There’s no question that technology is key to accelerating market growth in the cloud industry. If you want to increase consumer spend and game-changing innovation, you’ll need to adopt different thought processes that will help technology drive your business to its greatest potential.

One of those strategies is by forging new and collaborative relationships with users. As the consumer base for cloud services grows, more and more CIOs are rethinking IT architecture and controls to help ease the pressure of making tough IT decisions for even the most non-technical users.

Executives are also reexamining how their organizations work best together and how to prioritize initiatives that will provide the strongest competitive advantage for the business.

Recently, a team of Rackspace experts explained how they overcame challenges to drive new, innovative initiatives for Rackspace. Speakers included Rackspace CIO Steve Mills, Rackspace CMO Suaad Sait, Rackspace CFO Karl Pichler and Rackspace Vice President of Enterprise Cloud Lisa Larson. In case you missed it, you can check out the full webinar here:.

Be sure to tune into other upcoming webinars where we’ll discuss topics including resiliency, Hybrid Cloud and Cloud Block Storage.

He holds an MBA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His professional career spans as District Manager with ASAP Software and a Partner Development Manager at Sun Microsystems.  He founded a growing online business from scratch, Fat Tone Guitars, a multi-channel marketer of electric guitars, amps and effects pedals for musicians.

An entrepreneur, brand developer and channel management professional, Phil Vickman took the time to talk to the Rackspace Startup Program about what’s involved in architecting, developing and deploying sites for startups. What follows are Phil’s thoughts on being a Drupal web application and website development company and its partnership with Rackspace.

How do startups benefit from the Promet Source expertise?
Startups benefit from working with Promet via fast deployment of web applications and complete 24×7 application support. Promet utilizes the Agile Development approach, which allows startups to quickly prioritize features and functionality prior to deployment.

What business wins has Promet Source achieved?
Promet has developed and deployed the C2ES Geaux Green, Third Party Trust and the Grinnell College websites on the Rackspace Cloud. The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) is a non-profit organization working together for the environment and the economy; Third Party Trust is a Chicago based B2B site that is a social site for corporate security professionals, focused on streamlining the security governance and risk management processes between enterprise organizations and their service providers; and Grinnell College is a private, coed, liberal arts college founded in 1846 in Grinnell, Iowa.

How does Promet Source help grow startups?
We provide fast, flexible and affordable development options for our startup clients. By partnering with Rackspace, we offer the best option for rapid development, secure and flexible management and operations, along with the easiest and most comprehensive scalability options.

With Third Party Trust, and with Grinnell, Promet and the client jointly created their workflow. Promet worked with the client to help them identify their Minimum Viable Product (MVP) on launch; and their future releases. We were able to help them prioritize their budget, to get the most out of each product release.

What best practices does Promet Source incorporate into your customers’ sites?
Promet utilizes numerous Drupal CMS deployment best practices. We must engage in both short and long term site planning with our customers. Promet must understand the customers’ content types and end user characteristics in order to plan a responsive web design solution for the startup. With Third Party Trust, Promet, along with the client, incorporates best practices of separate development, staging and production environments, and code review and use of GIT.

How has a partnership with Rackspace benefitted both Promet Source and the startups you work with?
Our partnership with Rackspace gives Promet the ability to offer [an amazing] hosting platform to our customers. We can provide best of breed solutions for the full array of needs facing a startup: speed of development, ease and flexibility in feature rollout, secure and automated management, scalable, pay for what you need hosting and support for the entire stack.

What straight up business advice would give to a startup?
Think about your startup’s growth prospects, business capabilities, end users, content type and budget to build a site before architecting, developing and deploying a scalable site for your business.

The Rackspace Startup Program thanks our favorite Drupalganger, Phil Vickman, for taking the time out of his busy schedule to enlighten us on how Promet Source is a Drupal web application and website development company that offers expert services and support for startup sites deployed on the Rackspace Cloud. For more insight on hosting your startup on the Rackspace Cloud platform backed by Fanatical Support™, contact the Space Cowboys today.

