The heading says it all. Last weekend, I snapped and took the plunge to join the cloud computing bandwagon and moved my server to Rackspace. I moved the wordpress instance and this blog. I will be moving about 7 to 8 sites that either I own or is helping someone to host to my new home in cloud. i got a closer look at cloud in the process. This article is a humble attempt to document what I learned. Why I chose Rackspace against Amazon and What I would expect moving forward.
What the heck is cloud computing ?
Cloud is a fancy name for Internet. And computing; Well, remember the first class about computers you took. They said a computer comprises of a CPU, a storage device or memory and an input output device like keyboard or mouse. Cloud computing is a bold attempt to take that first two pieces and putting it in internet. In its simplified form thats all you need to know. However the whole technology is built on the same fundamentals of peer-to-peer, the one you used to download your music, or bit torrent. That is, if you let multiple machines to work on a task, divided into manageable pieces, you can achieve more throughput compared to one you would have achieved with one machine. Cloud computing in its present form is possible because of some ground breaking technological advances they made in the field of grid computing and server virtualization.
Cloud computing cleared your desk. It basically took the CPU and storage away from you, along with the dangling wires. This is the basic concept of the business model adopted by major players in the field. They sell you either just storage space or CPU and Storage. They meter your usage and bill you based on how much you had used. A storage is metered in GB of usage and CPU is metered on the basis of hours of usage. Amazon sell S3, the storage part of the cloud and EC2 the CPU part of the technology. Rackspace has named them cloudfiles and cloudserver respectively. Rackspace additionally have a service called cloudsites aswell; which is so cool, I will come to it in a bit.
Traditionally when you needed a web presence, you employ a hosting company. They lend you some space and assorted number of tools and some restrictive access to the part of the machine provisioned in your name. You upload your files, write web applications with the languages and tools they provide. Often times you have no control on installing anything new. Even if you can, you cannot accomplish anything without some help or advice from the support staff at your hosting company. Cloud, on the other hand, breaks all these barriers and provides complete control. You get a whole server in your name. With complete access. For eg, you can even remote desktop into your machine provisioned for you. You even have your own static public IP (not with amazon EC2, though). However, flexibility comes with responsibility. If you had gotten yourself a windows machine then you should be worrying about software patches, viruses, malware .. you got the idea. The machine is vulnerable to any issues you would have faced if it were a real one.
Why Rackspace not Amazon EC2 ?
As I mentioned previously, Rackspace has a service called “cloudsites”. cloudsites is cool because the service is a blend of traditional web hosting and the cloud. It starts at a flat rate and you can throw in a virtual server and some cloudfiles space anytime you want. cloudsites in a very superficial aspect looks like a web hosting package, with a enormous high price (however the price is almost equivalent of running an EC2 server 24 hours for 30 days). But its a virtual server that runs 24×7 servicing requests to a site hosted on that virtual server. You can host multiple sites on this server and even can lease out space. There is a billing interface and an interface to monitor your client’s usage. This is what I have signed up for now.
When you sign up for a cloud server, either on amazon or on rackspace you have a choice of a Windows machine or a linux machine. If you are on EC2 you are stuck with it. Rackspace on the other hand is purely hybrid. Even if you are signed up for a linux machine you can decide to write a part of your application in ASP. You can place the ASP files along with the PHP files on the same folder. And you can see it co-exist flawlessly in there (I haven’t tested it yet).
Amazon doc is confusing. Jargon filled and uses too many 3 letter syllables to denote its various services. You have to pretty much sign up at three different places to get your virtual server up and running. First on AWS, then on S3 and finally on EC2. Logically it didn’t made any sense. Racspace has a much more straight forward approach.
But you shouldn’t be looking at the docs. Dave Winer had made an utterly simple EC2 for Poets tutorial. I wonder if Amazon will consider retiring their jargon filled docs for this one !
Amazon’s server is ephemeral. It can crash and could take all the data you saved along with it. Rackspace data is saved on a Raid and is completely oblivious to server’s condition. So you don’t have to worry about any server crashes.
That being said there are couple of turn offs for rackspace. Rackspace has APIs to manage their services. But I felt its lacking some features. Amazon has a much more flexible API set, IMHO. I can’t pin point where it is lacking, nor can I suggest what I need more. I would definitely take some time off during the weekend to get a closer look at the APIs.
What is lacking ?
I had expected that I can download a server instance on to my local machine. I then can take it else where and boom, I have the exact setup running in the new home.After all this is what server virtualization is; in its true spirit, right ?. Unfortunately thats not the case, now. Moving from rackspace else where is as painful as changing your hosting provider. Though i know its a long shot, I am expecting that it would happen sooner or later.
