Check out Lew’s full blog post here.

We are, of course, never ones to rest on our laurels, and we have several plans to further develop Cloud Servers moving forward. Some excerpts:

• One is API’s:  As you may know, we’ve recently released the API spec for public comment – after all, the people using the spec should define it.  We’ve received great feedback on it already (thanks!).  It will be released to the public in July and you can expect a lot of cool partner tools quickly.
• Windows: Windows for Cloud Servers is officially coming. Fully-supported, high-performance Windows that supports the latest OS and database builds and also meets Microsoft’s supportability standards. Yes, it’s a high standard, and yes, it will cause longer timelines, but the work is underway, and the benefits are on the horizon.

At The Rackspace Cloud, we are dedicated to constantly improving all our offerings, including Cloud Servers, Cloud Sites and Cloud Files and we always welcome feedback.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to give us a ring at 1-877-934-0409, drop us a line on Live Chat, or shoot us a Tweet on Twitter @mosso. We’re always here, and we love to hear from you.

Lew Moorman, President of Cloud and Chief Strategy Officer, Rackspace, blogged about the B43 launch today.  We share in the excitement!

Here is the text from Lew’s post:

Helping You Use the Web:  Welcome Building43

We constantly ask our customers what else we can do to help them.

There is one theme that comes up more than any other: Help me grow my business!  While this strays from our core of offering on-demand computing services, today we are pleased to announce something that should help.

Robert Scoble, Rocky Barbanica, Rob Lagesse and team today launched Building43.  Check it out here.

The goal behind this new community is very simple.  As the Internet grows, it gets more useful, but massively more complex.  How is a business supposed to make sense of all the new tools launching every day?  TechCrunch, GigaOm, Mashable, CNet and many others are all focused on making you aware of these tools, but who is helping you figure out how to actually USE them?  Who can help you, as a businessperson, integrate these tools and drive real results?

Well, that is what Building43 is all about.  The stories up today are just a taste of what is to come.  Mark Zuckerberg talking about how he thinks businesses should use Facebook.  Graham Weston and Tony Hsieh talking about how great service matters even more in the web era and how they use technology to enhance it.   If you find this useful, please join this great new community.

When we announced the hiring of Robert and Rocky this Spring, we were not sure where exactly we would end up.  But, we’re excited to offer some fanatical insights on using the web to grow your business.  Please engage in the community.  Share your ideas.  Tell the world what has worked for you.  Meet others with your same problems. Together let’s grow the next generation of the web.

Representing a real world demonstration of the power and value of cloud computing, Ryan Block, live.gdgt.com co-founder and editor, was able to provide live coverage of the keynote event over his site using Cloud Sites. He and his photographer were also able to simultaneously capture and upload photos in real time to Cloud Files which auto-integrates into the site. These activities took place while serving an average of 656 page views per second to live.gdgt.com viewers around the world at a minimum of cost and hassle.

“Scaling an infamously well-trafficked event like Apple’s WWDC has always been a major challenge, often requiring a large IT staff and massive infrastructure at multiple data centers. The Rackspace Cloud has enabled us to iterate and scale our live coverage beta quickly, and without us having to make a major investment in hardware or operations,” said Ryan Block, co-founder of live.gdgt.com. “Perhaps most importantly, though, Rackspace’s support staff went above and beyond to help us prepare for the event. Their input and attentiveness to maintaining our uptime — even despite unbelievable load — sets them apart.”

Cloud Sites retails at $100 per month and Cloud Files is based on a pay-as-you-go model starting at $.015 per gigabyte of data. Cloud Files also allows customers the option to serve content files using Limelight Networks, a top tier content delivery network (CDN) in real time without any extra effort and only paying for what is used. Customers also receive 24/7 Fanatical Support® for questions or concerns about their hosting needs at no extra cost.

The estimated cost difference between “do-it-yourself” hosting from scratch vs. deploying Cloud Sites and Cloud Files using this type of an event as a barometer provides a clear example of the cost benefit of cloud computing. Physical space, hardware, software, and administration costs for a unique datacenter capable of handling this type of load and traffic could cost tens of thousands of dollars, while using Cloud Sites and Cloud Files is likely to cost just a few hundred dollars.

“Ryan and his team did a great job of integrating our Cloud Sites product for his application and our Cloud Files content delivery network to deliver an amazing live-blogging experience. We were really happy to remove the scaling burden for him so he could focus on his real-time reporting,” said Emil Sayegh, General Manager of The Rackspace Cloud. “You don’t have to be Nostradamus anymore and predict what your datacenter needs are going to be during peak periods using Cloud Sites when you can simply code, load and watch it scale.”

There always seems to be a discussion about everyone’s favorite Twitter apps. Everywhere you go there are techies and Twitterers.  Lots of us use Tweet Deck, iPhone lovers like to brawl over which apps rock hardest, and we all love newbies TweetPhoto and dailyRT (not just because they’re hosted in our cloud).  So we thought we’d put it to a vote.

