From its humble origins, Rackspace has grown into a global company with more than 200,000 customers in 120 countries and $1.8 billion in annual revenue. They have more than 5700 employees (called rackers) on four continents. However, Rackspace cloud servers have been facing aggressive competition from the big players: AWS, Azure, and Google, and even from some of the smaller public clouds that populate various niche markets. That competition, along with management changes and a sinking stock price have raised questions about Rackspace’s ability to stay in the race and survive the public cloud war.

Can Rackspace rely on some unique selling points while fighting off competition from both the giants and niche public cloud providers?

What do Rackspace cloud servers have going for them?

Two things: customer support and OpenStack. Each of these adds its own significant value.

1) Support

Rackspace prides itself on its “Fanatic Support” – a term coined back in 1999 by VP of Customer Care, David Bryce, to capture the essence of the company’s customer service philosophy. While not everyone in the industry will necessarily agree on the ultimate quality of the results, Rackspace aims to offer its customers more than “the basic break-fix support.”

Fanatical support is meant to make Rackspace’s team an “extension to the customer’s team,” providing customers with 24/7 access to the knowledge and experts they’ll need to get their desired results. Rackspace trains and evaluates their employees based on criteria designed for Fanatical Support and customers’ satisfaction and loyalty.

“Fanatical Support” is a product of Rackspace’s early focus on providing managed cloud services. Rackspace cloud servers deliver better value, the company believes, because the “highest performance and cost-efficiency come when you combine infrastructure with specialized expertise.” Relying on managed services can relieve you of some of the responsibility for infrastructure monitoring.

2) OpenStack (and hybrid clouds)

Rackspace, with NASA, is the founder of the open source project OpenStack, and the operator of the largest OpenStack public cloud. Enterprises that choose to use OpenStack on their Rackspace cloud servers will, by design, avoid the potential costs of vendor lock-in, because they’re always free to migrate to some other platform or even to their own data centers. And that’s no small consideration.

Building on OpenStack, Rackspace plans to position itself as number one in the hybrid cloud market. They believe that the traditional multi-tenant public cloud approach used by the giant public clouds is not necessarily an enterprise’s best choice.

How Rackspace cloud servers compare

Rackspace vs the giants

AWS, with their massive economies of scale and near-constant new feature rollouts, has announced price reductions tens of times since their launch in 2006, and Google and Azure are not far behind. Practically speaking, Rackspace simply can’t expect to go head-to-head with the Big Three on either price or features. Betting on Rackspace becoming a player in the mainstream general cloud computing market would, therefore, not be particularly wise. Whatever space they do manage to carve for themselves will, therefore, have to leverage their two core strengths.

Rackspace vs niche public cloud providers

“Niche cloud providers” are cloud providers who, like Rackspace, lack the resources and infrastructure to compete in the open cloud market. Niche providers whose business models overlap with Rackspace include CloudSigma (who, broadly speaking, wish to be known for better performance, simpler hardware setups, and flexibility), Digital Ocean (developer-focused and super-fast provisioning), ProfitBricks (the InfiniBand high-speed network connectivity), and SoftLayer (integration and automation).

Rackspace cloud servers run on a mature and reliable platform, but they face stiff competition from the industry. The company really has no choice but to focus on their niche and differentiate themselves through customer service and specialization (OpenStack). Joining the ongoing price war would definitely not end well for Rackspace, and it might well put them out of the race altogether.

In my opinion, the survival of Rackspace as an IaaS public cloud will depend on keeping their customers addicted to their “Fanatical Support” and on successfully marketing their OpenStack and hybrid cloud philosophy. Rackspace is already known for some SaaS cloud services like Microsoft Exchange, so there’s promise in focusing more on SaaS and PaaS. Niche public cloud providers compete with Rackspace cloud servers but they don’t greatly threaten their existing position. However over time they, too, might reduce Rackspace’s piece of the public cloud pie.

The post Rackspace Cloud Servers: Can They Survive the Competition? appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Explore the power and weaknesses of encryption

Welcome to the Cloud Technology and Security Alert News Digest.
This week we’ll explore both the power and weaknesses of encryption, the fully controlled future of cloud computing that OpenStack might deliver, and the Internet’s darkest, deepest reaches.

