FLO Cycling makes affordable aerodynamic bicycle race wheels to be used by triathletes. They have been our customer since late last year when they came to Rackspace after their popular pre-orders became too popular for their previous hosting solution to handle.

In a recent pre-order, they sold out of their wheels in 12 minutes and wrote a blog post about how they survived the traffic. You can watch the full video from the Google+ Hangout we did with  FLO Cycling, or jump to one of the highlights below.

• Jon Thornham and Chris Thornham of  FLO Cycling talked about how the majority of their business is done through pre-orders. They talked about the importance of having a site up and available and described the different hosting platforms the company has used.

• The guys talked about how they knew that Rackspace was the right platform for them and how important it was to have a hosting provider and team to support their business. Jon went on to talk about the relief of not having to worry about hosting so they can focus on their business.

• Chris talked about their program called Bike for a Kid, in which  FLO Cycling uses a certain portion of sales to help purchase bikes for children who can’t afford them. Watch Chris talk about the program here and be sure to check out their website for more information about Bike for a Kid.

That’s the recap from last week’s Google+ Hangout featuring  FLO Cycling. Be sure to catch Drew and I this Thursday at 1:00 p.m. CST for our next Cloud Launch Office Hours, and you can find out more information by visiting the Rackspace Google+ page. We hope to see you there!

Keynotes

It’s quite apparent that Red Hat is taking a more assertive — and sometimes aggressive — stance against closed source, overpriced solutions that prevent consumers from getting things done. Red Hat President and CEO Jim Whitehurst had a slide that showed “Open or Die” with a live plant on the left and a dead one on the right (see the photo in the post just below this paragraph). You could hear the gasp in the audience from some of the less technical crowd. Red Hat is making a big push to deliver on OpenStack and to modernize their RHEL and RHEV platforms. Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s executive vice president and president, products and technologies, detailed some of the upcoming offerings and the overall strategy seems to be a double-down on virtualization via OpenStack and further enhancement of Enterprise Linux.

Of the vendor keynotes, the Intel keynote from Dirk Hohndel, Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist, was superb. He seemed a bit nervous at first and we were quickly losing interest but he brought us back in with some good anecdotes. Dirk went into detail about how a company with a ton of intellectual property could also embrace open source. Surprisingly, the speech really moved me and there were no slides involved; it was just Dirk talking.

You can watch the keynotes on Red Hat’s Summit site. If you only watch one of them, watch Dirk Hohndel’s talk (direct link to MP4).

Sessions

The most memorable was Red Hat Chief ARM Architect Jon Masters’ demonstration of the 64-bit ARM platform (AArch64). Although there was no bicycle or spandex involved this year (he apologized for the lack of both), it was amazing to see some firsts. It was the first time AArch64 has been demonstrated in public and the first time Gluster ran on 64-bit ARM. He had a 2U rackmount chassis and the fans were extremely loud. Jon commented that the chips are “rarer than gold” and that he wasn’t going to chance turning the fans off. The server performed quite well during the demonstration and certainly outperformed what I’d expect from an ARM system.

Dan Walsh, Red Hat Senior Principal Software Engineer, led two informative sessions that I enjoyed. The first was a session on Linux containers. LXC confused me quite a bit before the talk but Dan and the product manager went through how containers work step by step. They gave real world use cases and made comparisons to the more prevalent virtualization methods, like KVM. As you might expect, Dan sprinkled in some useful security tips to make containers safer to use.

Another of Dan’s talks was about how to use SELinux in a large enterprise. He started it off with a brief explanation of SELinux and made us all stand up and say the words on his first slide (“SELinux is a labeling system”). He offered some tips on how to manage SELinux on multiple machines with Puppet and Ansible. In addition, he showed how custom policies could be easily exported and then passed around as RPMs or within configuration management systems. We also saw how to send auditd logs to remote systems for aggregation and alerting. You can certainly manage SELinux on many machines simply by treating the policies and configuration just like you treat any other service’s configuration files.

