zen and cloud computing

The cloud is a utility service and, similar to a utility like electricity, you pay for it based on your hourly usage. The major advantage of the cloud’s utility pricing is that costs scale up and down along with your configuration, allowing you to plan for the traffic of your visitors without waste or excess. But rather than talking directly about dollars and cents, let’s use an analogy of hosting a dinner party to understand the power of utility pricing.

Several weeks ago, I flew out to San Francisco and got to talk with a lot of developers about their applications and the cloud. There were three points that almost every developer brought up: scaling their app, initial deployment and feature requests.

You’ve worked hard on your application and are gearing up for a major event. You’ve heard me talk about the power of the cloud API, and have incorporated it into your app to control cloud infrastructure, in particular to scale up your configuration in a short amount of time. But before the big day comes, there is one important point to remember as you plan for a high traffic event.

While it is tempting to think of the cloud as a single-cell organism consisting of raw compute power; the truth is that the cloud is more of an ecosystem with many unique parts that interact with each other. The Rackspace open cloud is a complete solution for your business to host its application.

When I first got into hosting, we had to call somebody at our data center any time a customer wanted to make changes to their configuration, such as adding more resources. Our Racker in the DC would have to locate the physical server and install additional hardware to the machine, or they might have to build and provision a completely new server. Our Cloud Application Programming Interface (API) has changed the game, allowing our customers to easily modify their cloud configuration with just a few lines of code. The API is a powerful tool and something all of our customers should know about, regardless of their level of technical ability.

Among the many reasons why people choose the cloud, one of the most powerful is the Application Programming Interface, more commonly referred to as the API. As developers continue adopting virtual environments to host their sites and apps, we’re seeing increasingly innovative and powerful uses of this feature.

There are paradigm shifts that occur with the release of any new technology. This holds true for hosting in the cloud as opposed to more traditional dedicated hosting. Before we get into those differences, I want to talk about something else: fishing.

When our customers come to us to setup a cloud environment, they are excited and ready to build their configuration. While you can do some amazing things in the cloud, there are a couple of things that you are going to want to configure. When I get to visit with customers, I have found that these points come up often so I wanted to write a post to make sure that you configure them.

Whenever you start up a Cloud Server project, there are a lot of things that you need to consider. At Rackspace, we wrote a Knowledge Center article called “The First 48” which goes into detail of everything you need to do when you get started using the Cloud Servers platform. However, I thought I would shrink it down a little bit and give you what I think are the first five things you should consider.

One of the number one questions that I get from prospective customers is, “Which Rackspace cloud product is right for me?” We have three main cloud hosting offerings here at Rackspace: Cloud Sites, Cloud Servers and Managed Cloud. Understanding what each product does might be a little confusing, so to explain the differences I like to use a photography analogy.