Managed Cloud

This is a guest post by Andrew Youderian, a Rackspace customer who owns a number of online stores, including Right Channel Radios and TrollingMotors.net. He also blogs about building profitable eCommerce businesses at eCommerceFuel.com. 

At Rackspace, we are looking at ways to reach our readers in the channels that they like to consume content. This is why we are launching Google+ Video Wednesday, where we will be posting a weekly video of our Rackers giving tips and tricks on how to use some of our products.

It’s no secret that the Space Cowboys from the Rackspace Startup Program like to eat. Check out our photos on the website! Now on to the main course, Food Genius, a dining-out data company, providing the food industry with actionable, real-time data on emerging trends and app developers with access to the internet’s largest database of restaurants and their dishes. By tracking nearly 15 million restaurant menu items and how consumers interact with them, Food Genius leverages the social web to generate high quality and incredibly granular data for an array of commercial and consumer uses.

With the cloud, solutions that were once only affordable to the largest organizations are now cost effective solutions for small and midsized businesses. Cloud load balancers are one of these things.

One question that I commonly get is, “So how exactly does Managed Cloud support my business.” There is a lot of documentation on our service level and what we actually do, however, for this post I wanted to give a very high level analogy of how Managed Cloud delivers support to you and your organization.

The game industry today offers plenty of development engines to choose from. Unfortunately, there is no technology that allows all devices to plug into the same game server in real time. Almost 69 million Americans will be playing social games in 2012, according to analysis firm eMarketer. Within the Rackspace Startup Program there are several companies that cater to social games, the new buzz word in the industry, but it’s limited to device specific social play. To Digital Harmony Games, that’s not social at all. That’s just online play with social features, stuck in its own device.

The coming year will likely see unprecedented growth in cloud computing, especially as people become more comfortable with the interaction of the interfaces and security becomes more stable.

With the Cloud, many developers and companies can now afford to have a true test and development configuration to ensure that their code deployments will work properly in the production environment.  Setting up these types of environments is valuable because not only can the development team determine if their code works, they also can discover the associated downtime with deploying it.  But did you know that you can use the Cloud in a similar manner to help diagnose a problem that your configuration might be facing?

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.

Last week we talked about what a few big-name service companies would be without their commitment to service. When you think of hosting providers, service might not be the first thing that comes to mind. But if you experience a failure, you quickly realize the value of service. In the cloud computing world, we constantly deal with intense projects, like helping customers scale infrastructure to handle spikes in web traffic, handling highly complex technical issues, or helping customers back track steps when a they’ve made a change to their configuration causing their site to go down.