Sankasaurus

For doing anything serious on Rackspace Cloud, you need to be able to use machines larger than 2Gb of RAM. Problem is, machines larger than 2Gb of RAM cannot be imaged (or backed up) – until now. About a month ago, they announced the ability to snapshot a machine into Cloud Files. Today I decided to take it for a spin and hit Snag number one: there was no way to do an image on my new 16Gb machine. After talking talking to one person at Rackspace Cloud, I was none the wiser – Snag two was the lack of training for their support staff. After asking for the supervisor, he created a ticket for the approval for the terms (letting me know I would be charged for the storage in Cloud Files) and off I went. Until I hit Snag 3 – the “Images” tab for the server details still showed no way of performing an image. I was told to use the “My Server Images” and HORAY I could make an image of my 16Gb machine.

Finally the feature that prevented my company from using Rackspace Cloud, and instead using AWS, was fixed! Congratulations to the Rackspace Cloud team.

Another thing I learnt today is that there are two data centers for Rackspace Cloud machines – DFW and ORD. The first server you provision gets assigned to one of the two data centers, and which ever one it gets put into is the data center that all of your other servers will be put into as well. So if the first server gets put into DFW, then all of the other ones you create will be. That is until you delete all of your servers. Then once again, the first server can get put into any data center.

I am hoping that in the future, we will have a choice about which data center a server is provisioned in, particularly since it will help for geographical distribution.

I am pleased to annouce my very first open source project hosted at github. The project, called Rackspace Cloud PHP Library is a simple, single PHP file to easily make Cloud Server API calls. Rackspace have not yet released any libraries for their API, possibly because it is still kind of in beta. If they do, I believe there will be of little use for my project, but right now, it has value.

So what was my motivation for this?

Well the Rackspace Cloud Management Console is severly lacking in features. Things such as creating an image of a server (just like you can in AWS EC2), and sharing an IP address between servers (something you cannot do in EC2 – an IP address can only be attached to a single instance at a time). It is this second feature that I am most interested in because it means I can use a virtual IP address (floating IP) to create a HA (highly available) “cluster” of Tomcat servers. I plan on using keepalived to do the IP switching, and Apache with mod_proxy_balancer and mod_proxy_ajp to talk to multiple Tomcat servers. Without reading the poorly written API documention and learning that I could create a shared IP group, I would not have known this was possible.

This project is very much a work in progress, and what is in there now represents only about 8 hours of work. I welcome any feedback, and anyone else who wants to join.