are the details:

Bandwidth for Rackspace cloud load balancers is calculated separately at our standard rates:

Note*: Concurrent connections are a measure of average utilization over an hour based on 5 minute polling.

As with all Rackspace products, Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers are backed by Fanatical Support at no additional cost.

IPv6 Support Now Available

Beginning last week, we started provisioning all newly created load balancers with both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address.  Deploying IPv6 at the load balancer allows customers to begin servicing IPv6 requests without having IPv6 connectivity to any of the servers sitting behind the load balancer. This provides an excellent solution for deploying and testing IPv6 for your application with minimal changes to your current configuration.

To implement this configuration, we are providing full, dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity to our load balancing network without relying on tunneling solutions.  This provides customers with the best possible combination of throughput and performance for IPv6-enabled clients.

While IPv6 addresses are automatically assigned to every new load balancer, additional functions have been added to our API, which allow users to provision and remove IPv6 interfaces from existing load balancers.  To download the latest copy of our developer API guide, click here.

Please let us know if you have any questions about our new UK offering or IPv6 support.

We’re fully committed to the Cloud Sites product and are in the process of expanding the team dedicated to the ongoing development. In the near future, Cloud Sites will offer:

• Improved DNS management capabilities to give users more control in managing their domains on our system.
• Better interoperability with other cloud products to provide a seamless experience with integrating different cloud resources.
• Public API access to provision and manage web sites and other resources.
• PHP 5.3 and .NET 4.0 language support providing users the ability to deploy new sites or automatically update their existing sites to the framework of their choice.

This is an exciting time for Cloud Sites, and as we continue to develop the product, we appreciate any feedback you have.  We invite you to submit suggestions through our User Voice customer feedback site, feedback.rackspacecloud.com, where customers have the opportunity to discuss and vote on features that are most valuable to them.

As we’ve designed this product, we’ve made conscious design decisions that have resulted in this service behaving as customers would expect traditional load balancers to work while scaling dynamically based on the elastic demand of cloud applications.  Based on customer expectations, our goals were to build a solution that is very easy to set up and use, feature rich, yet powerful enough for the most demanding workloads.

We expect customers will use our cloud load balancers for a variety of scenarios.  Two common uses include:

•    Rapidly Growing Customer – In this scenario, a customer is growing rapidly and needs more than a single cloud server.  With cloud load balancers, traffic can be balanced across two or more Cloud Servers.
•    High Availability – Customers running mission critical business applications on the cloud need to be up 100% of the time.  With cloud load balancers, customers can build a very robust high availability cloud configuration quickly and easily.

Our cloud load balancers include features our customers have been asking for and features unique in the industry, including:

• Static IP addresses
• Support for multiple protocols
• Advanced algorithms
• Built-in high availability
• Health checks
• Advanced access control
• Session persistence
• REST-based API
• Connection logging
• Connection throttling

If you are interested, check out the Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers information on our website here.  This offering is not currently available to UK Cloud customers, but will be coming soon.

If you are a current cloud hosting customer, you can login to your control panel and navigate to the load balancers section to get started. A full-featured API is also available to control this service programmatically. The API Developer Guide for this service is available here.

Pay As You Go Pricing

You pay for each Rackspace Cloud Load Balancer by the hour + the number of concurrent connections + bandwidth. There are no upfront setup fees. Here are the details:

Bandwidth for Rackspace cloud Load Balancers is calculated separately.

Note*: Concurrent connections are a measure of average utilization over an hour based on 5 minute polling.

All Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers are backed by Fanatical Support.  For details, visit the support page on our website here.

Let us know if you have any questions about our new offering.  If you need the ability to scale mission critical applications or quickly build high availability configurations, we hope you try our new Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers offering.

Want to learn more? Sign up for upcoming webinar.

Build and Automate Your Own Cloud High Availability (HA) Config Using Cloud Load Balancers In 15 Minutes (or less).

I will be joining Raja Srinivasan,VP of Cloud Computing at Zeus Technology, to lead a webinar that will cover the current state of the cloud, teach you how you can build a robust HA solution in no time, and provide an overview of the newly introduced Cloud Load Balancing Solution as well as an overview of Zeus’s industry leading technology powering it. Details:

Date: Tuesday, May 3rd
Time: 1pm CDT

Click here to register.

•    List, add, modify, and remove domains
•    List, add, modify, and remove DNS records

Additionally, we’ve exposed several features in the API that previously required a support ticket, including:

•    Management of the default time to live (TTL) and resource record time to live (TTL) values
•    Advanced record types – TXT, NS, AAAA, DKIM, and SRV
•    Ability to configure the priority of all resource records

While this release is limited to the API only, we’re working in parallel to improve the customer DNS experience in the control panel as well.  The control panel will soon feature domain management as a top-level feature and provide a full suite of self-management features that are now being exposed through the API.

As we work through the beta development phase of this project, we’re looking for customers to evaluate and test this service. The ideal customer will have Cloud Servers in their configuration and be familiar with the Rackspace RESTful web service APIs.

