Thursday, March 12, 2009

Rackspace’s Cloud Servers to Go Live on March 16, 2009 at US$ 0.015/Hour or US$ 10.95/Month Up

Rackspace’s Cloud Servers with .NET and LAMP stacks will go live on Monday, 3/16/2009 to establish a new low in on-demand pricing for Platforms as a Service (PaaS), according to Emil Sayegh’s Breaking News: Mosso | The Rackspace Cloud Announces Availability of Cloud Servers and More post of 3/11/2009 and Rackspace’s announcement at the South by Southwest (SXSW) 2009 conference.

The Cloud Servers page says “While APIs are the foundation of any cloud service, our Cloud Server APIs are not quite ready for this debut—but they'll follow soon afterwards. For an early look at our APIs, send us an email at cloudserver_API@mosso.com.” Here’s the advance info from the blog post: 

Cloud Servers provides inexpensive compute capacity that can be instantly sized to meet your needs, so you never again have to deal with planning and predicting lead times.  From the same control panel that you use to interact with Cloud Sites and Cloud Files, you can run anything you please on your favorite Linux distribution – Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Centos, Fedora and Arch. Billing is calculated on an hourly basis – not monthly – so you pay only for what you use. You can forever say goodbye to high hosting bills that cover what’s mostly unused, just-in-case capacity. On March 16, you can start your virtual instance for less than two cents per hour.  And, as always, all of our offerings are backed by Fanatical Support.  This means that we will go the extra mile to ensure that the network, hardware, and virtualization layer are running with no glitches, and that you can reach our fanatical technical support experts to help you at any time, day or night.

Note the lack of information about .NET/.ASP support or Windows instances. Cloud Sites supports .NET 3.5, IIS7 and SQL Server 2005, but starts at US$ 100/month.

Did Amazon introduce “reserved instances” in response to Rackspace’s Cloud Servers?

The post also mentioned that Cloud Files emerged from beta yesterday (3/11/2009). Following is the blurb about Cloud Files:

Cloud Files, our scalable and affordable web-based storage system, is the first and only cloud service to leverage a tier-one CDN to deliver a complete, pain-free, hosting solution for storing and delivering media content.  As of today, Cloud Files is no longer a beta offering. We’ve tested the service time and time again, eliminated the need for weekly scheduled maintenances and added new features.  Cloud Files is officially ready for prime time, and it’s backed by Fanatical Support.

New Cloud Files features available today:
•    Chunked PUT requests
•    Increased name limits on Containers/Objects
•    JSON/XML list output
•    Pseudo-nested folders/directories
•    Ruby API

Click here to see Cloud Files in action.

Note that the Mosso trademark appears to have moved to the back burner.

More will follow on 3/16/2008 or when I get more details on the Cloud Servers APIs, whichever is sooner.

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