Rackspace is pleased to announce the release of CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing) headers for Cloud Files content. CORS headers can be used to open communication between the browser and Cloud Files.

As you may know, Cloud Files already supports the concept of Form Post, but when using JavaScipt, users will be burdened by the cross-site security protection that are enforced at the browser-level. However, there are many cases, like developing web applications or control panels, where the browser may need to interact with Cloud Files. To allow for this communication, users should make sure their JavaScript makes a preflight request to Cloud Files, which will send the browser a list of supported origins. If the origin of the browser is allowed, the browser can continue to make the PUTs and POSTs to Cloud Files.

Setting up CORS headers in Cloud Files is simple for API users (this feature is not yet available in our Control Panels). Using the API, set metadata on your containers for the following:

X-Container-Meta-Access-Control-Allow-Origin
This is a list of origins allowed to make cross origin requests, and should be space separated

X-Container-Access-Control-Max-Age
The length of time, in seconds, that you want the origin to hold the preflight results

X-Container-Meta-Access-Control-Allow-Headers
These are headers that you allow in the request from the browser

CORS headers should be used in conjunction with Form Post and Temp URL.  You can get details about using this feature in our Cloud Files API Developer guide.

If you have additional questions, please feel free to ask them here, contact our Fanatical Support Team or email me directly at megan.wohlford@rackspace.com.

Streaming files instead of using traditional download for video provides end users with faster time-to-start rates, avoids buffering and gives developers access to unique features like multiple bit rate. Unlike competitors, Rackspace does not charge extra for streaming traffic, and because Rackspace employs HTTP for streaming, customers get access to use all the Rackspace points of presence on the Akamai network.  That means Cloud Files customers can utilize more than 200 edge locations when streaming their videos to end users around the globe

iOS Streaming

Developers can now stream videos to iOS devices utilizing the native video resources on iPhone, iPad or iPod devices. There is no player required for iOS support and there are no additional fees to use our streaming service.

Customers can easily find their iOS URLs via the API or by logging into the next generation Cloud Control Panel, and selecting “View all Links.” from the container drop down menu.

JW Player Plugin

In addition to native iOS streaming support, Cloud Files today also released plugins and support for JW Player. JW Player is one of the most popular video players available with support for both HTML5 and Flash.

Use of JW Player plugins is restricted to JW Player commercial subscribers and may not be used with the free version of JW Player. The plugins can be downloaded from the Rackspace Knowledge Center, where customers will also find best practices for streaming, integration guides for Cloud Files, and more.

If you have any questions about these features or Rackspace’s streaming offer, please feel free to ask them here, contact our Fanatical Support team or reach out to me directly at megan.wohlford@rackspace.com.

Common use cases include:
Resellers - Many Cloud Files customers separate their customers into containers within Cloud Files. By giving them logs for each of their containers, we give resellers more options for billing their customers.

User Monitoring - Customers sharing an account with multiple users can track which users are accessing their data, which are uploading the most content, etc.  This gives IT departments more information for better serving their customers and possibly identifying problem users.

Access Tracking - Applications built on Cloud Files have a variety of use cases that can benefit from this feature. Logs can be used to track high usage times, user activity, monitor the system and more.

Log Data Examples:
If you enable access log delivery for non-CDN enabled containers, there is a variety of data available. Here are a couple of examples:

• Client IP
• Bytes Out
• Timestamp

Log lines will appear like this:

50.56.228.64 - - [27/08/2012:16:50:22 +0000] "PUT /v1/
     MossoCloudFS_bb88c7b9-ea5b-49af-82fc-
376ff241963c/CharacterTest_%2521
     HTTP/1.0" 401 0 "-" "python-requests/0.13.8
     CPython/2.7.3 Linux/3.2.0-29-generic"

How It Works:
Access Log Delivery (logging for non-CDN content) works similar to logging for CDN.  Customers can choose to have their logs enabled via the API or next generation Cloud Control Panel. Once logging is enabled, Cloud Files will create a container on the customer’s behalf called “.ACCESS_LOGS” and deliver logs to that container. Logs will be processed every two hours, but may take up to 24 hours to deliver based on the activity of Cloud Files at that time. Customers are charged standard Cloud Files prices for the storage of logs.

Enabling a container for log delivery is simple. When using the Cloud Files API, simply set metadata on the container, using “X-Container-Meta-Access-Log-Delivery” set to “true.”  If a customer needs to disable logs for any reason, they can simply set the value to “false” or remove the metadata altogether.

