As the cloud evolves, so to have ways to make the cloud work with resources that live outside of the cloud. This approach is called Hybrid Cloud. Our method for connecting cloud and dedicated resources is RackConnect®. With it, customers can run cloud resources and dedicated resources as if they were in the same environment. This would allow a cloud-fueled frontend to interact with databases on a dedicated backend. In the finance service example above, RackConnect could easily provide a seamless experience by connecting cloud and dedicated architectures to reap the benefits of cloud bursting and utility pricing while maintaining dedicated servers for security and compliance.

Hybrid Cloud is also a solution for those who aren’t ready to go all cloud yet. Though cloud is tried and tested in the business, there will always be those who prefer to work with existing technologies and legacy systems while still taking advantage of the cloud. RackConnect enables this by allowing an existing configuration to remain on dedicated servers while moving cloud-able pieces to the cloud.

If you’re considering a hybrid approach, here are five considerations laid out in the whitepaper “Nervous About Cloud? Go Hybrid Instead” to think about in planning:

1. How well do you understand your current application environment?
   Gather internal utilization reports that provide historical traffic and hardware performance statistics.
2. Do any regulatory or industry requirements need to be adhered to?
   Isolation is often required for compliance to standards such as PCI or HIPAA. They may also forbid the use of multi-tenant infrastructure.
3. Are all of the applications currently running certified or supported by their vendors to run in a virtualized environment?
   In some cases, software companies will not provide support if their application is installed on a virtualized platform.
4. Do you understand your current hardware environment?
   Server reports can be run to determine historical and average metrics such as processor, memory and disk utilization to understand the factors that cause spikes in CPU and memory use.
5. Has a budget been defined for this project?
   A hosting provider can work with you to help design a system that optimizes your investment while adhering to your technical and financial needs.

Read the entire whitepaper to understand more about Hybrid Cloud or engage us for a discussion about your needs and if Hybrid Cloud powered by RackConnect fits your unique use case.

Trey is a cloud evangelist with the Rackspace Startup Program. Check out the previous post in his SaaS series where Trey talked about how the cloud can improve the resource utilization of your SaaS app. Find out more about hosting your SaaS application at Rackspace.

That additional capacity hangs around all year sucking up power, floor space and maintenance time. During non-peak periods, these servers are likely sitting idle, but can potentially leave you vulnerable if peak demands were miscalculated or if there is a spike outside of your pre-determined peak. Until a few years ago, this was a nuisance that businesses just dealt with.

Cloud computing gives SaaS businesses the opportunity to provision resources as needed to close that resource gap. The elasticity of the cloud offers SaaS operators the flexibility to add resources to manage Black Friday, for example, and shrink back on Saturday. Unexpected spikes are also easier to manage with the ability to add cloud capacity in real time to handle the onslaught and roll it back when the spike subsides. With cloud-based SaaS architecture, the business is free to develop, test and deploy apps and releases without worrying about setting up or scaling servers to make it all run.

Planning for optimal resource utilization is an important element of SaaS planning. If poorly planned, user experience and response time can be degraded resulting in lost customers and damaged reputation. Our cloud experts can help you take the first steps toward moving to the cloud or help you explore a Hybrid Cloud approach that combines dedicated resources with cloud. Next week, we’ll talk more about the potential of hybrid cloud.

Trey is a cloud evangelist with the Rackspace Startup Program. Check out the previous post in his SaaS series where Trey talked about why SaaS startups begin their journey at Rackspace. In his next post, Trey discusses the benefits of a hybrid cloud for your SaaS app. Find out more about hosting your SaaS application at Rackspace.