We encourage you to read the PAR Act – we have linked it at the bottom of the page. For everyone out there who is not a lawyer, though, we want to take a minute to explain what this bill means and why it is so important:

• Patent trolls are notorious for hiding their claims behind flimsy lawsuit pleadings. The current standards for making an accusation of patent infringement do not require plaintiffs to explain what they allege to be infringing or how the defendant infringes. This lack of clarity forces anyone accused of patent infringement into an endless (and expensive) guessing game. Section 281A of the Patent Abuse Reduction Act forces patent assertion entities (PAEs) to spell out their claims and be specific about their complaints. These specifics include how the patent is being abused; the names, model numbers and other information of the products or services alleged to infringe the claim and where the infringement occurs; and a host of other factors most patent trolls can currently omit from their suits.
• Patent trolls usually hide their actual owners behind shell companies. These patent trolls don’t want publicity because they don’t want to be known for who and what they are. Section 281A of the bill removes the anonymity of patent trolls and forces them out of hiding, by requiring them to identify not only themselves, but any other businesses or individuals who are co-owners, assignees, licensees or have a legal right to enforce the patents in question, along with exposing any person or business with a financial interest in the patent infringement case.
• Another common tactic of patent trolls is to find a first patent, sue people on that patent with a first shell company, and settle… only to find and sue the same people again on a second patent with a second shell company. This bill makes it possible to expose the money machine behind patent trolls, and to make them come to the table and take part in the case.
• One of the most expensive parts of a patent lawsuit is something called “discovery” – where companies are forced to organize and hand over mountains of internal documentation to the patent trolls so that they can introduce “evidence” of patent infringement. Trolls use discovery to drive up the cost of the lawsuit, making it cheaper to settle, and to fish for more ways in which they can apply their claims. Section 300 of the PAR Act adds fairness to the discovery process by limiting discovery until after the meaning of the patent (called “claim construction”) has occurred, and shifting much of the cost of unreasonable discovery back to the patent troll.
• Finally, section 285 institutes a “loser pays” rule for unreasonable litigation. This is the ultimate tool for balancing litigation, freeing businesses and individuals from having to shoulder the massive financial burden of fighting a frivolous patent infringement claim.

The Patent Abuse Reduction Act beams necessary sunlight onto these all-too-frequent proceedings and is a major step toward fixing the problem of patent abuse. It has a fitting acronym – the “PAR” Act – because it helps put companies “at par” and on an even playing field with those who would abuse the system.

At Rackspace, we’ve been on the front line of the problem; patent trolls have become our most pressing legal issue. We have seen a 500 percent spike since 2010 in our legal spend combating patent trolls. And we’re not alone. We hear almost daily about companies and developers that have been impacted by patent infringement suits filed for no other reason than to extort money.

We’ve stood up and fought back. Just recently we fought a troll in court, and won; we turned the tables on another, suing them in Federal Court; and we filed a challenge with the patent office against a third.

An army is now forming to fight patent trolls, and, if passed, Sen. Cornyn’s Patent Abuse Reduction Act of 2013 will be a very powerful weapon with which to battle them.

Read the full Patent Abuse Reduction Act of 2013 here.

As someone who has taken an enterprise to the cloud globally, I understand just how much of an impact the cloud can have on a business. I have been a vocal supporter in the belief that the cloud can open all sorts of possibilities. It’s not just about cost mitigation and scalability.

Businesses looking to learn more about what cloud computing can offer are faced with a plethora of suppliers purporting to have cloud services. Many of the potentially transformational benefits can be lost in the confusion of conflicting ideas, and these businesses sometimes gain a false sense that the cloud sounds like stuff they have heard before.

The truth is that real cloud is a service that’s hard to fake. The key is that the products, services and technologies offered by a vendor enable an enterprise to focus on its business imperatives without having to worry about the infrastructure. It is always a tough question: does a company invest in expensive infrastructure just in case it becomes successful beyond expectations? Does it allow a huge opportunity to slip through its fingers simply because of a conservative approach to investing in infrastructure? Both are risks that all businesses have to traditionally face.

These risks become real concerns when businesses do not use the cloud. Cloud approaches mean that businesses can effectively forge ahead knowing that the infrastructure will cater to their usage needs. Imagine starting a fishing business and not having to worry about how big a boat and net you should buy. Instead, you can rely on being able to start with modest equipment and elastically expand the ship and net at sea if you happen to come across a huge school of fish.

The freedom from encumbrance that results from this elasticity has the potential to change the way businesses approach their strategic planning, innovation and related areas of risk management and process streamlining. More agile methodologies ensue that facilitate experimentation and allow changes to happen organically, leading inevitably to a focus on the business goals rather than the potential impediments such as not having enough infrastructure.