Tell us your top pick for Favorite Twitter App and enter for a chance to win free cloud hosting from The Rackspace Cloud for six months.

Here’s how it works:

• Write in your favorite Twitter application below.
• Tell us in a few words what makes it your favorite.
• Provide your name and email address.

(The entry period is closed. Thanks to everybody for participating!)

We’ll post the results the week of June 22, 2009.

What’s at stake?

The winner is eligible to receive up to six months of any combination of Cloud Sites hosting (up to $100 a month value), Cloud Files (up to $100 a month value) and Cloud Servers (up to $20 a month hosting) worth a maximum value of $1320 over six months.

Click here for the full list of rules. Must be a resident of the United States to be eligible to win. Void in New York and Florida.

Klemens and his team worked together on the Wendy’s International campaign, 99CentBidforValue web-based reverse bidding auction.  The problem they were presented with was an unknown number of participants hitting the website all at once and within an extremely limited time frame, making it nearly impossible to predict the number of servers needed. There would also be lulls when maximum servers would be unnecessary.

Klemens breaks down the configuration that he and The Rackspace Cloud used for Wendy’s International: “We connected with The Rackspace Cloud, and we were up and running in a very short period of time – in about 24 hours or so.  We didn’t know anything about how many users were going to hit the server at the same time.”

He further explains, “When you design marketing experiences, which is what we really do, it’s very difficult to know what kind of penetration you’re going to have.  Due to the great scalability of the Rackspace Cloud, we were able to handle the sustained load of 400 database transactions per second.”

All in all, Klemens was pleased with the speed and agility of the process, “The agile development process made it into an extremely successful project, and the deployment through the cloud was fabulous and went well.  We gained 40,000 new registrants in 10 days, harvested email addresses for continued marketing efforts, and made Wendy’s a very happy customer.”

Klemens closes, saying, “It was exactly the right fit for what Wendy’s needed.”

The Wendy’s/White Knight story underscores the inherent value of cloud computing – taking the guesswork out of predicting datacenter needs and the not insignificant resources needed to do it yourself. Solving these problems while saving time and money allows cloud customers like Klemens Wengert to focus like a laser on what they do best – in this case, creating compelling end user experiences for high brow clients like Wendy’s International and their customers.

Want to see the results for yourself?  Check it out, and find out when the next auction is taking place!

We’ve put together several video tutorials showing first-hand how to perform various tasks across our three different platforms. Take a look at these videos, which are only a few minutes each. See for yourself how easy it is to get started in the Cloud.

Cloud Sites Videos

These eight short tutorials (click here to access all eight videos) show you how simple and straightforward it is to use our Cloud Sites product, including instructions about:

Cloud Files Video

This video demonstrates how to utilize Cloud Files in conjunction with the Limelight Content Delivery Network for faster delivery of your content.

Cloud Servers Video

This video shows how fast and easy it is to spin up and provision new virtual dedicated servers using Cloud Servers.

Have a look and tell us what you think. We’re always looking for ways to do it better.

As with other social media services and the viral nature of online photos, TweetPhoto is expected to experience unpredictable and massive swings in traffic patterns – making the The Rackspace Cloud approach to providing worry-free scaling and unlimited storage an attractive solution.

“The photo sharing experience on Twitter and Facebook is begging for a transformation. TweetPhoto on Cloud Sites and Cloud Files will allow users to easily upload as many photos as they want and automatically share them with Twitter followers and Facebook friends,” said Rodney Rumford, co-founder of TweetPhoto. “TweetPhoto is a simple to use tool that utilizes cloud hosting solutions from Mosso | The Rackspace Cloud to scale massively while providing reliable uptime and unlimited storage for end users. Coupled with Rackspace’s unmatched customer support, we’re confident that the cloud technology will be virtually invisible and a non-issue for us and our users.”

TweetPhoto is expected to launch with a number of interesting and bandwidth-intensive features that allow users to search for photos, subscribe to RSS feeds by tag or user, transfer bio and friend information from Twitter, scroll through trending photos, see the location of where the picture was taken using geotagging from GPS-enabled smartphones, and see which other users have viewed their photos and what photos their friends are favoriting, uploading and commenting on. The power of a scalable platform like Cloud Sites helps to allow TweetPhoto to include these features, which require the ability to store and recall countless amounts of metadata in real-time requiring.

“By using Cloud Sites and Cloud Files, TweetPhoto can focus on what they do best without worrying about whether their application can withstand a global viral sensation,” said Emil Sayegh, general manager, Mosso | The Rackspace Cloud. “TweetPhoto is an example of yet another social media company taking advantage of our Cloud portfolio by building their site on a reliable cloud hosting platform that can support millions of visitors, which, in turn, can enable them to take online photo sharing to new heights.”

