[toomuchtodo]

Don't lie. I had ~120 instances I had to juggle between 3 availability zones, and never were two AZs down/rebooted at once. Our environment suffered no downtime, as we had at least 2-3 days notice per AZ to move instances around.

Rackspace's handling of the situation was a joke. They sent notification emails out at 9:30pm on a Friday night, and then proceeded to do the reboots Saturday at peak traffic times.

[justizin]

Yeah Rackspace is hardly to be held up as a standard bearer here, they don't even _have_ availability zones.

We have around 200 instances, had about 59 reboot, and specifically were able to plan around these happening on different days.

We weren't super excited when the window seemed to go to 4h right before it started, but we were prepared.

I'm an ex Racker and I've told people high up at Rackspace for years that until they implement something like availability zones, they're a joke for any kind of production. Their philosophy, as is pervasive in the hosting industry, is that they have paying customers so whatever they are doing must be right. Obviously Amazon often also seems to act this way, but this particular maintenance was handled well afaict, and availability zones showed their value.

[toomuchtodo]

> Their philosophy, as is pervasive in the hosting industry, is that they have paying customers so whatever they are doing must be right. Obviously Amazon often also seems to act this way, but this particular maintenance was handled well afaict, and availability zones showed their value.

This could explain why Rackspace was shopped around by Morgan Stanley. They may be profitable now, but Amazon and Google are going to eat their lunch.

[hga]

Shopped around, with no takers. At last count it was reported they've given up on that.

[toomuchtodo]

Indeed they have. Now they're doubling down on their existing platforms (and also, OnMetal).

I think their best move would be to pivot to be a firm that manages solutions for corporations that refuse to move off on-premises equipment for whatever reason. Their CapEx costs fall away, and they already have a deep ocean of talent to draw on.

There are already large orgs that already do this, but Rackspace has the potential to suck A LOT less than they do at the same task.

[snowwrestler]

Amazon and Google are worthless to any company without a robust sysadmin/devops team, which is most companies in the world.

It's easy to get stuck in the tech-savvy bubble here, where most people can write code, pick up Chef in a week, and are trying to build cheaply at "web scale." Those people don't need, or want to pay for, support with their servers.

But most companies need some help to run a few servers for web and email. Rackspace is the only large hosting provider who provides that across the board.

That said, Rackspace needs to beef up their devops support, or they risk limiting their own abilities to grow with their customers.

[cthalupa]

> Rackspace is the only large hosting provider who provides that across the board.

SoftLayer has provided manged service for years, and was bigger than Rackspace even before they were purchased by IBM.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/14/whos-... (Ignore the 2009 - the post has been updated as of 2013)

[snowwrestler]

Plenty of hosting companies offer managed hosting as an upsell. You can't even get pricing for it at Softlayer without talking to a sales rep, for example.

Rackspace is the only large hosting provider who provides that across the board, because even their smallest cloud servers come with phone support. As far as I know, you cannot get phone support with an arbitrary set of cloud servers at Softlayer, or Amazon, or Google.

[snacksmasters]

Would you rather be forced to fly first-class or have the option to choose?

[snacksmasters]

Huh?

Elastic Beanstalk, OpsWorks, Google sites, Google apps, AWS Marketplace, etc..

Going by what you said about most companies, most registered businesses in the world are likely just looking for a single dinky site with a mailbox pointing @theirbusiness.com, definitely no need for more than a shared server. Google, Wordpress, Github pages, Shopify, and dozens of others make this very simple to setup and use. You said Rackspace is the only large hosting provider that provides this across the board, that is not true and they aren't even in my top 10 if I was looking for a provider.

For a single website that gets less than 10 visits / day with 5 html pages I was just quoted $75/mo minimum by Rackspace with some server management on my part.

[wmf]

something like availability zones

How is that different from a datacenter?

[res0nat0r]

With az's you can at least have some fault tolerance and not have to pay the outbound costs or latency associated with going across the wan.

[toomuchtodo]

AZs in AWS are essentially distinct "datacenters" from a logical perspective. There is no shared infrastructure between them; if AZ B drops off, as long as you have your data and instances replicated and serving in another AZ, you will see no downtime.

[mentat]

That is "in theory". In fact there have been region wide failures at the AWS services level, though none recently that I know of.