Our next generation Cloud Control Panel also supports enabling logs.  Once in the Files section of the control panel, click the gear next to a private container and select “Modify Logging…”

Customers will be asked to quickly confirm their choice. If a container is already logging-enabled, customers can also disable their logs using this process. Once logs are enabled, the first delivery will likely take 24 hours.

If you have any questions about this feature, other Cloud Files features or Rackspace in general, please feel free to comment on this post, contact our Fanatical Support team, or email me directly at megan.wohlford@rackspace.com.

Using Cloud Files multi region is perfect when you want to locate your Cloud Files and Cloud Servers (or Rackspace Dedicated Servers) in the same data center to reduce latency and take advantage of free bandwidth when using our internal data center network, ServiceNet. Customers who only serve certain geographic regions may also find it helpful to locate the Cloud Files objects as close to that region as possible.

You don’t need to do anything to set up multi region capabilities for your account as all U.S. accounts now have endpoints for both Dallas (DFW) and Chicago (ORD).  Customers using the API can simply choose which endpoint to interact with, and once authenticated against that endpoint, the Cloud Files experience is just as it was before.

Our MyRackspace and next generation Cloud Control Panel users can also take advantage of the new multi region feature. When creating a container, you can select your desired data center and once containers are created, Rackspace will show to which region they belong. Any Cloud Files customers using the first generation Cloud Control Panel (manage.rackspacecloud.com) will need to begin using the next generation Control Panel (mycloud.rackspace.com) to take advantage of this feature.

The following screenshots illustrate this new capability:

MyRackspace Portal – Create New Container

Next Generation Cloud Control Panel – Create New Container

Next Generation Cloud Control Panel – List Containers

Our API users will also see changes in their Service Catalog, which now shows multiple endpoints for “object store” (click image to enlarge):

Cloud Files will NOT automatically replicate data across regions. Customers who would like to have their data in both places should ensure PUTs are done to both endpoints and will pay for data stored in both locations along with related bandwidth charges.

All existing customers will have their current region set as their “default,” meaning that it will always be ordered first in the list of endpoints when authenticating against Cloud Files using our Auth 1.1 or 2.0 APIs. Customers using Auth 1.0 will still only have a single endpoint returned.

And if you have customers  around the world, don’t forget you can deliver your content rapidly with Akamai’s Content Delivery Network (CDN), which caches content at global edge locations and saves users time because the requested content is received from within the region instead of coming from the origin server in Dallas or Chicago.

If you have any questions about multi region support for Cloud Files, please feel free to ask them here, email me directly at megan.wohlford@rackspace.com or contact our Fanatical Support team.

The good news is that ALL EXISTING CDN URLs WILL CONTINUE TO FUNCTION AS NORMAL even after we make this change.

Beginning in mid-August, the Cloud Files team will make a system change that is designed to allow the Cloud Files infrastructure to scale more efficiently, reduce the risk of CDN downtime and increase the protection of your CDN URLs from DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.

In order to do this, we have to change the format of our CDN URLs.

Today, if you add a file to your container (e.g. mydog.png) and CDN-enable it, that CDN URL would have a format that looks like this:

http://c25810.r10.cf1.rackcdn.com/mydog.png

After we complete our change, your new CDN URL would have a format that looks like this:

http://80745c48926cd286a5a0-48261ebe0e4c795a565ece6b9cca2fe8.r10.cf1.rackcdn.com/mydog.png

Once we have made this change, both our control panels and our APIs will return the new form URLs.  While the URL you see will be different from your existing URL, existing URLs will always continue to work as normal. 

This change will take several weeks as we upgrade each of our datacenters, and should be implemented by the end of August for all customers.

If you have any questions about this change and how it will affect your content, please feel free to reach out to me directly, megan.wohlford@rackspace.com.

Sincerely,
Your Fanatical Support Team

Qloudstat, a Rackspace Cloud Tools partner, is changing the way users look at web analytics by making the service simple to enable and effortless to consume. Qloudstat has taken Rackspace’s basic and massive CDN logs and turned them into easy to understand graphics and customizable charts. Qloudstat has even made all of the data exportable to common formats and applications.

These are my personal favorites…

See where your end users are coming from:

See peak performance times:

Pricing for Qloudstat is easy: it’s a flat, per-month fee based on your usage, with five tiers to choose from. There is even a free tier! Prices are quoted in Euro, but U.S. customers can leverage the latest conversion rates.

For more information on Qloudstat and how to get started, just visit Qloudstat.com, or feel free to ask your questions here. Let us know what you think!

