Cloud Databases

Last week we told you about the huge milestone we reached with the launch of the Rackspace open cloud into production. It was a great week and you may have seen what industry folks are saying, including GigaOm, Wired and ZDNet, among others. Today, I wanted to expand a little bit more on Cloud Databases, which was released in Unlimited Availability (General Availability) as part of the Rackspace open cloud.

Another busy week is in the books here at Rackspace, and we’re pumped about what’s to come. In case you missed anything, here’s a handy digest to get you up to speed.

The ability to spin up databases on demand without having to buy, configure and size a server was a “no brainer” that drew SnapPages to the Rackspace open cloud and Cloud Databases.

Speed and simplicity; it’s what technology hungry consumers want. Think about it: If I hear a song, I can download it on my smartphone immediately with a simple click or two. That’s incredibly powerful. It takes just seconds. We no longer have the time nor the patience to click through various navigation menus and wait several seconds after each click for results. We demand instant, real-time outcomes and anything less is, quite frankly, unacceptable.

Yesterday kicked off a new era for our customers and the Rackspace Cloud: an era of openness, choice and innovation. It’s been 18 months in the making, and we have officially moved our core cloud technology to OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system that we founded.

When we set out on the journey to the open cloud 18 months ago, we knew our goals were ambitious. We wanted to build the Rackspace Cloud on OpenStack and, in the process, take OpenStack to the next level. We wanted to bring a truly open cloud computing solution to the world; and we knew it would take a tremendous amount of work.

Ok. So what is the Cloud DB Client? It’s a user interface packaged as a Google Chrome extension for the Rackspace Cloud Database API service.

a:link {text-decoration: none; color: red;} a:visited {text-decoration: none; color: red;} a:active {text-decoration: none; color: red;} a:hover {text-decoration: underline; color: red;} Face it: you love your application. You’ve spent weeks and months meticulously coding it and you LOVE it, just the way it is. You want to run it in the cloud and you certainly don’t want to spend time redesigning it to work with a new cloud database technology or to perform well on the infrastructure of your cloud provider. When it comes to databases, we all know that performance matters. You want your application to run fast, really fast. How fast? How about 229 percent faster? Intrigued? Please read on.