I could give you dozen of reasons why Rackspace is the perfect incubator for your budding web app, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll run through the top five:

1. Instant Scale: Whether load testing or taking on a real unexpected traffic spike, you have access to massive infrastructure resources at your fingertips. And, unlike traditional hardware or dedicated resources, you have the flexibility of instantly tapping extra resources to carry you through a spike without being financially or physically stuck with unused hardware or a long-term commitment to capacity you no longer need.
2. CAPEX Savings: Keeping the balance sheet balanced is just as much of a priority as perfecting your code when you’re starting up. Making capital investments in architecture can put you in the hole before your first customer signs up. By converting that CAPEX investment into a fixed monthly expense, you’re likely to spend less time in the red paying off hardware and achieve profitability faster.
3. Startup Support: Our industry recognized Rackspace Startup Program has helped many SaaS operators, like YouGotListings, break into and claim their place in the SaaS market. Coupled with world-renowned Fanatical Support, startups get the help they need to get up and stay running.
4. Broad Portfolio: We’re built to serve entrepreneurs from their first server all the way up to the complex, multi-server configurations SaaS applications need to successfully compete in the market. Rackspace serves as a single provider solution for your entire infrastructure including compute, storage, databases, networks and more.
5. We’re Open: Running our cloud on OpenStack, the largest open cloud in production, gives you the advantage of web scale with the freedom to focus on coding your application without worrying about how or if you can move the application in the future.

For more reasons, give us a call to discuss the unique needs of your SaaS application and how our open cloud solutions can help you stay lean as you move from startup to started. I’ll be back next week to talk you about using cloud to gain maximum resource efficiency in your SaaS application.

Trey is a cloud evangelist with the Rackspace Startup Program. Check out the previous post in his SaaS series on scaling your SaaS app in the cloud. In his next post, Trey discusses how the cloud can improve the resource utilization of your SaaS app. Find out more about hosting your SaaS application at Rackspace.

How Cloud Scaling Works

When it’s time to scale vertically with physical or dedicated infrastructure you’ll have to deal with adding capacity to your existing servers. The process may include downtime and other infrastructure adjustments to access the additional resources. In the cloud, resources can be set to add automatically or you can instantly add capacity with a few clicks.

Similarly, the cloud alleviates the need to procure new hardware to accommodate horizontal scaling. In traditional environments, horizontal scale involves adding more servers to achieve more capacity. The time to receive the hardware and stand it up hinders agility and leaves you holding capacity you may only use occasionally. Horizontal scale in the cloud is as easy as a few clicks in the control panel to add more nodes – no hardware, no time to setup.

Three Benefits Of Cloud Scaling

1. More efficient use of resources because you’re not tied to hardware that you’re not actively utilizing.
2. Open API and control panel management allows you to set your parameters and let it run without babysitting servers.
3. Powered by OpenStack so you can move your application to another cloud or to your onsite data center without rebuilding your application code.

Over time, a complex SaaS environment will include a combination of these scaling techniques. Talk to our team of cloud experts for help in figuring out the best options for your workloads. Next week, we’ll talk about how SaaS startups use the cloud to stay lean.

Trey is a cloud evangelist with the Rackspace Startup Program. Check out the previous post in his SaaS series about cloud enhancements that your SaaS app can use today. In his next post, Trey will talk about why SaaS startups begin their journey at Rackspace. Find out more about hosting your SaaS application at Rackspace.

The cloud may not be right for your entire SaaS infrastructure; compliance and security issues will dictate which pieces can go cloud and which need dedicated hardware.

For a few quick cloud enhancements to your infrastructure, consider these areas where cloud-based services can help enhance your current SaaS environment:

Cloud Load Balancers: Your web layer and application layer need the ability to serve multiple users simultaneously. Once upon a time, load balancing required physical hardware and the expense and maintenance that come along with hardware ownership. Not anymore. Cloud Load Balancers let you balance traffic across resources to maintain user experience and functionality without additional hardware. You can balance servers on your Rackspace account or use it to balance servers in your data center.

Cloud Databases: SaaS apps rely heavily on their underlying databases to manage user accounts, product display, content and more. Scaling databases to hold and communicate the volumes of data and data relationships needed to manage your application in a general cloud environment can quickly get out of hand. Cloud Databases are built to take advantage of the cloud while accommodating the special needs of databases. You can reallocate the time needed to maintain, backup and secure the underlying hardware for your databases so you can focus on the data, not the server.