When encryption fails

Columbia University CompSci professor Steven M. Bellovin, in an Ars Technia article, observes that encryption alone is not nearly enough to prevent successful breaches like the recent massive theft of sensitive health information from the health insurer, Anthem. While encryption should certainly be part of a security plan, once an intruder has access to your system, the strongest algorithms known to science won’t do a thing. Instead, writes Prof. Bellovin, taking steps to secure your OS and account access should be given far more attention.

OpenStack: the cloud’s most disruptive platform?

Intel’s Billy Cox, writing on the IBM blog, Thoughts on Cloud, nicely describes the potential of enormously scalable projects like OpenStack to radically change our expectations in computing. The closer OpenStack comes to the reliability of integrated upgrades, rolling upgrades, and roll-back, the easier it will become for the enterprise to comfortably adopt new kinds of cloud deployments. And, observes Cox, the sheer scale of OpenStack makes significant and regular developments possible.

A new lock for the box

Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica reports that Box – known for its collaboration-centered online storage service – will now allow security conscious customers to have full control over their encryption keys. Noting that this move is, in a way, a contradiction to the value that easy document sharing gave Box, Brodkin explains that by connecting Box accounts to AWS’s CloudHSM, their new Enterprise Key Management tool might successfully find a middle ground between “open” and “secure.”

The Dark Web

You think Google searches cover a lot of web sites? Mark Stockley at Naked security writes that there might be at least as much of the Internet that Google DOESN’T reach…and, for our general needs, doesn’t have to. However, law enforcement agencies have an interest in peering into what’s known as the Dark Web – those sites that, intentionally or not – are not indexed by commercial search engines. The US military’s DARPA is developing a tool called Memex to intelligently (and boldly) search those places where “no man has gone before.”

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Cloud Technology Issues:  struggles between relational databases and NoSQL, VMWare and Red Hat, and malware creators and the WordPress plugin

Welcome to the Cloud Technology and Security Alert News Digest. This week we’ve got some interesting struggles: between relational databases and NoSQL, VMWare and Red Hat, and malware creators and the WordPress plugin, Fancybox. We’ll also discuss Minecraft in education and the opening up of IBM’s Watson.

The relational database strikes back

We’ve mentioned the shifting border between relational databases and NoSQL in this space before. Now James Bourne at Cloud Computing News reports that an EnterpriseDB-commissioned study performed by Forrester found a significant number of respondents reporting having trouble fully integrating their NoSQL solutions, while the capabilities of many relational DBs – and in particular Postgres – are improving the way they handle unstructured data.

Cloud technology, Watson style

ZDNet reports that IBM’s Watson, the cognitive computing system that, more and more, is opening up to developers, has now made its formidable speech-to-text, text-to-speech, visual recognition, concept insights, and tradeoff analytics available through the Watson Developer Cloud.

Minecraft as cloud giant in the education market?

Why not? The Minecraft gaming world is a mature platform with a huge and fiercely loyal, paying user base that just happens to present enormous educational potential. Besides the existing programs using Minecraft mods to teach kids programming skills, a recent Atlantic Monthly article points out that some educators are apparently now incorporating Minecraft worlds into a much broader swath of their curriculum.

The big boys are having it out in the enterprise cloud ring.

Cloud Computing News reports that Bryan Che at Red Hat isn’t impressed with VMWare’s new hybrid cloud initiative, writing that VMWare is not the ideal platform for architectures requiring significant scale-out (rather than scale-up) options. Che feels that a specifically scale-out cloud base like OpenStack would benefit from a more closely matched infrastructure.

WordPress plugin bug

Did you really think we’d go a second week without reporting some nasty exploit? If your WordPress deployment uses the Fancybox image displaying plugin, then you might just be in for an unpleasant surprise: Fancybox has a vulnerability that can leave you wide open for attack. ZDNet reports that WordPress has already removed the plugin from its own repositories, but anyone hosting WP locally and using Fancybox, might want to remove it immediately.

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Welcome to the Cloud Technology and Security Alert News Digest. This week we’ve got some strategic collaborations by the big cloud industry players that could eventually make a big difference for anyone using or managing cloud infrastructure, a glimpse into the enterprise service management software market, some analysis on trends in cloud deployments and, more generally, the shape of Silicon Valley innovation…and no new major security threats. Not even one!

