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Rackspace is effectively dead as a cloud hosting platform Could you elaborate on this? I'm genuinely curious and didn't see anything obvious to explain it in s

Rackspace is effectively dead as a cloud hosting platform Could you elaborate on this? I'm genuinely curious and didn't see anything obvious to explain it in search results.

andrewstuart 9y ago
Well it's my own personal judgement. I did ALOT of work implementing support for six cloud computing platforms (also MS Azure, which I did not mention above). All of them provided me either with free or cheap access to their services - I was building something for the platform after all. Rackspace started out with a developer program, which they withdrew as my project was coming to completion. I asked for more free/cheap developer access and they said no - it was going to cost me several hundred dollars per month (the base line cost for Rackspace) just to support their service. I thought "no thanks". I also thought that any other cloud provider that actually cared about getting people to use its platform would provide a free/cheap program for developers to build tools around it and support it. What I saw was that Rackspace just don't really care about its cloud platform any more. How can a cloud hosting platform company take a cloud hosting product to market whilst actively selling support for its just-the-same competitor (i.e. AWS) and still be credible? Doesn't make sense. I noticed at the same time that Rackspace shifted focus heavily towards providing support for other cloud computing platforms like AWS and also observed in the news some of their business challenges and came to my own conclusion that they have been defeated in cloud computing but have not declared defeat yet. So it's just my opinion but I think Rackspace cloud is dead/defeated and will meet its fate soon enough, maybe to be sold off or something. Just my opinion.
- contingencies 9y ago
  Interesting. About 3 years ago I had a similar project - see http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts/original/ http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts/original/ and http://stani.sh/walter/cims/ http://stani.sh/walter/cims/ - but ex-employer decided they wanted to keep IP, so I haven't been able to open source it.
  - nightcracker 9y ago
    Never sign IP clauses, they're criminally unfair.
- nikanj 9y ago
  Rackspace was the only cloud provider that would rather have paying customers, and this signals you they're out of the game?
chrissnell 9y ago
Rackspace has been taken private and sold; the company has refocused its efforts on its original mission: fanatical support. They are now selling support for the other major cloud providers. They still run datacenters and a public cloud but those mostly exist for their support customers that need them. They have basically killed off all of the cloud R&D functions that defined them in the early part of this decade. Incidentally, NetBoot.xyz is hosted in Rackspace by a Racker, or at least he was when I worked there.

Rackspace is effectively dead as a cloud hosting platform Could you elaborate on this? I'm genuinely curious and didn't see anything obvious to explain it in search results.

andrewstuart 9y ago

Well it's my own personal judgement. I did ALOT of work implementing support for six cloud computing platforms (also MS Azure, which I did not mention above). All of them provided me either with free or cheap access to their services - I was building something for the platform after all. Rackspace started out with a developer program, which they withdrew as my project was coming to completion. I asked for more free/cheap developer access and they said no - it was going to cost me several hundred dollars per month (the base line cost for Rackspace) just to support their service. I thought "no thanks". I also thought that any other cloud provider that actually cared about getting people to use its platform would provide a free/cheap program for developers to build tools around it and support it. What I saw was that Rackspace just don't really care about its cloud platform any more. How can a cloud hosting platform company take a cloud hosting product to market whilst actively selling support for its just-the-same competitor (i.e. AWS) and still be credible? Doesn't make sense. I noticed at the same time that Rackspace shifted focus heavily towards providing support for other cloud computing platforms like AWS and also observed in the news some of their business challenges and came to my own conclusion that they have been defeated in cloud computing but have not declared defeat yet. So it's just my opinion but I think Rackspace cloud is dead/defeated and will meet its fate soon enough, maybe to be sold off or something. Just my opinion.

contingencies 9y ago
Interesting. About 3 years ago I had a similar project - see http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts/original/ http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts/original/ and http://stani.sh/walter/cims/ http://stani.sh/walter/cims/ - but ex-employer decided they wanted to keep IP, so I haven't been able to open source it.
- nightcracker 9y ago
  Never sign IP clauses, they're criminally unfair.
nikanj 9y ago
Rackspace was the only cloud provider that would rather have paying customers, and this signals you they're out of the game?

chrissnell 9y ago

Rackspace has been taken private and sold; the company has refocused its efforts on its original mission: fanatical support. They are now selling support for the other major cloud providers. They still run datacenters and a public cloud but those mostly exist for their support customers that need them. They have basically killed off all of the cloud R&D functions that defined them in the early part of this decade. Incidentally, NetBoot.xyz is hosted in Rackspace by a Racker, or at least he was when I worked there.