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Rackspace Developer+ Program

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Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#41

Post by jnoller »

namidark wrote: post #38
korzun wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rackspace is a tarnished brand for me. I have dozen of servers with them (both cloud and hardware) and in terms of support and network they are pretty good. If you used them back in the day, give it another shot. Totally different picture now. > But I'm drawing a blank because it's a competitive market. I don't think there is much competition when it comes to hosting mission critical applications. Typical options a…

Thats a pretty bold claim that Rackspace is the only solid choice. There are many other providers out there that provide better white glove service.

Can you (honest question) itemize what's better white glove service? Because I want to take that list and act on it inside of Rackspace.

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#42

Post by jnoller »

pekk wrote: post #13

So Rackspace wants to compete with the EC2 Free Tier and get developers hooked on their platform. Those developers should consider how much they will have to pay after the first year. It's a pity that Rackspace is taking away its cheaper, smaller sized instances. Oh well - at least Linode and Digital Ocean still want my money.

Anyone who needs help calculating how much they will pay after the year is up can ask me, and it will also be shown on the invoice each month.

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#43

Post by meritt »

jnoller wrote: post #39
latch wrote: post #7

Rackspace is a tarnished brand for me. I immediately associate it with ridiculous pricing and bad "cloud" (mosso). With closed eyes it refused to see the quicksand of commodity it built its tower on. I was hoping to come up with ways that companies with poor brands can recapture a lost audience. But I'm drawing a blank because it's a competitive market. It's like the car industry an the generational memory people hav…

[Full disclosure: I am the PM for this project, a principal eng/manager at rackspace, and I believe in honesty] > Rackspace is a tarnished brand for me. I immediately associate it with ridiculous pricing and bad "cloud" (mosso). With closed eyes it refused to see the quicksand of commodity it built its tower on. You know what? I agree. Several years (4+) ago when RSC (Rackspace Cloud) came out I used it. My job was b…

My company hosted with Rackspace Cloud for nearly 3 years ($1k/mo average) but recently switched to AWS. Too much frustration and technical issues.

My biggest suggestion? Drop your 24/7 support or hire competent people. We had to contact support numerous times (a point I'll get to in a minute) and the experience was infuriating each and every time. It was the equivalent of talking to Comcast's tier-1 tech support. You guys would have blatant network outages and your "fanatical" support would be asking if I could ping servers (I had to point out the status page presence to them). We always had to waste time dealing with your ticket-jockeys before we'd get escalated and someone would actually solve the issue. I'd rather wait on a response than deal with an incompetent person asking for ping logs or suggesting I reboot a server.

Your private networking at ORD was problematic. We had our internal subnet at ORD which would very often just straight up fail. Server A could route to B, but the reverse was not possible. It appeared to be some sort of ARP fuck up, I dunno. We ran into issues every couple weeks and most often would resolve itself by the time we actually got a tech response. Which of course was closed with an equivalent of "could not reproduce"

Your MySQL-as-a-service is abysmal. It's running 5.1 (Do you have any idea how old that is?) and the performance is beyond horrible, I don't think the config was tuned whatsoever. Cloudfiles we routinely broke due to our write concurrency being too high (we were told you use sqlite?). This caused us to simply to manage our own software and completely avoid your pre-packaged SaaS offerings.

Since we switched to AWS we couldn't be happier and with reserved instance pricing we're actually saving money (annualized) on a superior platform.

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#44

Post by jnoller »

korzun wrote: post #15

So I'm not sure why there is a spin on this. This is (as others pointed out) basically a free yearly trial. When I was writing an API client for their cloud infrastructure (before they rolled their own) > https://github.com/AlekseyKorzun/rackspace-open-cloud-php I had to spin up instances for testing purposes on my own dime, luckily I had disposable income. In my case, if I money was an issue, their Developer+ progra…

See, it't not a yearly free trial - and that's why I avoided saying that completely. Other providers have a free tier with a specific instance type, or # of api calls that you're "limited to" per month, if you exceed those, you're charged. That's not free.

The same applies here, except we don't dictate which products or APIs you use; you will get the credit, for one year, applied to the services you need for your application.

Also, if any time you're writing OSS bindings to our APIs, or openstack, let us know. We'll hook you up for free to get that support in there.

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#45

Post by unoti »

old-gregg wrote: post #34

Disclaimer: my company was acquired by Rackspace 2 years ago. I am a developer myself and below are my honest impressions (and things I have learend) of Rackspace cloud. Back when they launched it after having had acquired Slicehost, Rackspace Cloud was the only alternative to AWS and had one significant differentiator back then: the local storage on the instances wasn't ephemeral - it was permanent. The benchmarks a…

> Rackspace Cloud was the only alternative to AWS and had one significant differentiator back then...

One other big differentiator compared to AWS, and the reason I went to Rackspace in the first place: straightforward pricing. Figuring out how much an AWS machine was going to cost was, back then at least, like trying to figure out how much it'd cost to buy a hundred Yen next Monday, for someone who has no experience with currency markets. Amazon's pricing was very complex, but with Rackspace, it was easy for me to tell how much a month would cost for what I needed.

> if a customer asks for help resolving problems with Sendgrid (a competing email sending service), Rackspace support people will gladly assist... I was blown away by that, customer gets help with whatever they feel like getting it.