Even after the Pub Crawl on Thursday night, the Friday morning presentation about systemd was packed with attendees. The presenters went through SysV’s shortcomings and what systemd can deliver. It will replace init in RHEL 7. Adding systemd reduces the complexity of managing services and allows you to automate many of the things that are annoying to do manually (like cgroups). Its default method of handling cgroups allows CPU share to be carved up per service rather than per process. That means that if httpd has 10 workers and MySQL is running two processes, each service will receive a 50 percent share of the total CPU (rather than httpd getting a lot extra since it has multiple processes).

The RHEL 7 talks were extremely informative and I was writing until my hand almost fell off. I probably missed a lot of the new features so it might be a good idea to wait for the slides to be published. If you’re eager to use RHEL 7 as a desktop, you’ll see GNOME’s classic mode on the desktop (and it looks great).

After-hours

As usual, the Red Hat Certified Professionals reception at McGreevy’s was a great networking opportunity. I met other Linux users from around the world and enjoyed some pretty decent beer and food. I stayed after the reception and received a detailed lesson about how hockey works. The Bruins pushed through three OTs but eventually lost.

The rain ruined Thursday night’s plans but the Red Hat marketing folks put together a great alternative in less than 24 hours. We ended up at Royale and were treated to a ton of food and drinks. Some musicians set up late in the evening and we were all wondering what type of music they’d play. It was a group called Alter Ego from Montreal and they really rocked the place. They’re famous for “60 costume changes in 90 minutes” and they took us through oldies, disco, and contemporary music. They hit every single music genre I could think of (except country) and everyone was amazed that they entertained us for 90 minutes without a single break. If you get the chance to see this group in person, don’t miss it.

Wrap-up

The Red Hat Summits continue to be a good opportunity to learn, network, and experiment. The ratio of attendees seems to be tilting more toward the non-technical side, and this is a problem that the organizers will definitely need to improve. There were several technical sessions packed wall to wall with plenty of non-technical people playing on their phones or checking email on their laptops. It’s a tough problem to fix and many conferences have the same issue.

Next year’s summit will be in San Francisco in April. I hope to see you there!

It’s an incredible honor to be included on list for 2013, which features a who’s who in technology and business. Rackspace ranks No. 56.

About working at Rackspace, Computerworld wrote, “This San Antonio-based managed hosting services company provides a raft of technical training to its IT staffers. The organization offers the full Red Hat certification program at no cost to employees, as well as the most advanced Cisco certification, the Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert, and the Microsoft Certified IT Professional, Enterprise Administrator curriculum. Through Rackspace’s VTO, or Volunteer Time Off, program, which was introduced last year, every employee may take up to three workdays off per year to give back to the community.”

Computerworld’s annual Best Places to Work in IT feature has ranked the top 100 work environments for technology professionals since 1994. The list is compiled based on a comprehensive questionnaire regarding company offerings in categories like benefits, diversity, career development, training and retention. Computerworld also conducts extensive surveys of IT workers and their responses factor in determining the rankings.

We’re pumped to make the list for the sixth year straight as we continue our mission to be one of the world’s greatest service companies and to deliver Fanatical Support on an open hybrid cloud. This recognition wouldn’t be possible without Rackers, whose hard work, drive and spirit has once again put us among the 100 Best Places to Work in IT.

Want to find out for yourself what makes Rackspace an awesome place to work? We’re hiring.

This blog covers a basic scenario that will show you how easily the CSWP can be configured and ready for use.

Scenario – A research organization is putting together a SharePoint 2013 Community site to enable all of its top scientists to communicate. It would like to have a section on the site that shows all the organization’s scientists in a functional image slider. The problem is that the photos are spread throughout the site collection in different libraries. The one positive is that the organization uses Enterprise Keywords and all the photos have been tagged with the keyword Scientist. (At the end of this blog, I will show how to activate Enterprise Keywords on a library.)

Here are the steps the organization will follow:

1- The first step is to edit my Community site and add my CSWP which can be found in the Content Rollup category.

2- To configure the web part first click anywhere in the web part, then choose the Web Part tab in the ribbon. From that tab click Web Part Properties

3- We first need to setup the query. To do so click Change query from the web part properties box.