What does the enterprise cloud look like these days?

Canonical has released its sixth annual Ubuntu Server and Cloud survey of how the enterprise cloud, including open source cloud tools like Ubuntu Server and OpenStack is being used. Continuing last year’s trend, more and more mission-critical infrastructure deployments are being trusted to clouds – often private – and more and more of those deployments are in service of increasingly interactive devices like those in the Internet of Things. Take a look.

Microsoft and Linux

Who would have thought we’d ever use the words “Microsoft” and “open source” in the same sentence? But the one time monopolist Redmond WA. The company has been partnering and actively contributing to a number of open sources Linux projects, including SUSE and Ubuntu, for some years now, and has made some of its own development tools – like Orleans – open source. What’s up? According to ZDNet’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, it’s all part of Microsoft’s plan to embed Windows and Windows Server into as much of the cloud as possible.

Think bigger

The next big thing in computing? Silicon Valley has mobile app’ed itself into irrelevance by ignoring all the big, world-changing opportunities that animate London and China. Or maybe not. Maybe Silicon Valley incubaters are actually quietly positioning themselves – the way they always have – to innovate in entirely new ways leading to unexpected change (and opportunity). Which is it? Read this fascinating article in Technology Review to get a better idea.

Service Management Software: poised to explode

Keep your eyes on platform-as-a-service providers of enterprise service management software as more and more internal enterprise tasks – like employee on-boarding – face automation. ZDNet reports on the entrance of ServiceNow into this rapidly growing market, joining Salesforce and Workday.

Google teams up with VMware

With its eyes on the enterprise cloud market, Google has partnered with VMware to allow for integration of Google’s Google Cloud Storage, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Datastore, and Google Cloud DNS with VMware’s vCloud Air. This will, according to Charlie Osborne at ZDNet, help Google compete with the Big Data giants, AWS and Azure.

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Welcome to the Cloud Technology and Security Alert News Digest. This week, we’ll learn about anticipating and planning for disasters, including disasters of the apocalyptic kind, about new legal responsibilities you may face in managing users’ data, and about a class of third-party tools for managing resources spread across multiple platforms.

The end is coming. Plan for it

David Gewirtz at ZDNet has a sobering discussion about anticipating disaster in the cloud. No matter what platform we use, our data and app deployments are always going to face some risks and we’d be fools to ignore them. What will you do if your servers go down for a few hours? How about if they disappear forever (and don’t think that’s not possible)?

User data: some strings attached

One of the nice things about cloud computing is the seamless connectivity it offers between providers and consumers anywhere in the world (and, soon, beyond). On the other hand, one of the really frightening things about cloud computing is the seamless connectivity it offers between providers and consumers anywhere in the world. Anna Brading at the Naked Security blog reports that the European Union is working on a new law that would require data protection compliance for anyone – anywhere – who holds data belonging to any EU citizen. Fines will top out at €100 million.

Just speak to your lawyer

…And it’s not just personal data: Security Week reports that Canada’s CRTC (the agency responsible for communications oversight) has a new law that could require explicit user consent before some kinds of applications can be silently updated. Read the whole thing.

Third-party resource management

Dan Kusnetzky at ZDNet brings the third-party hybrid and multi-cloud strategies cloud management tool, DivvyCloud, to our attention. As Kusnetzky acknowledges, DivvyCloud certainly isn’t the only product that provides a single interface to manage cloud resources hosted on multiple platforms (AWS, GCE, OpenStack, etc), but it is important for cloud computing professionals to at least be aware that such tools exist.

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Google Cloud Platform for Startups

Let’s start our review with Google itself. If your startup never got Cloud credits before, has funds for less than 5 Million Dollars and annual revenue are below the 500K$ threshold, then your startup qualifies for Google’s program, provided it is part of one of the many accelerators, incubators and VC funds that Google asks you to be in. All the biggest players are approved by Google (including its own Ventures, of course), and the list is getting longer day by day, so I guess that a number of startups is eligible for this free program. The 100,000$ credit your startup will get can be applied to any Google Cloud Platform service, and you will also get 1:1 technical architecture reviews with Cloud Platform solutions engineers and 24/7 phone support. This is a huge improvement since the previous program, which granted a way smaller credit, likely making the Google free program for startups the best one available around nowadays.

