load balancing

One of the best things that you can do today to prepare for the holiday rush is to put a Cloud Load Balancer in front of your cloud configuration. You want to do this now because in order to route traffic through your load balancer there will be some downtime associated with setting up the DNS and allowing it to propagate. There’s no time like the present to take care of this so you can take advantage of all the benefits the load balancer can give you in the holiday season.

Your customers demand that your website is up and running 24×7. And with Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) now configurable on F5 devices at Rackspace, you can offer your customers a better, more personalized online experience with improved resiliency.

Before cloud computing, only the biggest and richest companies could afford complex, multi-server environments to meet their IT needs. These types of tiered configurations provided increased performance, stability, and redundancy along with luxuries like separate staging environments for testing. The essence of the cloud revolution is making these options accessible to all organizations, without forcing them to expand their IT spend.

Businesses come to the Cloud with a variety of workloads including hosting rich media sites, corporate websites, ecommerce sites or test and development environments. With these workloads, businesses have a variety of challenges like how to best migrate data to the Cloud, how to optimize their applications for our cloud platform, or how to marry a dedicated hosting environment with a cloud environment, what we call a hybrid environment. (Check out this fun infographic that explains this hybrid hosting).

A lot has happened since I introduced myself to you here. We’re continuing to listen to our customers and we have accelerated our product releases and geographic coverage in response. Just since January, we’ve launched Cloud in the UK, Cloud Load Balancers, Akamai CDN to all of our Cloud Files customers, new iPhone and iPad apps, Ubuntu on Managed Cloud, higher throughput limits on Cloud Servers, a number of features to our Cloud Files product, and many more. Today, I want to share with you the progress we’re making using open source, namely OpenStack. A significant part of our focus over the remainder of the year will be transitioning our Cloud Server code base to OpenStack Compute, also known as “Nova.” This strategic decision has many implications that will affect the majority of our customers so I want to highlight a few changes.

By Brandon Woodward, RHCE