Cloud facilitates this change in thinking, but it has failed to overcome the concerns around privacy, security and data sovereignty. Despite all the advocates who have effectively said that the benefits outweigh the risks, the fact remains that some businesses stand to lose more than they can gain if their data is exposed. In some cases there are legislative impediments, PCI compliance, health records, national sovereignty rules to name a few, that render the potential gains seemingly academic. Further concerns around the high dependency on single cloud providers have further limited the uptake.

But Rackspace has largely addressed these concerns by open-sourcing the cloud. By working with NASA, Rackspace has given birth to what is now among the fastest growing open source projects in history – OpenStack. The OpenStack Foundation now has more than 8,600 contributing developers and has been adopted by more than 100 companies, including IBM, Dell, HP, NTT, Red Hat and Canonical. Rackspace has very publicly gone “all-in” on OpenStack and is one of the largest contributors to the code base. Rackspace’s approach is that Fanatical Support will be the key differentiator that enables the company to excel.

As a result of OpenStack, businesses have the freedom to build on the hybrid cloud, an infrastructure platform that uses a combination of public multi-tenanted cloud infrastructure, dedicated servers and private cloud facilities that are on their own premises if necessary. The technical barriers between each of these topologies are being eliminated, making for one platform that truly allows businesses to have freedom from worrying about their infrastructure as they focus on driving their business forward.

The freedom to choose a mixture of topologies, suppliers and service levels really allows businesses to focus on what they do, not how they do it. Adding Fanatical Support to that freedom allows cloud computing to fully realize its potential. And that excites me.

—-

Oh, and for those who want to understand more about my role at Rackspace, I have come on board as the Director of Technology and Product – Asia Pacific. My functions include promoting how cloud computing concepts can help businesses achieve their goals, expounding on the concepts of the open cloud, as well as helping ensure new Rackspace products and services are ready for the market in the Asia Pacific region.

I welcome the opportunity to talk about my journey to the cloud and how thinking cloud and related topics such as Big Data, the Internet of Things and social media can change our approach to business.

Cool, huh? Let’s dig a little deeper into what this means for you, and answer some questions you may have:

Wait, what!? I don’t even know what Mailgun is. What is it?
Oh, let’s back up then. Mailgun is a set of APIs to send, receive and track emails. All apps and websites use email in some way; whether for welcome emails, shipping confirmations or marketing. And we all get them. Mailgun lets developers integrate email deeply into their applications without having to worry about managing email servers themselves. Mailgun also automatically manages the email delivery process, dramatically increasing the chances that your email pops up in the recipient’s inbox. Mailgun has grown rapidly since we acquired it, and it now sends more than 350 million emails a month!

Do other Rackspace customers already use Mailgun?
A number of you have already built Mailgun email into your apps. Integration is often as easy changing a single line of code and – PRESTO! – headaches around managing email vanish. But don’t take it from me; listen to one of our customers. At the beginning of the year, DealTicker, a Rackspace customer that operates one of Canada’s largest performance marketing sites, had been looking to improve its ability to scale email sending. DealTicker moved to Mailgun and now delivers in excess of 30 million emails per month. Here’s what DealTicker President Daniel Abramov had to say:

“As a customer of Rackspace, we have gotten used to unparalleled service experience, and dealing with Mailgun was no different. The flawless execution and service delivery is due to the dedication, support and hard work that the entire Mailgun team has demonstrated to DealTicker throughout our migration and integration process. We have transitioned from one of the largest full-service email marketing firms over to Mailgun and have seen unsurpassed inbox deliverability and service excellence.”

Do I have to send tens of millions of emails to use Mailgun?
Heck no! Not all Mailgun customers send as many emails as DealTicker, but that doesn’t make the emails they send any less important to their businesses. Mailgun helps developers of all kinds of apps deliver mail to the inbox – PagerDuty is one example. PagerDuty is an app that alerts on-call engineers when there is a problem with their app (if you use Rackspace Cloud Monitoring, you SHOULD also use PagerDuty for alerts, it’s awesome). Here’s what PagerDuty CEO and Co-Founder Alex Solomon had to say:

“We rely on email to notify our customers when their mission-critical applications are down. Reliable, on-time delivery was the biggest requirement for us when choosing an email provider, and we couldn’t be happier with Mailgun. Their team is there when we need them, and emails are always delivered quickly.”

Thanks Alex. We’ll buy you a beer next time you’re in San Antonio.

I won’t take any more of your time. Now that Mailgun is integrated into the Cloud Control Panel, you can use it now. Go for it. It’s fun and it’s easy. Happy emailing!