AWS Activate

AWS started its program for startups about 1 year ago, under the catchy name of “AWS Activate“. Since then, the program has changed a few times, and differently, from Google’s analogous program, it comprises two different packages: the self-starter and the portfolio one. The former is just mildly interesting, being mostly based on the AWS Free Usage Tier with some extra benefits like training and dedicated support, yet it is available to any startup with no restrictions. The portfolio plan is only available to startups in accelerators, incubators, and seed funds instead, and in fact, you can apply only through its AWS Activate Program Director. That’s the only requirements, though: so without the many limitations, Google asks for its program. On the other hand, you will get “just” $1,000 to $15,000 AWS Promotional Credit, up to 1 year of AWS support, training and dedicated assistance, also including some special “Portfolio” third-party offers.

Microsoft BizSpark

Microsoft’s program for startups is called BizSpark. Quite interestingly, this program lasts for 3 years instead of the just one from AWS and Google, and the startups can keep using any software they downloaded during their permanence in the program at no costs afterward. Unfortunately, this program grants you just 150$ of free monthly Microsoft Azure benefits, an embarrassing amount compared to its biggest competitors. The strong point of this program is the access to Microsoft software though, and not the Cloud services specifically, quite in line with history and tradition of the company, with the usual supplement of technical training and dedicated assistance. To be eligible for the program, your startup needs to raise less than 1$ revenues per year, being in business for less than 5 years, but there is no need to be part of an accelerator or an incubator. All in all, Microsoft’s free program for startups is probably the least interesting one cloud-wise.

Rackspace Startup Program

Rackspace has a program for startups too, and it’s the most obscure one, given that the dedicated website gives just some general information about all the features of this program. For example, it’s impossible to know what are the requirements to be eligible for the program. Any startup can apply, then Rackspace evaluates the application after getting in touch with the applicant, but there are no hints about what are the revenue, funding or income limits to be accepted into. Benefits are quite generic as well. Rackspace gives you hosting, mentorship, technical assistance for cloud architectural planning, git repositories, SDKs, APIs and other extras that are included in the package, but there are no clues about the real extent of those advantages, not even about their lifespan. Good to see this program around, especially for OpenStack-oriented startups, but some clear details would have been really appreciated.

The post How to Move Your Startup to the Cloud: the Best Free Programs appeared first on Cloud Academy.

OpenStack Marketplace aims to end confusion

 OpenStack Marketplace is probably the most important announcement of the summit: the goal is providing a complete online directory of all the distributions, tools and services offered in the OpenStack world by different vendors. From training to Consulting, the OpenStack Marketplace is the place to find solutions for companies and professionals. 

The OpenStack Distributions War

Every vendor involved in the OpenStack Foundation is now working with its own distribution of OpenStack. RedHat is very active and rumors say that the company is working with aggressive strategies to get more customers on its distribution. It’s probably only the beginning: HP has a billion commitment to OpenStack for the next two years and the same will probably happen with Oracle, now a Corporate Sponsor of the foundation. Canonical is already claiming its leadership on OpenStack.
Most of these vendors will try to be leaders in the private cloud space but it’s also very clear how some of them will use this approach to also offer a public cloud infrastructure. That’s the case of HP.

With more and more enterprises that are implementing OpenStack around the world, I’m expecting that this war will get worse in the next months with more vendors trying to sell their own OpenStack solution: at the end of the day, they will end up facing competitors like Microsoft, VMware, and Amazon.

OpenStack supporters used to say that this open source platform is the best alternative to lock-in oriented platforms like Amazon Web Services. It seems that the future could be exactly the opposite: with more and more vendors sponsoring their own distributions, it’s likely to become a world where you will get support from a vendor only if you are using that specification distribution. The first step to a lock-in strategy to retain customers.

How OpenStack will compete with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud

I think that the next 6-12 months will be the right time to understand if OpenStack will be a serious competitor for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google in the cloud computing industry.

My view is that OpenStack will be the most important technology in the private cloud market but will need more development and less confusion to succeed with a public cloud approach.

Training will be an important element for OpenStack to succeed in the public cloud market. AWS and Azure have already a solid base of developers that are learning how to use their platforms, OpenStack needs a similar approach that should be independent of the single vendors.

A recap of the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta

Let me finish this post with a video that goes through all the news of the summit.