Open architecture: A common concern among SaaS operators considering the cloud is the fear of coding that perfect app on architecture that locks you in. With many cloud providers, that’s the case: moving your app to another vendor or moving it into your private data center means undertaking the daunting task of recoding critical pieces of your application. To eliminate that headache, Rackspace cloud products are built on open standards powered by OpenStack. That means you can move your app to any other OpenStack-compatible provider, even your onsite data center, without worrying about losing functionality.

These are just a few general ways to infuse the cloud into your SaaS application. Based on the unique needs of your app, there may be even more ways to take advantage of the cloud to reduce your hardware outlay and get more out of your application infrastructure.

Trey is a cloud evangelist with the Rackspace Startup Program. Check out his previous post on bash prompts and his next post on scaling your SaaS app in the cloud. Find out more about hosting your SaaS application at Rackspace.

This Tech Corner explores the productivity improvements for server management that can be found by organizing your Bash prompts.

I find that it’s very easy to have several terminal windows open when working on multiple servers. However, I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve executed a command on the wrong server because of this. The chance of running a command in the wrong window is something that can be reduced by customizing Bash prompts for easy labeling.

For Bash, this is dictated by what variables are assigned to PS1. Take a quick look at this current Bash prompt and we’ll dissect it. To do this, we’ll need to echo $PS1 (which stands for primary prompt string) to see what variables are assigned:

[root@testtaketwo etc]#  echo $SP1
[\u@\h \W]\$

It looks a little confusing but it’s actually pretty straightforward:

• The ‘\u’ is for user or in this case root
• The ‘@’ is just rendered text in the prompt
• The ‘\h’ is the host or in this case ‘testtaketwo’
• The ‘\W’ is for the working directory
• The ‘\$’ will give you a $ if you’re root, so use this if you want to differentiate your users
• A ‘#’ is for any other user
• And finally the ‘[]‘ encloses it

Here it is spaced out to match its output in the prompt:

[root@testtaketwo etc]#
[\u   @\h                   \W   ]\$

So let’s add a little more functionality by editing the .bashrc file found in your user’s home directory. We’ll add the time (in 12-hour format) and date, as well as clean up the formatting a bit.

Add this to the bottom of ~/.bashrc in your favorite txt editor and save it:

PS1="[\u@\h:\W, \@, \d]\$"source .bashrc

And voila! We’ve added the time and date to our prompt and adjusted the formatting:

[trey@testtaketwo:~, 06:57 PM, Wed May 09]$

This can be taken a bit further by adding some color-coding to the prompts. This will let us quickly differentiate between boxes in our environment. For this example we’ll add a Prod tag before the hostname and make it red:

PS1="[\u@\e[1;31mPROD:\h\e[m:\W, \@, \d]\$ "

The addition of the color makes this look a lot more complicated than it really is, but if you break it down:

This starts the color scheme:

\e[0m

This ends it:

\e[m

So the red color from the example is defined as:

\e[1:31m \e[m

With whatever you colored in between, notice the 1 in 1:31m, you can use that to toggle the brightness of the color so 0:31m will give you a darker red.

With prompt organization you can go on to create separate Bash prompts for your production and dev environments, making them easily distinguishable by color when you’re navigating between different terminal windows.

So this is great, but every time we add a new user we have to go in and edit their .bashrc file that lives in their home directory. Well, never fear! We can make this auto-magically go into effect for new users too. The /etc/skel contains files and directories that are copied over to a new user’s home directory when created via useradd, so if we edit the .bashrc file located here any new users will be created with the custom Bash prompt.

The Monument-National, the oldest theatre still in use in Quebec, was the venue for FounderFuel’s Spring 2012 Cohort Demo Day, and the atmosphere inside the theater was as charged as that outside. The 800-plus seats were filled with entrepreneurs, investors and venture capitalists from all over North America. Attendees networked with one another and discussed technology and trends against the theater’s backdrop of red velvet seats and 19^th century vintage wood work.