If you would like to apply for early access to the Rackspace Cloud DNS API Private Beta program, please email dnsbeta@rackspace.com. Tell us about your current configuration and use case ideas on how you would use this new service.  We’ll start sending out invitations for the Private Beta next week.

We’re excited to work with our customers to finalize this new offering as the feedback received will be crucial to making this product a success.

Be sure to subscribe to our blog for future product announcements.

UPDATE: Today Rackspace Cloud DNS API is available for all US and UK cloud customers! For additional information check out our website.

Last November, we announced that we were actively developing a high-performance, on-demand cloud load balancing solution and were seeking customers to participate in our cloud load balancers private beta phase.

Since then, our engineers and our private beta customers have been evaluating and testing our cloud load balancers along with the API.  Our private beta customers have provided us critical feedback on what works well and what improvements needed to be made.  We’re pleased to announce the availability of cloud load balancers (Beta) to all Rackspace US Cloud customers.

Our cloud load balancers include features our customers have been asking for and  features unique in the industry, including:
•    Static IP addresses
•    Support for multiple protocols
•    Advanced algorithms
•    Built-in high availability
•    Health checks
•    Advanced access control
•    Session persistence
•    REST-based API
•    Connection logging
•    Connection throttling

If you want to learn more, click here for a PDF document that provides additional details.

The API

Implementation and management of our cloud load balancer solution is currently available only through our API.   In the near future, we will integrate the cloud load balancer into the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel.  To download the API Guide, click here.   In order to use our API, you should have a general understanding of the load balancing service and be familiar with:
• RESTful Web Services
• HTTP/1.1 Conventions
• JSON and/or XML Data Serialization Formats
• ATOM Syndication Format

Pricing

You pay for each cloud load balancer (instance) by the hour + the number of concurrent connections + bandwidth.  There are no upfront base fees.  Here are the details:

Note*: Concurrent connections are a measure of average utilization over an hour based on 5 minute polling.

Bandwidth for Rackspace cloud load balancers is calculated separately:
•    Bandwidth (Out) is $0.18 per GB
•    Bandwidth (In) is $0.08 per GB

Getting Started

Well…are you ready to add a cloud load balancer?   It’s an easy three step process:

1.    Add a cloud load balancer. If you already have a Rackspace Cloud account, use the “Create Load Balancer” API operation.  If you don’t have a Rackspace Cloud account, go to the Order Now page and get yourself an account….then use the “Create Load Balancer” API operation.
2.   Configure cloud load balancer. Using our API, select name, protocol, port, algorithm, and which servers you need load balanced.
3.   Enjoy your cloud load balancer which will be online in just a few minutes. Using our API, each cloud load balancer can be customized or removed as your needs change.

In the near term, we expect to announce general availability that will include our industry leading service level agreement (SLA) and access via the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel.   We are very excited and can’t wait to hear from you about our new cloud load balancers offering.

Cloud Load Balancing will allow customers to create more robust, scalable, and high availability configurations in the cloud in a matter of seconds. Imagine being able to launch a load balancing solution with the push of a button or via API. That’s what we’re building! The result is considerable time savings compared to manually configuring a solution and significant cost savings compared to going through our professional services team.

Cloud Load Balancing will include numerous features that help you ensure that your applications are online and are highly responsive:

• Advanced Algorithms – Including support for round robin, weighted round robin, least connections, weighted least connections and random. Customers will have the ability to ensure traffic is being properly routed to the back-end nodes in a way that is optimal for their workload.
• Static IP Addresses – Every load balancer is assigned a dedicated static IP address that can be selectively shared with other load balancers under a single account. IP addresses are persistent and won’t change while a load balancer is active.
• Health Monitor – In the event that a back-end node fails, the load balancer will quickly remove it from rotation. The health monitor is even capable of inspecting your HTTP traffic to ensure your workload is performing how you expect it to be.
• Simplified Maintenance – We will perform rolling application restarts that will have zero customer impact by draining your nodes and taking them out of rotation immediately.
• Advanced Access Control – You will be able to easily manage who can and can’t access the services that are exposed via the Cloud Load Balancing service.
• Session Persistence – If you are load balancing HTTP traffic, the session persistence feature will enable an HTTP cookie to ensure subsequent requests are directed to the same node in your load balancer pool.
• REST-based API – The RESTful API will let you develop custom solutions to automate the entire process of managing and controlling the Cloud Load Balancing service.

Our Cloud Load Balancing service is based on Zeus technology and built on top of our robust network, you’ll have the ability to burst and only pay for the resources used. At launch, we will support load balancing HTTP, HTTPS, LDAP, LDAPS, IMAP, FTP, POP3, POP3S and SMTP protocols on either a public interface or internal interface.

As we work through the beta development phase of this project, we’re looking for customers to evaluate and test our API. The ideal customer will be familiar with consuming RESTful web service APIs, as well as the general concepts of load balancing.

