Cloud Application Architectures

Rackspace’s Cloud Services

Rackspace’s Cloud Division is the umbrella group that builds and delivers Rackspace’s core cloud technologies to customers. By combining product offerings built at Rackspace, a few key company acquisitions, and its existing managed hosting offerings, Rackspace intends to provide a comprehensive offering. Customers can range from small startups in a complete virtual/cloud environment up to complex physical servers, and anywhere in between.

Many current Rackspace customers have begun to see advantages to using cloud services. By developing and offering cloud services within Rackspace, customers have the advantage of a single vendor relationship, fully integrated technologies, and, in many cases, performance benefits from having their physical servers located within the same data centers as their cloud services.

Cloud Servers

In October 2008, Rackspace acquired Slicehost (http://www.slicehost.com), a leader in the Linux virtual server hosting market. Mosso, a subsidiary of Rackspace, will be leveraging this technology to develop Cloud Servers, an offering similar to Amazon’s EC2.

As outlined in this book, an attractive use of EC2 is to move your dedicated physical servers into the cloud and replace them with virtual EC2 instances. Arguably, EC2 is more attractive to customers that need temporary computing power or the ability to grow and shrink their configuration as needs demand. Slicehost, in contrast, was built specifically for customers looking at less-expensive ...