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Rackspace vs. Amazon — the Cloud Wars

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-hear-the-music dept.

fdicostanzo writes "The folks at Mixpanel are leaving Rackspace's server cloud for Amazon and have left a little note about their reasons. There's been some talk that Rackspace's offering has not been up to snuff once you scale. Analysis suggests that Rackspace's offering still has some advantages however."

4 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Sometimes you need real hardware by jwthompson2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They missed the fact that RackSpace offers hybrid cloud options that Amazon just can't match at this point. Got IO issues? So did GitHub when they were running on Amazon's infrastructure. Know how they solved it? They moved to Rackspace and married the cloud for front-end with physical hardware for their IO intense workloads. It seems to me these guys may just be naive. They've probably only sidestepped their problems for now.

    --
    Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
  2. Re: by mark72005 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Interesting discussion. Perhaps more companies could make business out of their spare resources as Amazon does.

    Also funny, in the comments section with GoGrid.com trolling with a $100 coupon code. Way to sweeten the pot...

  3. Can't solve for noisy neighbors with horizontal by MattW · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You can't just keep scaling horizontally to avoid noisy neighbors. The problem is, unlike with cpu and memory, Amazon doesn't currently have a way to control how many IOPs one tenant has. You might even scale up from 2 "servers" to 4, and end up with the same neighbor because you're on the same underlying hardware. Plus, the issue is: it's not predictable. You might have great IOPs at one point, and then some other tenant starts consuming a bunch of them and there's contention, and your performance degrades.

  4. No mention of Rack Space Cloud Sites by phpsocialclub · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Rack Space cloud sites is true cloud hosting, You do not add servers, you just pay for CPU usage like you are buying bandwidth. It is expensive and you can not customize it, but it always works and scales to meet demand.

    It is not a VM, where you can install your own OS, Web server, etc. It is a apache server, mysql clustered backend and varnish cache front end.

    Great for Blog hosting, PHP applications, etc. We do about 8-10 million page views on it per month and like it for what it is,

    If I had staff that needed to configure servers all day, it would be different, but for hosting large dynamic LAMP websites, it is great and reliable.

    Andrew