If you would like to help us raise the bar on Cloud Load Balancing, please email beta@rackspace.com. Tell us your current configuration and use case ideas for how you would use this new service.  Invitations for our private beta will start to go out this week.

We hope you are excited by this new development, we certainly are! We are also working on lots of other great additions to our services and can’t wait to share them with you in the very near future. Stay tuned!

Simplified Management
One of our biggest pain points with managing IIS 6 in a multi-tenant/web farm environment is the inability to replicate a single configuration to multiple cluster members. We worked around this problem by developing a custom replication agent, but it was extremely inefficient and error prone. Eliminating this bottleneck allows us to reduce our hardware requirements by 16 – 25% per cluster. Additionally, it means we no longer have to monitor a process that frequently caused problems for new sites customers create. With shared configuration in IIS 7, site configuration changes are replicated in real time as opposed to as long as an hour.

So far, the only problem we’ve experienced with this configuration is the inability to store the configuration on a network share and manage the server remotely. Microsoft is aware of the issue and is working to provide a fix, as this is a configuration they are supporting. Most likely this is an issue with impersonation/delegation in a two-hop authentication scenario.

Microsoft has also reduced the attack surface of IIS by fully modularizing the entire platform. When configuring IIS, you have the opportunity to customize the installation to fit the needs of your environment. Not only is this a benefit for our system operations team, but also for our customers because it means that their applications will benefit from these enhancements as well.

We also took a step forward and built our offering on a 64-bit platform. While our application pools are running in 32-bit mode by default, this will give us much more flexibility in how we scale the platform in the future. IIS 6 was plagued with limitations on non-paged pool memory, which will not be a limiting factor in our new configuration. While most web applications themselves do not benefit from a 64-bit application pool, we’ll be more than happy to make the switch for you.

Provisioning and Managing IIS 7 Hosted Resources
Less than a year ago, I was tasked with developing a new framework for provisioning sites on our IIS 6 platform. The only technology that could really do everything that we required was the antiquated Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) API. This was a very daunting and challenging task, even for a developer with five years of experience in Windows development environments. Most of the development was focused on trial and error. As a developer, I felt Microsoft had stuffed IIS 6 management into an unintuitive WMI container that really did not make sense for the application. After enduring a painful development cycle for our IIS 6 services, learning about the changes Microsoft had made to the management tools was a relief.

Developing the management tools for IIS 7 was truly a dream come true and shows that Microsoft really went the extra mile to ensure the management tools had received the same TLC that the rest of the platform did. I was surprised at how easy it was to interface with Microsoft.Web.Administration and make the API accessible over WCF. In fact, developing the new services took about half of the time that our original IIS 6 services required, which is a testament to the level of effort that went into these new APIs.

The .NET Framework 3.0 included WCF, which gives developers powerful new tools to develop interoperable web services. This was a major requirement of our new platform as our backend core provisioning system is completely Java-based. Integrating with our provisioning system via Axis2 was extremely straightforward and we weren’t forced to make any compromises to allow the two disparate platforms to work together.

If you’re like most of us, and developing with a heterogeneous platform in mind, then WCF will likely go a long way in meeting those requirements.

Built for Developers
For developers, Mosso’s offering of IIS 7 is extremely compelling. In fact, the offering has been engineered from the ground up with developers in mind, and many of us on the Mosso team use our own platform to develop applications. We took what we knew people disliked about our IIS 6 platform and we used that feedback to build our new offering. One of the biggest complaints we heard from developers was that they wanted to be able to run applications in full trust. While it wasn’t feasible in IIS 6, we were able to work directly with Microsoft to engineer a system that is able to accommodate this popular request without compromising the security, scalability, and performance of other users running in our cluster. We’re excited to open this opportunity up to our customers for the first time.

As with IIS 6, all Mosso customers are allocated their own application pool so that they can be confident that other applications running on the cluster will not interfere or cause an adverse impact on their applications. By doing this, we can optionally tune your application pool and your site so that it is optimized for your own needs. This is something that separates us from many of the other “budget” hosting providers.

Additionally, our IIS 7 offering inherits the same redundant, load-balanced platform that has allowed Mosso to be successful. As a developer, you no longer have to be concerned about resource utilization. We handle all of that for you. All you need to do is code it, load it, and watch it scale.

Our IIS 7 platform also includes full support for .NET 3.5, which provides numerous incremental improvements to the .NET Framework. Some of the new features the .NET 3.5 framework has are:

• LINQ
• Extension Methods
• Lambda Expressions
• Automatic Properties
• Object & Collection Initializers
• Anonymous Types

We are one of the first hosting companies to fully support .NET 3.5. While .NET 3.5 is only advertised as an incremental improvement, the new features offer a lot more flexibility for developers.

Start Developing!
While we’ve launched IIS 7 as a beta offering, we would encourage you to become more familiar with the features and start testing your applications on this new platform. We’ll be announcing plans soon to migrate all of our IIS 6 sites over to IIS 7. We encourage you to let us know what you think by e-mailing features@mosso.com.