4- A Build Your Query dialog box will open. There are four tabs available Basics, Refiners, Settings and Test. From the Basics tab you should see Switch to Advanced Mode in the upper right corner. If you see Switch to Quick Mode click it. We will start this query from the Quick mode.

5- From the Select a query menu I have several options. In this situation I could either choose Items matching a tag (System) or Pictures (System).  I also have the option of just querying documents, items matching a specific content type, popular items, etc.

6- Under Restrict by app I can decide to query the Current Site Collection, Current Site, Specific URL, or I can choose Don’t restrict results by app and query everything that I am currently crawling.

7- If you remember, in my test scenario I am looking for items that have a specific keyword of Scientist. So here I will choose Restrict on this tag: and enter Scientist.

8- You can add additional filters here or Switch to Advanced Mode for even more options. On the right hand side you can see what your query is currently returning to the web part.

9- The Refiners tab will allow you to filter your query even further. Currently, my query is returning any item that has been tagged with the keyword Scientist, but let’s say in my results I am finding that some documents had also been tagged with that keyword. I only want images to display so I can use this tab to add the ContentType of Picture to my refiners.

10- The Settings tab has a few additional options including the use of Query rules and the loading behavior of your query. For this example I will leave everything at the default.

11- The tab Test gives you your final query text for testing purposes. When finished simply click OK at the bottom of the Build Your Query dialog box.

12- The final step is to setup how results will display. From the Web Part Properties box you have the following options (the settings I choose for this solution can be seen in the image below.)

• Number of items to show
• Under Display Templates: Control (List, List with Paging or Slideshow)
• Under Display Templates: Item (determines how the image and text will display, if you are just listing documents “two lines” would be the best option)
• Under Display Templates: Don’t show anything when there are no results (leave this checked to avoid blank space, especially when using the slideshow control.)

**Note- If you want to get your hands on the code behind these display templates they can be found under Site Settings > Web Designer Galleries > Master pages > Display Templates > Content Web Parts

When your settings are right click OK to close your web part and you’re done!

Earlier this month, Rackspace sponsored and participated in a National Day of Civic Hacking at St. Edwards University in Austin. National Day of Civic Hacking brings together citizens, developers and entrepreneurs who collaborate to create, build and invent new solutions and software using publicly-released data, code and technology to solve challenges relevant to neighborhoods, cities, states and the nation. The ultimate goal is to work together to have a positive impact on society.

A group of Cloud Launch Rackers including Alan Bush, Drew Cox and Jason Swindle participated in the event and acted as live technical support, sat in with each team, designed hosting infrastructure and demonstrated what Rackspace’s award-winning Fanatical Support is all about.

I worked with Racker Nels Nelson on a project to deliver text messages to citizens when the Austin City Council discusses a particular neighborhood. We completed a non-trivial, legitimate, working product in less than 48 hours. Another Racker, Jay Morgan, was instrumental in guiding the process and design of a project called Connect2Good, an organization that links nonprofits with companies that can help them meet their needs.

See what Alan Bush had to say about the hackathon in the video below.

Harry Max, Rackspace’s Vice President of Experience Design, also served as a panel expert and gave advice and perspective to each team as it presented its project. Harry’s expertise helped the nonprofits ensure that their technology would deliver a good experience to all who interacted with it.

But the story I’m most excited about is that our participation helped prop up a new startup called Keep Austin Fed. This organization picks up unused food from restaurants and feeds people in need. Before the hackathon, Keep Austin Fed used a paper-based system that make it difficult to coordinate with volunteers around the city. Racker Joseph Palumbo helped Keep Austin Fed with its Cloud Servers and enabled developers to create a system to coordinate food pickup with volunteers via text message.

Throughout the weekend, developers, designers, system administrators and nonprofits in Austin and across the country collaborated to create software that will have a powerful and positive impact on society. If you haven’t been to a National Day of Civic Hacking, I encourage you to catch the next one that comes around. I know I am excited to see how each of these projects grows and matures.

This week at the Rack, we answered all of these questions – and more. If you missed out, check out our digest for a recap on the cloud conversation.

