Podcasts, Videos, Webinars

Return on investment (ROI) in the cloud is more complex than IT leadership traditionally experienced. This is mainly due to the abstract nature of cloud services, the quantitative versus the qualitative benefits and the variety of the service delivery and deployment models.

What really drives tech entrepreneurs? What makes them tick? What drew the great disruptors to technology? Rackspace On Startups is a video series that explores insights from tech evangelists and founders – from Woz to Graham Weston.

When you host your app in the cloud, you want to make sure that the infrastructure that runs it is up and available. Cloud Monitoring is an easy way to monitor your servers to ensure they are performing properly. In particular, there are two methods of monitoring my app’s servers that I always set up: ping checks and HTTP checks.

As a developer who has worked both at a startup and for Rackspace, I know the importance of monitoring. The worst thing is finding out that your app is down from a tweet or email from your end user. In addition to the performance of the app, it is also helpful to know the cost that you are incurring. While the pay-as-you-go utility pricing of the cloud has enabled many entrepreneurs to get their app up and running, forgetting to spin down servers that you put online for a short burst of time can end up biting you. That is why it is important to monitor these three things: physical infrastructure, application health and spend.

In the latest installment of the Enterprise Cloud Forum Vice President of Rackspace IT Operations Rich Murr and I highlighted how IT organizations need to reorganize and retrain IT talent to be most effective in a cloud world. If you missed the live webinar, you can now view the presentation and download the mp3 recording.

Do you wonder which applications require customizable infrastructure – cloud versus dedicated?

Academic and scientific research often involves the construction of mathematical and numerical models to solve scientific and engineering problems. Traditionally, these complex and intensive computational models have been implemented on super computers or high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure.  These models are difficult to setup and operate, and can create a painful experience for researchers who often have to wait in a long line to use their university’s super computing infrastructure, whether it’s for a few hours or a few days.

A book in a week? Yes, a book in a week. It can be done! It’s called a book sprint, and it’s intense. As the documentation coordinator for OpenStack, I knew we’d find the right book to write with this technique. In February, it all came together thanks to generous funding from the OpenStack Foundation for $10,000 to fly the team into our Austin Rackspace location.

Organizations are struggling to hire talent with the cloud computing skills necessary for the new world of IT. We see it ourselves. In a recent survey of 1,300 companies, we found that more than half of the organizations we polled suffer from a shortage of cloud computing talent.

During SXSW Interactive 2013, Rackspace has been spreading the word on the open cloud to the masses. And among our team of open cloud evangelists is the Rackspace Open Cloud Community. You can find the community team at Champions Sports Bar & Restaurant throughout SXSW. They’re here signing people up to join the community, answering question on open and cloud and handing out some really sweet t-shirts.