Scientific Revolution by ~pod-tanwen on deviantART

Those of us who had our adolescence peppered with the invention of the x86 processor, who gamed away our grade-school years on the Atari 2600 and watched Nintendo become the new heavy-weight champ of the console world with the invention of the original NES – we have spent the majority of our teen and young adult lives in the middle of the Information Revolution. To be able to look up something on Wikipedia on our phones while on a plane gives me pause, and makes me think back to my parents investment of a not insignificant amount of cash in to a set of World Book Encyclopedias so that we could have “information at our fingertips.” It’s impossible to control, and we can only sit back and watch in wonder as the course of humanity is changed right in front of us.

In terms of economic impact, the Information Revolution makes the Industrial Revolution look like child’s play. The political machines of individual nations are still trying to grasp the full force of the barely-regulated globalization impact of the Information Revolution. (It may be this barely-there-regulation that has gotten us so far so quickly.) All of this, and the Information Revolution is likely still in the early stages of what future generations will look back upon as our awakening.

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Depending on your needs, Rackspace’s implementation of Cloud Servers is either better – or worse – than Amazon EC2. I happen to see several advantages that Rackspace has over EC2:

1. Cloudfiles images are insanely easy to manage, and any server can be spun up from any snapshot. This is so much easier than trying to create a custom AMI that it’s not even worth discussing.
2. The initial buy-in is incredibly low – a single small server will run you about $12 on Rackspace, while running ~$70 on EC2. Yes, I know that the hardware is basically apples-to-oranges, but we’re talking about initial buy-in here, not what $70 will get you. I can run a web server box and a PostgreSQL box separately for well under a single small instance on EC2.
3. The support – oh the support. Zip, zilch, nada on EC2… while on Rackspace – a human in under 20 seconds. It’s glorious.

However, I grew to love the idea of throw-away servers with EC2. Alestic, Ubuntu, and other well-known institutions provide ready-to-go AMIs, and we spent a little bit of time writing code that would take a vanilla API, run a shell script, and turn it in to whatever it needed to be in no time flat. We plugged this scripting in to our CI server, and would have a successful build of our production branch of code spin up new servers with new code, drop the old ones, and no one would be the wiser. (more…)