Cut The Red Tape; Build Your Startup On Open Source Principles
It’s no secret that Rackspace loves startups – we were one in 1998. We’re also supporters of open source technologies, which have a ton of advantages for fledgling businesses. This week, Rackspace Director of Product Ev Kontsevoy, a founder of MailGun, talks about how he applied some open source principles to his startup.

Proactive Monitoring Strategies For Cloud Apps: Google+ Hangout Recap
Each Thursday from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. CST, our Cloud Launch Team offers office hours on our Google+ page to give people a chance to ask questions and learn more about the cloud. Last week, Rackers shared proactive monitoring strategies for cloud apps.

Webinar Recap: Be Resilient And Ready With Rackspace
In a recent webcast, Rackspace Enterprise Cloud Strategist Paul Croteau fielded tech questions and explained how Rackspace can help you create your own disaster recovery plan. Check out the full webinar and learn how to calculate your company’s downtime costs.

Why Hybrid Cloud Is A Must Have For The Enterprise
Rackspace CTO John Engates and James Staten, vice president and principal analyst with Forrester, recently got together for a recorded webinar discussing public, private and hybrid cloud. Here’s the full video.

Is There A Difference Between Performance And Site Load Times?
This week kicked off a new series called “Cloud Questions You Didn’t Even Know You Had,” which looks at topics folks might not even consider as they look toward taking advantage of the cloud. Check out our video post for an explanation on how you can save on your hosting bill while speeding up your website performance and load times.

Learn How To Cloud At Unlocked: The Hybrid Cloud
This week, Rackspace embarked on a global journey across the globe called Unlocked: The Hybrid Cloud. Unlocked is a free one-day cloud workshop sponsored and hosted by Rackspace that we’ll hold in several major cities across the globe to help you determine which cloud environment is the best fit for your application.

The hybrid approach allows you to combine the best of private and public clouds and dedicated servers to create an IT solution that fits your business’ needs. Mixing and matching these different cloud environments provides the best possible combination of cost-efficiency, security, reliability, performance and control.

Over time, it’s become clear that hybrid cloud computing has a valid role within enterprises. We believe that this solution is the future of all cloud computing and will enable you to find the best solution for your unique needs.

Last month, RightScale, a long-time Rackspace partner, confirmed our views in their 2013 State of the Cloud Survey. The survey found that of the 625 IT and business leaders polled, more than 75 percent have a multi-cloud strategy, with the majority of those planning for hybrid clouds.

It’s clear that businesses are finding real value in integrating private cloud, public cloud and dedicated computing.

Rackspace OpenStack Evangelist and Technology Strategist Wayne Walls recently discussed the infrastructure of the hybrid cloud in a webinar. If you missed out on the action, you can check out a recording of the conversation here.

Here’s the first question: is performance different than load times? Many folks think of the two as the same thing, but they are actually different. Increasing resources to your Cloud Server will almost always raise your costs, but will not always improve load times. And load times are what most people consider to be performance.

But did you know that there is one way you can leverage the cloud to serve content quickly to your visitors without having to beef up the performance of your server? In the video below, I talk about not only how you can save on your hosting bill, but also how you can speed up your website load times. The best part is that it works for all hosting environments, whether you have an all cloud, all dedicated or hybrid cloud solution.

San Francisco-based Screenleap, which was founded in 2011, is now a member of the Rackspace Startup Program. Screenleap turned to Rackspace after the startup had concerns about how its previous cloud provider could handle its unique usage patterns, CEO and Founder Tuyen Truong says.

“We’ve had a great experience with Rackspace so far,” says Truong. “We were using Amazon EC2 to service our screen shares, but had worries about reliability and cost-effectiveness given our usage pattern. We initially moved some of our screen share servers to Rackspace as a test and had great results. We have subsequently moved the majority of our screen share servers to Rackspace.”

With those concerns out of the way, Screenleap can focus on making it easy to share your screen with anyone online.

While Java is currently required to share your screen with Screenleap, viewing can be done on any device with a web browser without having to download or install any additional software. Truong notes that other screen sharing tools require viewers to either install additional software or have Flash installed to view another’s screen.

