It’s a little early in the year for “Pomp and Circumstance,” but don’t tell that to CloudStack. The open source IaaS platform this week graduated from an incubation project to a top-level project within the Apache Software Foundation. The project is now working on both its 4.0.2 and 4.1.0 releases, and from here on, users can expect a new feature release every four months, according to CloudStack evangelist Joe Brockmeier. As with previous releases, RightScale offers full support for CloudStack private and hybrid clouds.
Installing RightScale and Rackspace Private Cloud – in a Garage
RightScale’s Ryan Geyer, one of our cloud solutions engineers, likes to keep on top of the latest cloud technologies. While some people spend their weekends building model airplanes or puttering in their yards, Ryan likes playing with private clouds, and recently built a Rackspace Private Cloud Powered by OpenStack in his garage. Check out his step-by-step description, along with a photo showing that yes, you can actually run a private cloud in your garage. And when you’re ready to try it yourself (but maybe from your office) let us know – RightScale can help you manage applications in your Rackspace cloud.
Posted in Cloud Computing, OpenStack, Rackspace
Tagged Cloud Computing, Openstack, Rackspace
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Launch Application-Centric OpenStack Clouds with RightScale and Rackspace
RightScale just added more functionality for the Rackspace Open Cloud, which is based on OpenStack, the massively scalable open source cloud operating system. Now RightScale customers can take advantage of even more features for managing their Open Cloud Servers. Plus they can now connect to their OpenStack clouds and manage them through the RightScale dashboard.
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Posted in Cloud Computing, OpenStack, Rackspace
Tagged Openstack, Rackspace, RightScale
Overcoming Cloudbursting Challenges
One of the key benefits of cloud computing is that it gives you the ability to launch resources as needed to meet application demands. Some organizations that run their own private clouds are interested in leveraging cloudbursting, traditionally defined as an architecture where application workloads run fully in a private cloud until they grow beyond some threshold, after which the application tier bursts into a public cloud to take advantage of additional compute resources.
While this application-tier cloudbursting sounds simple in concept, you need to be aware of several important technical and business considerations if you want to leverage this architecture. These include bridging the inconsistencies among multiple clouds as well as dealing with the security, latency, and cost issues relating to communicating between public and private clouds. While there are approaches to addressing these technical challenges, many organizations choose alternatives to the traditional view of cloudbursting that focus on deploying workloads to the right cloud at the level of an application portfolio or an application service. Our Designing Private and Hybrid Clouds white paper provides more details on some of these cloudbursting alternatives.
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Google Compute Engine and RightScale Join Forces to Sell High-Performance Cloud
Last week we announced that RightScale has become Google’s first partner to resell Google Compute Engine. This news marks a milestone in a long and ongoing process. We have been working with Google on Google Compute Engine since 2011, providing input on its development and integrating RightScale — and that work just won us Google’s North American Partner of the Year for Cloud Platform award.
We were at Google I/O last year for the launch of Google Compute Engine, and we’ve been impressed with the platform’s power, building as it does on Google’s expertise at running global scale infrastructure. Although it is still in technical preview, we think Google Compute Engine is going to be a strong competitor in the public IaaS space, and RightScale can help customers get on board now.
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Posted in Cloud Computing, Google Compute Engine
Tagged Cloud Computing, Google Compute Engine
Integrate Windows Azure IaaS with RightScale to Improve Your SDLC
Whether you have a formalized process that’s tailored to your business, or you’ve chosen one of the Microsoft-provided ALM models within Team Foundation Server, or your process is seemingly ad hoc, it’s worth re-examining your software development lifecycle (SDLC) every once in a while. Integrating Windows Azure IaaS into your development and test process can help you deliver on-time and high-quality code. With the RightScale cloud management platform, you can integrate your existing toolset – TFS included – to build, publish, and deploy test environments with ease, reduce your on-premise IT overhead, and speed up your development and test cycles. This post is the first in a three-part series that I will be writing on DevOps. You can also join me for an upcoming webinar where I’ll present a live demo that will touch on many of the topics I cover here.
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Posted in Cloud Management, Microsoft
Tagged Cloud Management, Windows
Lessons Learned from Recent Cloud Outages
Outages happen, and they happen everywhere. Whether you leverage a public cloud, a hosting provider, or your own data center, infrastructure downtime is inevitable. Equipment breaks or does not function as expected, software bugs slip by, natural disasters occur, and unforeseen situations lead to unexpected consequences. Sometimes services are degraded and sometimes complete data centers go dark.
In the last few months a number of public cloud outages have raised the question of whether the cloud is reliable enough to run business-critical environments. To try to answer that question, we looked at some data points on recent outages.
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Thoughts on AWS OpsWorks Application Management
Since RightScale pioneered the category of cloud management six years ago, we’ve watched a variety of players large and small offer software and services targeted at some form of management of cloud applications and resources. We like to keep tabs on these changes, especially from the point of view of how new technologies affect companies’ choices as they adopt cloud computing. Last week Amazon Web Services introduced a new application management service called OpsWorks, which joins its patchwork of management tools for its cloud services that includes CloudFormation, AWS Console, and Elastic Beanstalk. While still in beta, OpsWorks is an interesting service and we’d like to share our thoughts on what it means for customers – beyond the fact that it’s a clear validation of the need for a more comprehensive management solution.
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Posted in AWS, Cloud Computing, Cloud Management
Tagged AWS, Chef, Cloud Management, Multi-Cloud, OpsWorks, Puppet, RightScale Cloud Management, ServerTemplate
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500friends Inspires Customer Loyalty
In this guest post contributed by the CTO of 500friends, Bob Tekiela talks about the challenges of launching a business on a SaaS platform and how RightScale is an integral part of his company’s ongoing success.
Customer loyalty is a critical ingredient of any successful business, but today’s highly connected world makes loyalty more challenging. As access to mobile and online tools such as product price comparison has become easier, customer retention has become more of a pain point for many retailers. 500friends, where I serve as chief technology officer, developed LoyaltyPlus, an innovative loyalty platform for retail industry, with some help from RightScale to manage the infrastructure.
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Posted in Cloud Computing, EC2
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What Is a Private Cloud?
As organizations look to building efficient, scalable web applications, they often turn to the cloud to satisfy their needs. Given that the leading infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Rackspace, and Windows Azure are best known for their public cloud solutions, it’s not surprising that some businesses never consider private clouds because they know too little about them. While public clouds offer similar security to private ones, and may be certified for compliance with HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, or PCI requirements, not all companies are comfortable yet with losing what they perceive as a level of control of their data. For them, a private cloud may be a first step toward “cloudifying” their organization’s data centers. But before they consider a private cloud as an alternative, businesses first need to understand just what a private cloud is.
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