The post How OpenStack is Evolving, a Recap from the Summit in Atlanta appeared first on Cloud Academy.

We are a company that aims to fill the gap between the number of jobs in the cloud computing market and the skills of system administrators/developers and DevOps that are trying to raise the bar learning cloud computing.

With this idea in mind we started our company with AWS learning content, but as I use to repeat to investors, customers and users, we are neutral and we are working hard to launch Courses, Quizzes, and Certifications on many other platforms.

When I read that PayPal will be one of the biggest users of OpenStack, I have no doubt that OpenStack is an important part of cloud computing’s future; it’s not about the hype or the religious conviction that we should have more platforms for private and public computing in the world, it’s also about real facts that I see every day.

In Italy, where I come from, we have already companies using OpenStack to serve public cloud computing services. Enter Cloud Suite comes to my mind, as well as Hosting Solutions (Italian only) and some others. Those are very small companies, less than 100 people, way far from being a 500 Fortune or 100 Fortune company, but still able to install and offer a cloud computing platform with a pay per use payment model and both computing and storage components.

Of course, if you compare OpenStack to AWS, the last one is still a kid in his early years: I’m personally seeing a lot of problems of OpenStack in production and several lacks from a security and management point of view that are scaring some companies when they evaluate it for their cloud computing platform. Don’t get me wrong, OpenStack has great management to create networks, instances and cloud object storage solutions (I was impressed by Swift and SwiftStack) but you cannot expect the AWS console and the powerful ecosystem of services, from computing to databases, that you can run on the Amazon’s side.

Usually, when you read articles about OpenStack and AWS, the writer confuses two segments: companies that are building a cloud computing platform using OpenStack (Hosting Companies, ISP and Telcos) and customers that are using AWS to outsource their workloads in the cloud. Those are 2 different segments, in a very different position.

Well, here I’m speaking about both: customers that are choosing cloud computing platforms based on OpenStack for the public computing as an alternative to AWS and hosting companies/ISP that are in love with OpenStack to start offering cloud computing services where the alternative would be VMware or other big vendors.

3 points: why OpenStack is a great alternative

Still, in this kind of landscape, PayPal will not be the only one using (and investing, don’t forget this aspect) in OpenStack for several reasons:

• AWS is a great service, the most advanced cloud computing platform right now, but it cannot meet every market and company in the world. In the IT industry, we have a lot of industries where Amazon is still far to be even considered. There are a lot of problems related to this: security and privacy are, of course, the most important barriers to adoption.

• In some cases, OpenStack is the perfect solution to build a public cloud for a specific country or industry.

• Even if it lacks a lot of features, OpenStack is becoming an alternative to the “vendors world” of VMware, Microsoft and so on. It’s about investing in an open source platform, on hiring people with development skills that are able to understand and manage all the OpenStack components.

Those are points that are convincing CEOs and CTOs around the world about the OpenStack adoption and sometimes, they are the same arguments that are changing how ISP and hosting providers build their teams: more DevOps and developers and fewer generalist sysadmins.

It’s not a product for everyone. At least now.

Canonical is doing a great job in trying to simplify how OpenStack can be installed and managed, and that is another path to the success of this platform. We can see clearly here why the number of cloud computing jobs is skyrocketing.

OpenStack: a problem of leadership

There is a great article that underlines why OpenStack is not running as it would be supposed to do. The lack of leadership is probably the biggest problem of this product: Matt Assay of MongoDB Inc. has a clear idea about this.

His solution would be Red Hat, but I think that could be just one of the many ways in which OpenStack could be more powerful.

Building such a complex product in a community ecosystem could be very challenging, it’s clear to me that OpenStack needs a leader that is able to put the ship in the right direction.

Speaking about more general problems, there is another big mistake that OpenStack is not trying to solve and that is, at the same time, the reason for AWS’s success. A community of developers that is totally in love with its cloud services. In OpenStack, this is still something to build from scratch and that could be a real pain.

Why not only PayPal

Enterprise is everyone’s dream. AWS is moving in this direction and OpenStack would love to do the same. PayPal is one great example about how one big company can embrace OpenStack, I believe it will not be the only for a simple reason: today OpenStack is the only reason and VMware and other players are still trying to understand how to move on this.

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