If you have any questions about Mailgun, just ask your Rackspace account team or start a live chat on the Mailgun website.

Features: What Does Your Email Need to Do?
A high-level assessment of the features you need in email may reveal expertise or technology gaps that require heavy capital investments to remedy. If you’re already deployed on-premises, consider the little annoyances that users complain about and if it makes sense to address them with valuable in-house time and resources or to offload to an email provider. For example, if users are clamoring for instant push for mobile, do you really want to spend the budget and time to stand up advanced mobile accessibility on-premise, or does it make more sense to seek out a provider to fill the need?

Value: How Much are You Really Paying For It?
With non-revenue generating apps like email, businesses sink money in, but don’t gain a competitive advantage from having email that works. However, they risk their reputation and security when email doesn’t work. Deciding whether to shoulder the burden of on-premise email or to choose the freedom of cloud hosted email can be a cost-driven decision.  Tapped out infrastructure resources or a shortage of expertise for an upgrade make the cost and time savings of cloud even more attractive. But cost isn’t the only measure of value.

Most businesses are unaware of the total costs of email-specific IT assets and associated expenses. A security patch that only accounted for an hour of labor to perform, if done incorrectly, could open you up to a breach that costs thousands. The power and cooling that go into running a mail server along with the software, labor, floor space and responsibility involved usually outweigh the value of running it on-premises.

Support: How Much Do You Need?
If there’s an email server outage on-premise, can you afford to lose time troubleshooting or waiting for a consultant to arrive? Cloud email options can turn panicked troubleshooting into a quick phone call to the provider that handles it for you. Of course, that assumes you’ve picked a responsive provider. Not all providers approach support the same way. Some lure customers in with cheap prices only to find out that when there’s an issue, there’s no one to call after hours or that the only support available is volumes of online documentation. Determining the level of support you need based on how much in-house expertise exists and the level of control you need impacts the type of providers you’ll look for down the line.

For the five most important questions to ask and TCO comparisons, check out our Business Email 101 Guide or for a quick high-level evaluation, take the In-house vs Hosted interactive quiz.

The idea of wanting to control the conversation in marketing goes way back. In real-life 1968—the year of Peggy’s pitch—H. J. Heinz poured $21 million into marketing so it could have the biggest voice in the room.[1]

In the age of “always on” marketing, the conversation sounds very different than it did half a century ago. For one thing, it’s louder and more boisterous than ever before. It includes millions, even billions, of voices.

So where does the cloud fit into all this?

Massive, affordable scalability stands behind the daily deluge—2 billion tweets, 133 million hours of watched YouTube videos, 10 million hours of streamed Pandora…

That’s probably not the conversation Peggy had in mind in 1968. But how could her savvy, 2013 alter ego—also called Peggy—use the cloud to sell more ketchup?

Selling Ketchup as a “Multichannel Digital Experience”
2013-Peggy has a different outlook (and hairstyle) than her 1968 doppelganger.

Her guiding campaign principles:

• Create a brand experience that’s intimate, immediate and informed
• Make the conversation seamless and unified across multiple devices, channels and platforms
• Consumers don’t care if they’re on the cloud, or off, consuming software-as-a-service or ketchup-as-a-condiment
• Power the campaign with technology that’s smart, affordable, scalable and flexible.

Peggy’s pitch to the rest of her team:
Always Think Super Bowl
(Microsites that scale with demand)
No marketing campaign aims for mediocre results. Marketers need landing pages and microsites that keep up with traffic, even during a Super Bowl ad. Cloud platforms scale dynamically to serve big spikes in customer traffic.

Give the Ketchup Fans the Microphone
(Full support for social media and rich media content)
Because Peggy wants customers to speak their minds, post their videos and re-tweet each other’s 140-character haikus about ketchup, she needs a cloud platform that’s integrated with social media and has massive storage capability. Some of that customer love can live on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but some of it should live on the website. “The cloud allows us to offload media delivery using blazing speeds on a global CDN.” She gets some blank stares. “For you civilians, that’s Content Delivery Network…”

Keep the Ketchup Next to the Virtual Register
(Secure, dependable online commerce)
Every campaign is about generating revenue from sales. Peggy doesn’t want to build an ecommerce platform from scratch. She wants to find a trusted cloud provider who can give her a world-class ecommerce platform—and the apps to go with it—to manage everything from checkout to shipping. “And guess what?” she says, smiling. “We’re going to ship ketchup and bright red merchandise straight from the warehouse.”

