Quick Review and Comparison of Rackspace

Rackspace, a cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) vendor, has been ramping up their advertising and recently announced that they were giving away their cloud management software for free for use in private clouds.  Given all the activity and buzz in the media about Rackspace and OpenStack, I thought I’d give Rackspace a test run.  I used the same approach that I used in my Amazon AWS review and setup an application on their cloud for a semi real-world trial.  Given that I’ve used AWS, I’ll try to do some quick comparisons as well. 

Rackspace Releases OpenStack Private For Free

I recently wrote about HP’s use OpenStack as part of their newly announced cloud hosting environment and how it could help feed their consulting and cloud offering sales.   Rackspace, who have been using OpenStack for a while, may be trying to capitalize on the same approach as HP by releasing their build of OpenStack for free.  I continue to think that these moves will allow CIO’s who don’t want to be left out,  implement internal clouds using the same technology and leave open an easy migration path to the providers public cloud.  In addition to this, Rackspace reminds the market of their relevance in cloud computing.  

CFO’s see value in the cloud, Being Courted by Google

According to a Google’s BLOG, in a survey of 800 CFOs, 81% think (AKA a believe) that completely implementing cloud technology would improve employee productivity, and 71% say it would reduce the time required to bring new products and services to market.  The CFO on a company is normally a big part of the decision making process.  I point out “belief” because a lot of times decisions are made in part or whole on a person’s belief.  If the numbers in Google’s BLOG are true, it will continue to fill the sails of cloud computing growth in the years to come.  I can get pretty analytical, but in general, I align with with the conclusions for reduced time for new services and productivity.  Also notice, CFO’s are being courted by Google... and for good reason.

Another example of why to use Google’s Two-Factor Authentication

This is a good article on how to close security holes for Google Apps users.  At the core is “two-factor authentication”.  I’ve written about two factor authentication before and I wish it was available on more sites.  I like Google’s and PayPal’s implementation (using my iPhone to receive a one-time second authentication password).  It’s not a huge pain because I can check a box to have Google remember me for a while.  Why aren’t more sites using this?  My bank doesn’t even offer this.  Although two factor authentication isn’t the end all be all of security, it closes a gaping hole.

NASA Mars Mission Uses Amazon’s AWS

NASA’s use of Amazon’s AWS is interesting.  I knew that NASA had a private cloud so I didn’t expect them to use AWS.  I’m guessing this is a good example of using the cloud to augment capability quickly when you don’t have enough (cloud bursting) and take advantage of services that are too costly to build yourself.  NASA was able to quickly setup needed AWS EC2 services to prepare and serve images and then take advantage of Amazon’s huge network footprint to cache images on the edge of the net to serve images and other science data to a massive set of customers around the globe.

Cloud Vendor Expansion

After taking a much needed vacation I thought I would post an update to catch up on some notable events.  Although Google has been in the cloud business as a “software as a service” (SaaS) provider with their office productivity apps, and a “platform as a service” (PaaS) provider with Google App Engine, they entered the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) field in June, firing a shot over the bow of Amazon, who for the most part is way ahead of everyone in experience and number of products.  HP announced their cloud offering as did Oracle.  All of the new entrants were at limited release status when they made these announcements.