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Rackspace Developer+ Program

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Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#51

Post by kylestev »

korzun wrote: post #25
bsenftner wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really should take the time to learn how to build your own server cluster. The savings is exponential. The control is complete. The knowledge is priceless.

> You really should take the time to learn how to build your own server cluster. Not sure where I mentioned that I don't how to do that. But thanks? > The savings is exponential. For a lot of start-ups rolling their own infrastructure is generally a giant waste of time and money in both short and long term run.

>For a lot of start-ups rolling their own infrastructure is generally a giant waste of time and money in both short and long term run.

Exactly. Which is why people go to Rackspace: not having to hire their own in-house DevOps guy (which doesn't scale as your servers grow) to take care of their servers.

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#52

Post by hkarthik »

latch wrote: post #29
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…

There are thousands (tens of thousands?) of dedicated providers, not to mention the possibility of colocating. But here's the kicker, even if Rackspace was better than all the other ones and you were ok with paying the hefty price, in this not-so-new commodity reality, reliability and scalability is mostly a software issue, not an infrastructure issue. A lot of it comes down to getting a reliable messaging infrastruc…

> A lot of it comes down to getting a reliable messaging infrastructure in place (trivial).

Can you expand on this with some examples? We're currently spending a ton of time getting a RabbitMQ-based message infrastructure to work reliably in EC2 and I wouldn't really call it trivial.

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#53

Post by thrown_produce »

thrown_produce wrote: post #36

There is no mentioned about Developer+ anywhere in the dashboard, account or billing-pages. I would suggest that this and the time left is somewhere mentioned because I'm not exactly interested in paying a "infrastructure charge" for spinning up a few test-servers. Second, I signed up via "International Customer" and according to the Dashboard I can't create servers in London - the only Datacenter in Europe. I'm in E…

No reply yet from the "fanatical" support re: a simple billing/account type question.

Linode, whom we use but need a second cloud for DR, answers to these types of questions in minutes.

jnoller: Where in the dashboard can I verify that I have a Developer+ account?

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#54

Post by jnoller »

thrown_produce wrote: post #53
thrown_produce wrote: post #36

There is no mentioned about Developer+ anywhere in the dashboard, account or billing-pages. I would suggest that this and the time left is somewhere mentioned because I'm not exactly interested in paying a "infrastructure charge" for spinning up a few test-servers. Second, I signed up via "International Customer" and according to the Dashboard I can't create servers in London - the only Datacenter in Europe. I'm in E…

No reply yet from the "fanatical" support re: a simple billing/account type question. Linode, whom we use but need a second cloud for DR, answers to these types of questions in minutes. jnoller: Where in the dashboard can I verify that I have a Developer+ account?

Working on that: if you email me: jesse.noller@rackspace.com I can confirm for you. I run a report regularly that enables a developer+ right hand support drawer.

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#55

Post by wink »

So I just signed for an "international account" (and not UK) and my only server choices are the 3 US locations and HKG/SYD.

Looking forward to that latency :)

Of course it's not your fault, but if UK is the only sensible choice for people in the EU (and needs a seperate account), please don't call the other offer "International".

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#56

Post by thrown_produce »

wink wrote: post #55

So I just signed for an "international account" (and not UK) and my only server choices are the 3 US locations and HKG/SYD. Looking forward to that latency :) Of course it's not your fault, but if UK is the only sensible choice for people in the EU (and needs a seperate account), please don't call the other offer "International".

I agree.

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#57

Post by thrown_produce »

jnoller wrote: post #54
thrown_produce wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No reply yet from the "fanatical" support re: a simple billing/account type question. Linode, whom we use but need a second cloud for DR, answers to these types of questions in minutes. jnoller: Where in the dashboard can I verify that I have a Developer+ account?

Working on that: if you email me: jesse.noller@rackspace.com I can confirm for you. I run a report regularly that enables a developer+ right hand support drawer.

sent!

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#58

Post by snowwrestler »

jnoller wrote: post #47
unoti wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Overall I've been a happy Rackspace customer for years, but we've had the same experience with Apache troubleshooting. The support ended at whether Apache was up and running. Beyond that we were told Rackspace considered it to be "application tuning"--which covers all the important settings that are used to manage loads and secure Apache. Luckily a development company we had on contract had a great Linux admin who could help us out.

From this perspective Rackspace definitely has not performed a devops role for us. Network administrator? System administrator? Yes, absolutely, and great support for both. But devops is where the application meets the server, and IME Rackspace has stayed away from that.

I do see the reason for it--what does Rackspace know about our application? It's not fair to hold them responsible for that. But it created a gap in our professional support.

edit: words

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#59

Post by jnoller »

snowwrestler wrote: post #58
jnoller wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Overall I've been a happy Rackspace customer for years, but we've had the same experience with Apache troubleshooting. The support ended at whether Apache was up and running. Beyond that we were told Rackspace considered it to be "application tuning"--which covers all the important settings that are used to manage loads and secure Apache. Luckily a development company we had on contract had a great Linux admin who co…

I think support has to move up the stack to be remotely relevant to 2014 markets and beyond. This is my goal and why I'm running point on the dev to dev support. But to your point, on the 15th we precisely outlined what is covered on each support level:

http://www.rackspace.com/managed-cloud/

Fundamentally; support has to become systems level, and not single instance level, and that means gaining knowledge and expertise (which we have in house) about the nuances of a given application stack.

Re: Rackspace Developer+ Program

#60

Post by jnoller »

philbarr wrote: post #8
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…

So this is essentially a free 12 month trial? The problem with that is I don't want to sign up today because the trial will start from the day I sign up. So if I had something ready to go today that would be fine but I don't - and by the time I do have something to go I may well have forgotten about this. If this is an attempt to get to the section of the market currently filled by the likes of Digital Ocean (to name…

> So this is essentially a free 12 month trial? The problem with that is I don't want to sign up today because the trial will start from the day I sign up. So if I had something ready to go today that would be fine but I don't - and by the time I do have something to go I may well have forgotten about this.

Agreed, and feedback like this will help me hone the time limit and other things. The program isn't ending any time soon, but I hear you loud and clear on the 12 month limit.

> If this is an attempt to get to the section of the market currently filled by the likes of Digital Ocean (to name but one) then this might be the wrong way to go about it. Personally, I want to be able to start small (VERY small, like FREE), and scale it up as I get customers. Digital Ocean and the like are great for small but I worry that they won't fit if I need to scale.

Bluntly: It's not. I've put comments in other threads, but this is not an attempt to go after VPS providers. It is not an attempt to dissuade people from adopting VPS providers. A cloud server and the associated technologies is different than what a VPS typically offers, and is designed for different architectures. The costs and the way you build your application (should be/are) different.

> So maybe you could offer something cheap and small as opposed to the "big or nothing" attitude that Rackspace seems to have. If I knew I could start miniscule but go all the way up to massive with the same provider then that's a big selling point for me.

For me, ideally we remove the time limit. That's my goal.

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