We’re in the Experience Business, Not the Computer Business
(Full support for web-based applications, content management tools and analytics)
Peggy’s deal closer: “On the backend, we want outside agencies and freelancers and the rest of us to seamlessly share content and ideas. We want all the applications we use—from customer relationship to online surveys to digital asset management—to live on someone else’s network and be securely and dynamically available on the web. We want to run lean and measure everything we do, in real time, using analytics that help us make smarter decisions. Oh, and we want to pay only for what we use and leave the maintenance, security and performance to the cloud fairies who live on someone else’s payroll.”

The room goes silent.

“By the way, did I mention the IT budget has been cut again? Yeah, so I guess we’re buying the tacos from now on.”

[1] According to Ad Age’s ranking of top spenders for 1968.

Drifty was part of this spring’s TechStars 2013 class out of Geekdom right here in San Antonio. This week we’ll highlight not one, but two awesome apps by Drifty as part of our Must Have App series. I recently sat down with founders Ben Sperry and Max Lynch to learn more about Drifty and the cloud technology behind the apps.

Clean, Functional Websites And Apps

The first app, called Codiqa, is a drag-and-drop interface-building tool for creating mobile websites and apps with jQuery Mobile. Codiqa exports production-ready HTML5 of whatever a user creates, saving them the time and effort it normally takes to do it by hand, and allowing them to skip the wireframing step altogether.

Jetstrap, the second app by Drifty, is similar, but focuses on empowering users to create responsive desktop websites with the popular HTML5 framework, Twitter Bootstrap. After drag-and-dropping a Bootstrap design, users can also export clean HTML5 of anything they build.

Codiqa and Jetstrap are the tools you’ve been coveting for quick, easy to create mobile sites and apps in the cloud.

The Cloud Behind The App

Both tools are essentially powerful Javascript/HTML/CSS applications that interact with servers through a REST API. Drifty developed the client-side and the backend separately, which makes it easy to plug the technology into different environments (such as a desktop app, for example). On the backend the apps use Python and CoffeeScript in the browser.

Friends Become Entrepreneurs

Max and Ben began working on the idea for Codiqa back in the summer of 2011. At the time, both were still working full-time jobs, like many new entrepreneurs, and spending afternoons and nights building the beta version of the tool. They created a landing page to capture leads and contact info to see if there was a need for these tools. “As it turned out, there were a lot of people interested in what we were building, and by the time we launched our private beta in January 2012, we had over 1,000 people signed up,” according to Sperry.

Codiqa (click to enlarge):

Sperry commented that early adopters offered an immense amount of feedback and support during the private beta. The two hustled to fix a long list of bugs, and to add some much needed features before releasing the product for everyone. In February 2012, Codiqa launched publicly, and gained over 10,000 users in the first month when jQuery Mobile spotlighted a free version of the tool on its homepage.

Since then, the two have grown the user-base and profits to the point where they no longer needed full-time jobs, and in August 2012 they became full on entrepreneurs with the launch of their second cloud product, Jetstrap.

Jetstrap (click to enlarge):

Web Development Made Easy

A person looking to build a mobile app or website can sign up for one of the tools and start building an idea with the easy drag-and-drop interface. Both apps come with the standard mobile and desktop component features, such as buttons, navbars, checkboxes, etc., which can be added and reordered with ease. When a user has a design built the way they want it, they can simply export the clean, standards compliant HTML5 file that’s ready to go live. Drifty’s products also have a live HTML/CSS/JS editor for people who wish to customize their apps even further within the tool.

“We’ve built innovative drag-and-drop tech and real-time HTML editing that updates your interface as you type, making it easy to pick your desired level of control: drag-and-drop for fast layouts, and HTML editing for small details,” said Sperry.

The next time you need to mock up a site or develop a mobile app, Drifty tools will help you take your vision to reality; Drifty works to make web development easy with Codiqa and Jetstrap.

Check back each week as we highlight a new Must Have App. If you missed last week, take a look at our previous Must Have App: drchrono.

If you’re a startup running on Rackspace and would like to be part of this series, let us know and we’ll set up a time to talk and learn more about your awesome app.

If you don’t have the answers to these questions, then mark your calendars.

Over the next few weeks, we’re bringing you a series of free webinars to help you drive innovation and improve your business’ cloud strategy. Join us in lively and engaged discussions with our best from Rackspace and your peers in the industry, including Rackspace CIO Steve Mills and Rackspace CFO Karl Pichler.