While the uptime and performance of the machines I have on Rackspace has been great, the "fanatical support" claim is empty marketing B.S. in my personal experience. A year ago, I had a machine's performance tank while my startup's traffic started to simultaneously ramp up. It turned out there was another host on the same machine slurping too much disk resources, they moved it away. That improved things some, but I ended up needing an expert to take a look at my Apache configuration. I begged Rackspace to help. My startup's life was hanging in the balance: traffic was going up, and performance was going down. I desperately needed help from an expert, and asked Rackspace for help, and offered to pay. They did nothing for me.

I started researching it for myself, and basically trained myself to be much more of an Apache configuration expert over the next 48 hours. I needed help, I had money, I was super desperate, and they did nothing for me.

I guess the real problem was that I didn't need help with SendGrid, or perhaps I couldn't figure out the right people to ask.

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#46

Post by jnoller »

meritt wrote: post #43
jnoller wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Full disclosure: I am the PM for this project, a principal eng/manager at rackspace, and I believe in honesty] > Rackspace is a tarnished brand for me. I immediately associate it with ridiculous pricing and bad "cloud" (mosso). With closed eyes it refused to see the quicksand of commodity it built its tower on. You know what? I agree. Several years (4+) ago when RSC (Rackspace Cloud) came out I used it. My job was b…

My company hosted with Rackspace Cloud for nearly 3 years ($1k/mo average) but recently switched to AWS. Too much frustration and technical issues. My biggest suggestion? Drop your 24/7 support or hire competent people. We had to contact support numerous times (a point I'll get to in a minute) and the experience was infuriating each and every time. It was the equivalent of talking to Comcast's tier-1 tech support. Yo…

Thank you. I'll actually send this directly to product management. All of this is valid feedback. As an aside, the MySQL offering just revamped quite a bit recently:

http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-databases-introduces-enh...

So yes: we're acting on the limitations.

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#47

Post by jnoller »

unoti wrote: post #45
old-gregg wrote: post #34

Disclaimer: my company was acquired by Rackspace 2 years ago. I am a developer myself and below are my honest impressions (and things I have learend) of Rackspace cloud. Back when they launched it after having had acquired Slicehost, Rackspace Cloud was the only alternative to AWS and had one significant differentiator back then: the local storage on the instances wasn't ephemeral - it was permanent. The benchmarks a…

> Rackspace Cloud was the only alternative to AWS and had one significant differentiator back then... One other big differentiator compared to AWS, and the reason I went to Rackspace in the first place: straightforward pricing. Figuring out how much an AWS machine was going to cost was, back then at least, like trying to figure out how much it'd cost to buy a hundred Yen next Monday, for someone who has no experience…

You should not have had that apache problem and not gotten help. Period. That's unacceptable, and I'm sorry. We're working on it

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#48

Post by jnoller »

mikegioia wrote: post #31
pekk wrote: post #13

So Rackspace wants to compete with the EC2 Free Tier and get developers hooked on their platform. Those developers should consider how much they will have to pay after the first year. It's a pity that Rackspace is taking away its cheaper, smaller sized instances. Oh well - at least Linode and Digital Ocean still want my money.

I'm in the process of migrating from Rackspace to Linode actually. The main issue is, we run a lot of average-powered machines and the prices at Rackspace were too oppressive. It's $80/mo for an 8GB server at Linode vs. $350 NextGen Standard) or $233 (NextGen Performance 1) at Rackspace. Our data size isn't that large so I value redundancy and ~$750/mo for one MongoDB replicaset is far, far too much.

FWIW: For MongoDB replicas and scale out - I would recommend taking a look at ObjectRocket. I'm not kidding when I say they're the only way I'm using mongo in an application.

On the pricing: You are right; we are not attempting to be price competitive with VPS providers. We can discuss the difference between Cloud servers (in general) and VPSes as a whole, but they really are meant for different things and will always be priced differently.

Also, as of the 15th, that 8gb box costs $186.88 /mo for a full 730 hour month now. Of course, that doesn't compare to the Linode offering. But then with cloud block storage, autoscale and other features rolled into the application it's a bit different

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#49

Post by jnoller »

corobo wrote: post #5
jnoller wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not precisely - I'm the architect behind this and personally, I hate anything labeled free or trial - they tend to draw people in, yes, but they're often crippled or limited. What this is 50$/month for 12 months (600$) off your cloud usage. There are no support fees or minimum, you have direct access to developers here, etc. There are no limits to what you can consume, no rate limiting, etc. For anything you use - sa…

Is it possible to graduate from developer+ to the startups programme you guys run if the situation would allow for it (startups requirements met, all that jazz)? Obviously you'd hope to be bringing in enough to cover hosting by year 1 but out of curiousity really Edit: A second question, is it possible to attach developer+ to an account that already exists? Reason my account's a bit unloved at the moment is because I…

Yes, you could go into the startup program! See the last item in the FAQ https://developer.rackspace.com/developer-plus/faq/

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#50

Post by jnoller »

korzun wrote: post #27
hyperliner wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried Digital Ocean for these types of tests. Very cheap.

Yup they are cheap and fast to provision. I use and recommend them for projects but I'm still not sure about running production grade stuff on their infrastructure.

Since I'm honest: I also have a DO account for the things I feel a VPS is good for; IRC bouncer, little programs I just need a shell for, etc.
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