Tips for Devs and Sys Admins

You can now use Mailgun, the email automation engine we acquired in August, directly within the Cloud Control Panel. That’s right. It’s no fuss, no muss. There’s no separate account to sign up for or manage, and all Rackspace Cloud customers receive 50,000 emails per month absolutely free. If you want to send more than that, just add your credit card in the Mailgun control panel and start sending – it’s simple. And if you have questions about Mailgun, contact your regular Rackspace support team. If we can’t help you, we’ll escalate to the Mailgun team for you, so you don’t have to worry about keeping track of two different support teams.

We all wish we could be rock star web designers and developers, but there just isn’t enough time in the day. Wireframing is time-consuming and so is learning HTML5. Instead, you can call on Drifty, a new software studio based out of Madison, Wis. that makes easy-to-use cloud-based tools for developing mobile apps and websites using web technologies. The two apps, Codiqa and Jetstrap, are helping more than 150,000 users combined create apps and sites faster and more efficiently.

If your mobile app ever gets a featured spot in an app store, Oprah endorses your product or you make an appearance on ABC’s Shark Tank, you are going to experience mind-blowing traffic to your site. Rackspace knows how to keep your app or site online when experiencing a high traffic event. Our customer gdgt knows this first hand as their site has been one of the few to remain accessible while live blogging important Apple announcements amid crushing traffic.

The hackathon we co-hosted with Sauce Labs last week to dive into Appium, the open source tool for mobile automation, was a brilliant success. Thank you to all who came out! We had such a great time that we plan to hold another hackathon soon.

I spoke several times recently mostly promoting Google Glass (so much so that a few people are wondering if Google is paying me, I assure you I bought my own Google Glass for $1,500 and Google isn’t paying me).

Roughly 30 Rackers attended DevOpsDays Austin last week (April 30 and May 1), an event that has become the conference that brings development and operations together. This year’s was the largest yet with almost 400 attendees – it was twice the size of last year. The energy there was contagious, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.

One of the largest development communities on earth has started to move its bare metal mentality into the world of virtualization, and the stakes have never been higher. To support this massive technology shift, Rackspace has built tools that help developers bring web or application development to the Rackspace Cloud.

Thousands of apps are developed every day and millions more are downloaded to devices. Yet, it’s still so hard to find those innovative apps, the ones that are really worth your time and download, especially in the cloud industry.

Here at Rackspace we are deeply committed to furthering the software development community. We love things like well-tested applications and vibrant open source projects.

When you’re working in your cloud app, the cloud enables you to easily spin up and down different servers and services with a click of a button. The drawback to this model, however, is that cost can be difficult to track. It’s easy to forget to shut down an instance, or a bug in app code could spin instances up without ever taking them down. Monitoring your costs is the third metric that developers should monitor, and Rackspace Cloud Tools partner Cloudability is a third-party tool that can be a big help.