Here’s a schedule of what’s to come:

Tuesday, May 21, 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. CST
C-Suite Disruption: Reinventing the Executive Ranks in a Cloud World     
Speakers: Rackspace CMO Suaad Sait, Rackspace CIO Steve Mills, Rackspace CFO Karl Pichler and Rackspace Vice President of Enterprise Cloud Solutions Lisa Larson

Wednesday, May 22, 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. CST
Be Resilient and Ready with Rackspace
Speaker: Rackspace Enterprise Cloud Strategist Paul Croteau

Tuesday, June 4, 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. CST
Building Bridges with Hybrid Cloud
Speaker: Rackspace Cloud Strategist Wayne Walls

Wednesday, June 5, 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. CST
Understanding Cloud Block Storage: Performance, Options and Use Cases
Speaker: Rackspace Product Director J. R. Arredondo

Register now, because spots fill up quickly. We hope to see you there.

The new features include:

API-Only:

• Container Quotas
• TempURL File Name Overrides
• Bulk Operations (Delete & Auto-Expand Archive)
• Static Large Object support

Now in Control Panel:

• Multiple File Upload
• Editing Headers

All of these features are now available in both the U.S. and U.K. regions.

To avoid the risk of getting into TL;DR territory; let’s take a high-level look at how each new feature works. I’ll follow-up with subsequent posts in coming weeks that dig deeper into how each new feature works along with specific API details.

Here’s what’s new:

Container Quotas

You can now set simple quotas on your containers by setting the X-Container-Meta-Quota-Bytes and X-Container-Meta-Quota-Count headers in your container metadata. This can be useful for administrators who want to put limits on containers used by non-admin users (users who cannot modify container metadata). The X-Container-Meta-Quota-Bytes header is used to limit the maximum size of a container, in bytes. The X-Container-Meta-Quota-Count header is used to set the maximum object count of the container.

TempURL File Name Overrides

With the new TempURL File Name Override feature, you can specify a “filename” query parameter to override a TempURL’s Content-Disposition header in order to instruct their browser to save a TempURL file with a specific name. This is done by appending &filename=my_file_name to the end of a TempURL.

Bulk Operations (Delete and Archive Auto Extraction)

Two new bulk operations are now available: delete and archive auto extractions. You can upload and auto-extract tar archives upon PUT request to your Cloud Files account. This is done using the query parameter ?extract-archive=format specifying the format of archive file. Accepted formats are tar, tar.gz, and tar.bz2. Root directories in the archive will be converted to containers if uploaded at the account level, or mapped to pseudo-directory names if uploaded into existing containers.

Static Large Object Support (SLO)

Static Large Object Support (SLO) is very similar to Dynamic Large Object (DLO) support in that it allows you to upload many objects concurrently and download them afterwards as a single object. It is different than DLO in that it does not rely on eventually consistent container listings to do so. Instead, a user-defined manifest of the object segments is used to help guarantee that every segment in the manifest exists and has matched the specifications. If everything does match, you will receive a 2xx response and the SLO object is ready for downloading. This can improve consistency when uploading multiple segments concurrently and subsequently downloading the resulting large object a short time after.

Multiple File Upload

You can now use the Control Panel to select and upload multiple files through one Upload Files operation.

From your container, select the Upload Files operation and the click the Choose Files button.

Select the multiple files you want to upload to your container.

After you have selected them for upload, notice that the number of files selected is shown next to the Choose Files button. Now select the Upload File button.

At this point your files will be uploaded into your Cloud Files account. Once the operation has completed, the Control Panel will show the updated contents of your container.

Editing Object Headers

You can now also use the Control Panel to modify some of the most common HTTP object headers including:

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

To edit object headers, go to the cogwheel next to your object and select Edit Headers from the drop down.

Select the header you wish to set along with its value and click the plus sign to add:

You will see any custom headers that have been set when you select the View File Info dropdown from your object’s cogwheel. Reselecting Edit Headers from the cogwheel drop down will allow you to set any additional headers or modify existing ones that you had previously configured.

For additional information on setting object headers or details on any other Cloud Files features, please refer to the Cloud Files API Developer guide.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts with details on how to access these new features through the API with command-line examples using cURL.

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

Be sure to subscribe to our product and development blog for future product updates and announcements.

For a deeper look at some of these features, head over to the Rackspace DevOps Blog.