Rackspace Cloud Usage Analysis
December 10th, 2009 | Published in Analysis | 8 Comments
We’ve seen Amazon EC2’s usage. We’ve also seen GoGrid’s usage. In this post, we’ll take a peek at how many servers are being spun up by users of Rackspace Cloud Servers. In the State of the Cloud series Rackspace seems to be a close second to Amazon. Will the usage data provide confirmation of this? Let’s find out!
Quite like GoGrid, Rackspace Cloud Servers’ systems make the task of measuring usage quite straightforward. Server IDs are serial numbers and there are no hoops to jump through in order to make the calculations. I set about collecting samples over a period of approximately two weeks. Here’s what I found:
Over the timespan of two weeks 7241 servers were provisioned by Rackspace Cloud users. On average the result is 488 servers/day.
Of the three providers surveyed, the Rackspace Cloud retains its position in second place. While among the top-ranked public websites Rackspace comes in at a close second, in terms of servers provisioned the gap is tremendous. The Rackspace Cloud is ahead of GoGrid’s 181 servers/day but still a hundred times smaller than Amazon’s whopping 50,000 servers/day.
As I speculated regarding GoGrid, some of the difference might be explained by the more elastic nature of a typical Amazon deployment and the ecosystem of tools available for Amazon. I do suspect that Rackspace may be gaining traction at least among the sporadic development and testing use cases – simply due to their low entry-level pricing. I myself have found that if in need of a quick server with minimal demands then Rackspace’s $0.015/hour definitely beats Amazon’s $0.085/hour.
December 10th, 2009 at 12:40 am (#)
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December 10th, 2009 at 12:58 am (#)
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December 10th, 2009 at 1:45 am (#)
Does this take into consideration that the Slicehost IDs are intermingled with Rackspace IDs? I.e. boot a new node on Slicehost gives you ID 100, then the next Rackspace node is ID 101. If my understanding is correct, that is how it works.
December 10th, 2009 at 8:05 pm (#)
Alex is correct… the SliceHost IDs are inter-mingled with the Rackspace Cloud Server IDs so the data is a bit skewed.
December 11th, 2009 at 12:24 am (#)
Thanks for highlighting that Alex and, err, Anonymous. Rackspace and Slicehost are indeed intertwined, and some of the numbers can be attributed to Slicehost.
One could imagine that Slicehost is a monthly-based service and so overall there would be less spinning up and down of instances as you’d expect to see on the pay-per-hour cloud.
December 16th, 2009 at 7:29 am (#)
How about Joyent?
December 16th, 2009 at 4:55 pm (#)
@Scott – Joyent have a slightly different model which is not as pay-per-use and elastic as the others. (A while ago there was even some controversy on whether they should be called cloud or not – but let’s leave that :-). One does not spin instances up and down rapidly on Joyent but rather purchases an “accelerator” on a monthly basis.
December 17th, 2009 at 8:46 pm (#)
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