Expiring Objects

The new expiring objects feature lets you set an expiration or retention period on your objects. For each object, you now have the ability to set (via headers) a retention period based on a date (i.e. 3/31/13) or a length of time (i.e. 360 seconds).  As soon as the object’s expiration period is up, the object will become inaccessible and deleted from Cloud Files. Any CDN-enabled files will live out their time-to-live (TTL). If you don’t need or want to keep Cloud Files objects indefinitely (e.g. log files or recurring full backups), this new feature is for you.

Temporary URLs

This new Cloud Files feature allows you to create temporary URLs that give direct access to your Cloud Files objects for a specified period of time. Temporary URLs allow you to sign URLs based on keys that you set. This means that you can now grant access to your content or an end user’s content without CDN-enabling the file. Temporary URLs can help prevent your content from being abused and from incurring unintended bandwidth fees. Ideal use cases include developers designing file managers or applications that allow users to share files

Form Post

Lastly, form post is another way Cloud Files is improving your user experience for developing file-sharing applications. Similar to temporary URLs, form post enables you to give your users a signature to include in their URLs. With that signed URL, end users can upload directly to Cloud Files using their browser without having to upload to an intermediary server owned by a control panel.

If you have any questions about these features or any other Cloud Files questions, please contact our Fanatical Support team or just ask them here!

Video files are typically very large and are a perfect candidate for cloud storage and CDN streaming delivery. Most rich media sites and many advertisements are actually a combination of interactive images that turn into streaming video once the user begins to click around.  Rich media is about having quick and seamless interaction…not about downloading videos and waiting for buffering.   Streaming technology works by breaking up a video file into time frames so you can chose which point of the video stream you want to start playing from.  From a user’s perspective, this means they can jump around the video feed without having to wait for the whole video to download.

This feature, often called “random seek”, seems pretty basic until you go searching through a 10 minute video (which doesn’t have this feature) for an answer you know is waiting for you right around 8 and ½ minutes into the video.

We’ve implemented our streaming offer to cover two basic scenarios.  The first is the user that has a video in .flv or mp4 format.  We’ve launched support for Flowplayer, a popular video player, so that customers can simply embed the video with an out-of-the-box player.

The second use case is for customers comfortable with flash development.  Using the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), customers get access to their video libraries and develop their own players.

As many developers for rich media sites know all too well, attracting a consumer’s attention is hard enough these days. Losing it over long download times and poor video performance is frustrating.   Let Rackspace help you store these video files in the cloud and stream them over one of the industry’s fastest CDNs.

For simple instructions and how to get started, check out our Knowledge Center articles:

Cloud Files CDN Streaming FAQs
Cloud Files CDN Streaming with the OSMF Plugins
Cloud Files CDN Streaming with the Flowplayer Plugins

Also, we have updated our Cloud Files API document here.

If you have any questions about his feature, I am happy to answer your questions.

•    Content-Encoding
•    Content-Disposition
•    X-Object-Manifest
•    Access-Control-Allow-Origin
•    Access-Control-Allow-Credentials
•    Access-Control-Expose-Headers
•    Access-Control-Max-Age
•    Access-Control-Allow-Methods
•    Access-Control-Allow-Headers
•    Origin
•    Access-Control-Request-Method
•    Access-Control-Request-Headers

Keep communicating and letting us know what headers you need via our Product Feedback forum. If you have any questions about these new headers, just let me know!

Our customers have been asking us for this feature and we’re thrilled to finally offer it.   Our partnership with Akamai has once again demonstrated it’s momentum. In just the first few months of our working together, we have released:

•    CNAMES – Seamless integration of Cloud Files content into customer’s branded Web site URLs.
•    Edge Purge – Allows customers to quickly edit or delete content on the edge server
•    HTTP Compression – Simple, cost saving process allowing compressed objects to be downloaded more quickly
•    SSL Delivery - Or https, encrypts customer’s data in transit as it goes through the CDN, allowing content to remain encrypted all the way from the origin servers out to the browser
•    Container MetaData – Metadata can be attached to objects and now containers in order to categorize them and mark them with any sort of data
•    Large File Support – Allows customers to use multipart uploads so now companies can store videos, HD movies, very large backup files, etc.
•    Extended TTL– TTL or Time to Live has increased from 72 hours to 50 years!

Creating CNAMEs is easy. We’ve created a simple process where you can create CNAMEs by simply using your DNS management tool to CNAME your Cloud Files CDN URL to whatever domain name you wish (and own).

For example:

You can find your CDN URL by doing a post on your object via the API or looking in your control panel (see below).

For more specifics, please see our knowledge base article here. And, if you have any questions about his feature, I am happy to answer – shoot me an email at megan.wohlford@rackspace.com