“For the entrepreneurs in the room, a quick lesson on the key things you need to do as a startup,” says John Stokes, a partner with Real Ventures and a FounderFuel mentor, as he walks out on stage. “Always have a t-shirt with your logo on it,” as he gestures to his FounderFuel t-shirt, “and don’t wash it till you succeed. If you’re in Silicon Valley build something people want, if you’re in Boston or New York, do more faster. We’re not in those places. We’re in Montreal, and Montreal is the home of creativity. So do something magical.” Stokes pauses for the audience as they applaud and cheer. “Before you show them the magic, you capture their imagination by telling them a story, and pulling people into your business, your vision, and your dream.”

The advice from Stokes above echoed with everyone in attendance, especially the members of the Spring 2012 Cohort. Teams wait nervously in the wings for their chance to pull the assembled crowd into their dreams, giving them a shot at securing funding and taking their business to the next level. Entering stage left, FounderFuel’s General Manager Ian Jeffrey now takes the stage. He has worked and mentored each of the 11 startups in the Spring 2012 FounderFuel Cohort over the course of the program’s 12 weeks, and he has the pleasure of presenting them to the audience.

Here is the Spring 2012 FounderFuel Cohort:

Appifier | Captivating applications that bring visibility, discoverability and monetization to web publishers.

Centerside | Adaptive web presences for the connected generation.

Epilogger | An entire event in one app! Consume, create, and share social content before, during, and after an event. Epilogger was the winner of the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX). The team will head to Silicon Valley for three months to continue development.

Healthaware | The online destination that takes the pain out of booking health appointments.

Live Rides | A community marketplace for rides that turns long drives into great social experiences.

Notesolution | Crowd-sourced course resources for university prep and exam season survival!

ooomf | The engagement platform that allows app developers to “socialize apps” which turns their followers into users, and fans into advocates.

PayPhoneAPP |Everything you need in one easy to use app on your smartphone that lets you use your money whenever and however you want.

Prestopolis |Real-time marketing solutions for local retailers.

ShopAround | Browse the malls before you leave home on your iPhone or iPad and discover your next favorite purchase from the comfort of your home.

TenScores | The automated platform that simplifies and optimizes Google Adwords spend, even for the smallest of users.

After the final presentations, the crowd filters out of the Monument-National Theatre while potential investors move to private areas to speak with the Cohort members one on one to learn more. For the Cohort presenters, there is hope that they have pulled the investors into their dream, captured their imagination and, most importantly, that they have secured funding to continue their pursuit of building a viable online business.

Later that night, we were privileged to attend the FounderFuel closing dinner with the entire Cohort to celebrate the end of the Spring 2012 class. Everyone was discussing the events of the day and plans for the future while sharing stories and experiences from the past 12 weeks. They talked about their excitement coming into the program, not knowing what to expect. They lamented over their “hell week” experiences and shared how they’d emerged on the ”other side” with a clear direction. Over the past 12 weeks, a true sense of community has developed among the group. Their interactions and easy laughs speak volumes as they mingle for what is probably the last time they will do so in one place.

It’s clear after listening to the shared stories and experiences that FounderFuel is doing something special, not just in Montreal, but within the startup community. Under Ian Jeffrey’s direction, FounderFuel is creating something magical and inspiring. Take a look at what the spring 2012 Cohort had to say. If your startup would like to experience everything that an accelerator has to offer, FounderFuel is currently taking applications for its Fall 2012 Cohort.

The Rackspace Startup Program is proud to be involved with the FounderFuel accelerator program. Congratulations to the Spring 2012 FounderFuel Cohort! These companies are now ready to introduce their businesses to the world. And the Rackspace Startup Program was there to help the FounderFuel companies build their businesses on a world-class Cloud Computing platform. Drop the Space Cowboys a note and let us know how we can help your startup facilitate the dream in creating the next big thing online!

Check out more news, articles and Startup Spotlight features from the Rackspace Startup Program.