“My cofounders and I were fed up with how hard it was to get a screen share started using WebEx and GoToMeeting,” explains Truong. “I used GoToMeeting at my previous company for sales demos and I found myself wasting a lot of precious time. Instead of being able to jump straight into demoing my company’s product, I found that I was spending the first five minutes of every meeting helping my potential customers install screen sharing software just so they can see my screen.”

Truong continues, “I thought that there had to be a better way and my co-founders and I started hacking at the problem. The solution we came up with was the foundation for Screenleap. After building an initial prototype, we applied to Y Combinator and got accepted. We launched Screenleap four months later in February 2012.”

The simple idea that guides development at Screenleap is the belief that sharing your screen is now a fundamental online interaction –  it empowers people to work together online more effectively. Team Screenleap is passionate about helping people collaborate better online.

“We want to make it even easier for people to start sharing their screen,” concludes Truong. “Our installation-free viewer makes it super-easy for people to view your shared screen. Our Screen Share API makes it easy for developers to add screen sharing to their own applications. Our users can now initiate a conference call with the users they are sharing their screens with without leaving Screenleap. We’re going to continue to make it easier for people to share the contents of their screen with others.”

Are you an entrepreneur with a startup idea to revolutionize the cloud? If so, the Space Cowboys would like to hear about it. Send us a message if you are searching for the rocket fuel to launch your startup. We look forward to hearing from you soon!

But don’t expect to get blasted with Rackspace marketing the entire day. In fact, you should expect the opposite. We’re a world leader in cloud computing and over the years we have seen thousands of cloud applications and infrastructure designs, and we have spoken with hundreds of engineering teams. What we have gained from that is a solid understanding of what building in the open cloud looks like; from single-server WordPress installs to complex adaptive applications that span clusters of cloud servers and everything in between.

Cloud Savvy & Unlocked

The idea of Unlocked grew out of an internal program we created called Cloud Savvy, which takes the lessons we’ve learned and applies design principles, cloud know-how and best practices to advance the level of cloud expertise inside our organization. The Cloud Savvy program arms us with in-depth cloud knowledge to better help our customers design their cloud applications the right way the first time. The feedback from the Cloud Savvy program has been off the charts – Rackers are more confident in their cloud IQs and our customers receive more Fanatical Support in the cloud than ever before.

As the Cloud Savvy content matured and we saw significant impact within our customers, we realized there was a new opportunity in front of us – a new avenue that allows us to extend our Fanatical Support. Fanatical Support doesn’t start once you become a customer; we want you to experience it from the start. From consultation to deployment to growing your business – it’s about being helpful and doing the right thing to get you on the right path to the cloud. It was an easy choice to share our knowledge and experience with the world, and we hope you’ll find value in the lessons we bring to you via our Unlocked roadshow.

Why Should You Attend Unlocked: The Hybrid Cloud

1. It’s free. As in free beer.
2. You’ve heard what cloud is and why cloud matters, now learn how to cloud.
3. Learn why hybrid cloud is the next cloud.
4. Come away with action items you can implement the next day.
5. Find the right fit for your application(s)

Agenda Snippets

1. Choosing the right datastore and polyglot persistence
2. The Five Pillars of Cloudiness
3. Why hybrid cloud is the next cloud
4. Everything is code

Unlocked’s first stop is Friday, June 14 in New York City at the SoHo House in Manhattan. Future Unlocked events are planned for London, Portland, San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago and Hong Kong. Check out the Unlocked web site for specific dates and locations: unlocked.io/#RoadshowDates

These events are for developers, engineers and technical decision makers. They are small by design, and we want to encourage a collaborative environment and engaging discussion.

The Rackspace team is in New York City all week for Cloud Expo, so stop by the Rackspace booth to say hello and ask us any questions you may have about hybrid clouds. You can also play the Unlock the Cloud game for a chance to win some sweet prizes! If you don’t have a Cloud Expo pass yet and would like to attend, Rackspace has plenty of passes, so please reach out to us on Twitter or leave a comment!

For more information about Unlocked: The Hybrid Cloud, please check out the Unlocked webpage!