Rackspace’s flagship cloud offering, Cloud Sites™ offers a scalable platform for handling huge traffic spikes and a pay-as-you-grow pricing model. It supports Windows, Linux and both at the same time.

Rackspace’s internet-based storage service, Cloud Files™ gives developers instant access to an enterprise-grade storage infrastructure, with access to a Tier 1 CDN and reduces overall investment and IT costs while providing unlimited storage. Cloud Files offers an industry leading SLA and a highly competitive pricing model with replicated storage starting at $0.15/GB.

Among other things, Lew participated as a judge on a panel of cloud luminaries reviewing presentations made by emerging technology start-up representatives under the “Cloud Management” category.

Winning “Best In Show” at Under The Radar was a company offering a free cloud server management tool called CloudKick.  Alex Polvi, CEO of CloudKick, demonstrated a very impressive live migration of an Amazon EC2 machine image (or “instance”) to Slicehost (part of The Rackspace Cloud family) by using a feature called Cloud Shift built into their cloud management control panel.

What is CloudKick? Why would you want to use CloudKick? How easy is it to migrate a live image from Amazon EC2 to Slicehost using Cloud Shift? Watch this short video for answers.  We think these guys have promise and are onto a hot trend (wink wink).

Originally founded in 1917, Chicago-based Radio Flyer products continue the tradition of building safe, quality toys that spark imagination and inspire active play. From the original little red wagon to current wagons, tricycles, scooters, and other ride-ons, Radio Flyer toys bring a nostalgic memory to kids and adults of all ages.

“When the time came for Radio Flyer to make the transition into the cloud, we needed a solution that offered the support and scalability to propel us to the next level,” said Tom Cesario, director of Information Technology for Radio Flyer. “Our business is growing and we’re reaching out to customers in new ways that will bring them to our site. We believe a cloud approach is the best path for us in order to support unpredictable traffic spikes and the customer service provided by Rackspace has been superb – allowing me to focus on strategic business issues and not technology issues.”

Radio Flyer initially tapped The Rackspace Cloud to host its extranet for its sales representatives and career site but has expanded its use of the solution to support its business strategy which will entail more interactive marketing to customers moving forward. The Radio Flyer website resides on Cloud Sites (from the Rackspace Cloud portfolio), a full-service cloud hosting platform which delivers automatic scaling to handle large usage spikes experienced by high traffic, fast growth websites. With a large presence in the United States and 22 countries internationally, the Radio Flyer site needs to properly scale—even during the busy summertime and holiday seasons.

“Key factors in our choice of Cloud Sites were the convenient and cost-effective pay-per-use model, load balancing, and high availability (HA) capabilities. As we migrated our corporate site, sales extranet and career site to The Rackspace Cloud, the ability of the service to support multiple platforms simultaneously was also a significant driver in our decision to move to Cloud Sites. We are able to run both our PHP and .net asp and Linux sites in parallel – eliminating the need for multiple servers,” said Cesario.

“In the coming months we are looking to integrate additional features to the Radio Flyer site that will potentially lead to significantly increased traffic,” he continued. “Incorporating The Rackspace Cloud into our business strategy gives us the assurance that the Radio Flyer site will not experience any downtime and that the other applications we incorporate into the site will be supported as well.”

“We are proud to support Radio Flyer, a household name, and a brand known for its high quality and hugely popular products. The Rackspace Cloud and Radio Flyer share two passions for our products: amazing reliability and a fun user experience,” said Emil Sayegh, General Manager, Mosso | The Rackspace Cloud. “With Rackspace, RadioFlyer.com is backed with our award-winning Fanatical Support®, and our 100% SLA guarantee for Cloud Sites allowing them to solely concentrate on their customers, and on the famous little red wagon.”

As we’ve watched our fellow techies swap stories over free lunch in Silicon Valley at Lunch 2.0, we got to thinking… why not here in the Great Lone Star State of Texas?  Lunch 2.0 is a grassroots effort to get smart folks together to chat about technology and what they are most passionate about. We’re proud to bring the first Lunch 2.0 event to our own backyard in Austin.

Of course, we have to do it Texas Style. You’re invited to mosey on down and grab some grub on us. Meet Racker execs including Emil Sayegh, General Manager of Mosso | The Rackspace Cloud, as well as other folks from cool companies in the Austin area.  We’ll have fajitas, friends and a lot of discussion about cloud technology at the Iron Cactus (note: the Northwest Austin location — not downtown) on Friday May 1 at High Noon.

The folks at SXSW Interactive are offering a free registration to the 2010 SXSWi for one lucky door-prize winning Luncher!  But you got to be in it to win it!

Space is limited so RSVP today at via email to Shanon Montelongo at shanon.montelongo@rackspace.com or register at: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2473239/

Thanks and see you there!