spack++

Thought I should get a little acquainted with rackspace so thought I would try my scripts and process from this post there.  The steps are similar.

Make sure you . /etc/profile, then you can try st stat.

The ubuntu set ups between amazon and rackspace are a little different, so I had to change my scripts a bit, but they should now work on both platforms.  I read awhile ago about rackspace claiming they were much faster than amazon, so thought I would put them to the test.  On amazon, my script (which pulls down quite a few packages and is a bit expensive) took

real    3m48.428s
user    1m9.970s
sys     0m1.800s


on rackspace

real    2m9.948s
user    1m17.100s
sys     0m7.920s

So, yeah, rackspace took 56.58% of the time that amazon did.  That’s a pretty real difference.  And the rackspace server cost 1.5 cents per hour.  That’s pretty much free.

Since this was my first time on rackspace, here are some general thoughts.

• Got a verification call after signup which I actually liked.  Guy was friendly and the call was brief.
• Haven’t tried the cloud tools stuff, but the aws console feels a little more mature.
• Didn’t have to set up keys or security groups with rackspace.  Back in the day, those things (especially the key) gave me pause on aws.  Course now I can do it in my sleep (nearly literally sometimes), but for a first time cloud user that might have been nice.  Might be nice to have an option for key based, and perhaps such an option exists.  Seems like you would want to have the security groups available but I haven’t found them in my quick browsing.
• I got to / had to give the server a name.  This is actually a nice feature.  Pretty easy to get lost at aws in their instance ids.
• A couple of the rackspace dialogs are a little slow to respond, so I ended up trying to start an instance twice but the second attempt failed because of name repetition.

If nothing else, rackspace’s openstack effort has now made them nearly a nickle from my testing efforts!

Enjoy!

Earl