A Look At The New Rackspace Cloud
by Mike
I have been very lucky to be included in the first rollout of the new rackspace cloud and while it has been live (to me) for a few days, I have only just had a few minutes to have a play with it.
First the good stuff…
We have a new control panel which seems to be quite a bit more responsive than the old panel, all Ajax-y and everything…
[caption id=”attachment_118” align=”aligncenter” width=”500” caption=”The new control panel is all Ajax-y”]
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This isn’t the only new thing, under the hood we now have IPv6 support (it seems as standard) for any new servers created via the new system and both the IPv6 address and the ServiceNet address are shown in your server details.
This is a big improvement over IPv6 support only being available via the LoadBalancer service or via a 6to4 tunnel.
[caption id=”attachment_119” align=”aligncenter” width=”263” caption=”Native IPv6 Support on a freshly provisioned Rackspace CloudServer on the new cloud”]
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I haven’t had that much time to play so far, but a couple of things jump out at me. The ServiceNet between this new server and my existing Rackspace CloudServers wouldn’t allow the two to communicate even though they are both supposed to be US CloudServers. This could be an isolated fault or down to the way they are provisioned (my guess would be that the ServiceNet on these Next-gen CloudServers aren’t connected to the legacy CloudServers ServiceNet)
The second thing that was implied (but I haven’t tested so far) is that to provision servers on the Next-gen cloud you need to use the updated API. I will be testing this in the coming couple of weeks as I rewite some of my provisioning tools.
[Edit: Another thing that seems to be missing is access to diagnostic tools. You can’t see the load of the host server, ping your server or access the console from the new control panel. This might end up being one of the real lows of the migration if they don’t add them in soon… ]
If anyone has any concrete info or additional thoughts then please comment or drop me a line at mike at technomonk dot com.
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