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[Full disclosure: I am the PM for this project, a principal eng/manager at rackspace, and I believe in honesty] > Rackspace is a tarnished brand for me. I imme

by jnoller 12y ago

[Full disclosure: I am the PM for this project, a principal eng/manager at rackspace, and I believe in honesty] > Rackspace is a tarnished brand for me. I immediately associate it with ridiculous pricing and bad "cloud" (mosso). With closed eyes it refused to see the quicksand of commodity it built its tower on. You know what? I agree. Several years (4+) ago when RSC (Rackspace Cloud) came out I used it. My job was breaking the limits of cloud providers, and I did my job quite well. I was unimpressed with the cost and what I saw. But - as old-gregg said much more eloquently; things have changed. From OnMetal to OpenStack, we've improved in capabilities, understanding the developer and hacker markets (my job, basically) and you're actually probably representative of the precise group of users I built this program for because this type of feedback, raw, unfiltered about technical capabilities and failings is what we need. As someone on the inside now, I am proud to see the changes - the Managed Cloud launch was all about finally making the public statement "here are the infrastructure prices and here is the support you get". It's a clarifying move but a fundamental shift from the bundled pricing you had several weeks ago. For example, when I went to developer events, people would ask me "do you have a cloud" - Yes I would say, and it has all these great features and capabilities and heck, we can do crazy topologies that mix dedicated gear with cloud stuff. People would be excited... Then pricing would come up: and I would have to write down the prices and then explain that those prices included support - from 24x7 phone, to everything else you can imagine. But that triggers the uncanny valley when talking to developers as you probably know. So now, here we are: we've separated our the cost of support from infrastructure. Our infrastructure prices are competitive with other providers (we lowered compute pricing for example), and now I have a channel with developer+ to try to win back - or get that raw feedback I need to make our products much better. developer+ isn't evil, it's not got crazy ulterior motives: it is us saying developers are important, and we haven't done well for them. I want you to sign up, I want you to try the services, SDKs, Docs, dev portal for a spin. If it sucks, or there are bugs, I want to know directly from you. In my mind, rebuilding a brand is much like rebuilding a relationship. It takes time, energy, honesty, candidness to regain trust. And I'm saying we're here to do that. I can't promise everything is perfect, or we're not without flaws. I can't say developer+ is 100% to where I want it to be. But I'm aiming for that. And I would honestly welcome you and your feedback, no matter how tough that love is.

meritt 12y ago
My company hosted with Rackspace Cloud for nearly 3 years ($1k/mo average) but recently switched to AWS. Too much frustration and technical issues. My biggest suggestion? Drop your 24/7 support or hire competent people. We had to contact support numerous times (a point I'll get to in a minute) and the experience was infuriating each and every time. It was the equivalent of talking to Comcast's tier-1 tech support. You guys would have blatant network outages and your "fanatical" support would be asking if I could ping servers (I had to point out the status page presence to them). We always had to waste time dealing with your ticket-jockeys before we'd get escalated and someone would actually solve the issue. I'd rather wait on a response than deal with an incompetent person asking for ping logs or suggesting I reboot a server. Your private networking at ORD was problematic. We had our internal subnet at ORD which would very often just straight up fail. Server A could route to B, but the reverse was not possible. It appeared to be some sort of ARP fuck up, I dunno. We ran into issues every couple weeks and most often would resolve itself by the time we actually got a tech response. Which of course was closed with an equivalent of "could not reproduce" Your MySQL-as-a-service is abysmal. It's running 5.1 (Do you have any idea how old that is?) and the performance is beyond horrible, I don't think the config was tuned whatsoever. Cloudfiles we routinely broke due to our write concurrency being too high (we were told you use sqlite?). This caused us to simply to manage our own software and completely avoid your pre-packaged SaaS offerings. Since we switched to AWS we couldn't be happier and with reserved instance pricing we're actually saving money (annualized) on a superior platform.
- jnoller 12y ago
  Thank you. I'll actually send this directly to product management. All of this is valid feedback. As an aside, the MySQL offering just revamped quite a bit recently: http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-databases-introduces-enhanced-support-more-database-types-larger-flavors-and-more-storage/ http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-databases-introduces-enh... So yes: we're acting on the limitations.
corobo 12y ago
> developer+ isn't evil, it's not got crazy ulterior motives: it is us saying developers are important, and we haven't done well for them. I want you to sign up, I want you to try the services, SDKs, Docs, dev portal for a spin. If it sucks, or there are bugs, I want to know directly from you. It's a marketing tactic. Unavailable to existing customers? Pure marketing. "devs are important unless they already have an account"

by jnoller 12y ago

meritt 12y ago

My company hosted with Rackspace Cloud for nearly 3 years ($1k/mo average) but recently switched to AWS. Too much frustration and technical issues. My biggest suggestion? Drop your 24/7 support or hire competent people. We had to contact support numerous times (a point I'll get to in a minute) and the experience was infuriating each and every time. It was the equivalent of talking to Comcast's tier-1 tech support. You guys would have blatant network outages and your "fanatical" support would be asking if I could ping servers (I had to point out the status page presence to them). We always had to waste time dealing with your ticket-jockeys before we'd get escalated and someone would actually solve the issue. I'd rather wait on a response than deal with an incompetent person asking for ping logs or suggesting I reboot a server. Your private networking at ORD was problematic. We had our internal subnet at ORD which would very often just straight up fail. Server A could route to B, but the reverse was not possible. It appeared to be some sort of ARP fuck up, I dunno. We ran into issues every couple weeks and most often would resolve itself by the time we actually got a tech response. Which of course was closed with an equivalent of "could not reproduce" Your MySQL-as-a-service is abysmal. It's running 5.1 (Do you have any idea how old that is?) and the performance is beyond horrible, I don't think the config was tuned whatsoever. Cloudfiles we routinely broke due to our write concurrency being too high (we were told you use sqlite?). This caused us to simply to manage our own software and completely avoid your pre-packaged SaaS offerings. Since we switched to AWS we couldn't be happier and with reserved instance pricing we're actually saving money (annualized) on a superior platform.

jnoller 12y ago
Thank you. I'll actually send this directly to product management. All of this is valid feedback. As an aside, the MySQL offering just revamped quite a bit recently: http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-databases-introduces-enhanced-support-more-database-types-larger-flavors-and-more-storage/ http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-databases-introduces-enh... So yes: we're acting on the limitations.

corobo 12y ago

> developer+ isn't evil, it's not got crazy ulterior motives: it is us saying developers are important, and we haven't done well for them. I want you to sign up, I want you to try the services, SDKs, Docs, dev portal for a spin. If it sucks, or there are bugs, I want to know directly from you. It's a marketing tactic. Unavailable to existing customers? Pure marketing. "devs are important unless they already have an account"