Cloud Databases

Cloud Databases helps you provision and manage high performance MySQL instances on Rackspace’s open cloud. Our service helps with the installation, configuration, deployment and on-going management of MySQL, and more importantly it helps you deliver fast apps through an architecture that is purpose-built with performance in mind using container-based virtualization.

Today, I would like to introduce you to a guest blogger, Dave Fowler, founder of Chartio. Chartio provides data analytics and visualization tools for business intelligence applications, and allows you to bring data from Cloud Databases and other data sources together into beautiful visualizations. Here is Dave:

We are living in the age of Big Data – there is so much information around us at any given moment that it is impossible to manually sift through and interpret it all. My team at Rackspace is responsible for the system engineering of our Cloud Databases product, and we collect 200,000 metrics every minute to understand the overall health of our system. Data visualization is more than a buzzword to me, it is vital to my team to do our job effectively.

As a Technical Lead for the Rackspace Startup Program, I often work with customers who don’t know or aren’t sure how or where to use the cloud to beef up their SaaS application infrastructure.

The container-based virtualization architecture we use in Rackspace’s Cloud Databases service has a number of benefits, one of which is a reduction in the overhead that is typical of traditional virtualization. Less overhead means more CPU for your compute-intensive databases.

Last week, we showed you a short video on the API for Cloud Databases. Today, we want to show you another short video from a couple of Rackers on the team that highlights some of the different use cases for Cloud Databases that we have seen customers using. Take a look. Do you have a different use case for Cloud Databases? Leave a comment here and let us know.

Using the Cloud Control Panel to manage your Cloud Databases is great for scenarios where your application has only a few databases or you don’t have a lot of automation needs. But what if you are responsible for tens or hundreds of databases? Maybe it’s because you manage them on behalf of your customers or offer services on top of Cloud Databases. In that case, using the Cloud Databases API is almost a requirement.

One of the advantages of the container-based virtualization architecture we use in Rackspace’s Cloud Databases service is the improved IO performance for your database. This performance improvement is primarily due to two reasons: the elimination of the hypervisor as a “middleman” in the path that goes from the database engine to the storage; and the flexibility in IO priority allocation that Cloud Databases gives to each one of the different containers of the system.

A few days ago we told you about the Unlimited Availability of Cloud Databases. Since then, we have talked with many of you about what you like about Cloud Databases and what you would like to see added. One thing that we consistently hear about from current users is the different levels of support we offer for databases based on whether your account is a Core Cloud account or an Account with a Managed Service Level.

This month, we raised the curtain on the Rackspace open cloud and welcomed our customers into a new era of openness, choice and innovation. And now we’re taking that one step further by making  Rackspace Cloud Monitoring available to everyone through Unlimited Availablity. Cloud Monitoring is a powerful tool that unlocks the value of the open cloud by letting customers monitor any cloud or infrastructure, whether it’s hosted in your datacenter or ours. It’s one easy solution to monitor all IT infrastructure from a single interface, regardless of vendor or location. Cloud Monitoring joins Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack and Cloud Databases as pillars of the Rackspace open cloud.