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July 14, 2009 -- Expanding the power of its Cloud, hosting services provider Rackspace Hosting (www.rackspace.com) has launched the public beta of its Cloud Servers API, offering users more control and flexibility over their "Infrastructure as a Service," as well as providing automation features such as mobile Cloud management with a new iPhone application.
A key part of Rackspace's portfolio of cloud services, Cloud Servers provides inexpensive compute capacity that can be scaled instantly, allowing businesses to pay only for what it uses as needed. According to Rackspace's Tuesday announcement, the open, standards-based API lets Rackspace Cloud customers manage their cloud infrastructure with greater control and flexibility. For instance, the API lets users write code that detects load and scales the number of server instances up and down, enabling various elastic scenarios.
"With the launch of our API, we're looking forward to working with our partners and the developer community to create a powerful cloud ecosystem which we believe will generate new tools and applications to make cloud hosting even easier and more efficient," Rackspace Cloud general manager Emil Sayegh said in a statement. "We see programmatic control as essential for igniting an ecosystem around the Rackspace Cloud. It's a key tool for generating the 'next big thing' in cloud because it gives developers the power and control to bring their great ideas to fruition."
Before the Cloud Servers API, customers could only interact with Cloud Servers via the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel.
Thanks to a new application built off the APIs by developer Michael Mayo, Rackspace Cloud customers will be able to manage their Cloud Servers or Cloud Files accounts instantly on their iPhones. The application is set to hit the App Store within a month.
"It's been a great experience to collaborate with the Rackspace Cloud team on the development of the Cloud Servers API," stated Michael Mayo, iPhone application developer. "Working together with the Rackspace team enabled me to develop my application much more quickly. I'm very pleased with the open feedback process as it makes my work a lot easier."
Launched earlier this year, Cloud Servers provides server capacity to businesses of all sizes, leveraging key technology developed by virtualization hosting provider Slicehost, which Rackspace bought in October 2008.
Aside from its technical advances, Rackspace was also recently thrust into the spotlight when part of its Dallas-Fort Worth data center was hit by a 45 minute outage at the end of June, which attracted the attention of not only tech pundits and bloggers, but also more traditional celebrities including pop singer Justin Timberlake, who posted a Twitter message about the web hosting outage. A week later, Rackspace had another power outage at the same data center, leaving customers without network access for only a brief period of time.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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