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Rackspace is effectively dead as a cloud hosting platform

Could you elaborate on this? I'm genuinely curious and didn't see anything obvious to explain it in search results.

Well it's my own personal judgement.

I did ALOT of work implementing support for six cloud computing platforms (also MS Azure, which I did not mention above).

All of them provided me either with free or cheap access to their services - I was building something for the platform after all.

Rackspace started out with a developer program, which they withdrew as my project was coming to completion. I asked for more free/cheap developer access and they said no - it was going to cost me several hundred dollars per month (the base line cost for Rackspace) just to support their service. I thought "no thanks". I also thought that any other cloud provider that actually cared about getting people to use its platform would provide a free/cheap program for developers to build tools around it and support it. What I saw was that Rackspace just don't really care about its cloud platform any more.

How can a cloud hosting platform company take a cloud hosting product to market whilst actively selling support for its just-the-same competitor (i.e. AWS) and still be credible? Doesn't make sense.

I noticed at the same time that Rackspace shifted focus heavily towards providing support for other cloud computing platforms like AWS and also observed in the news some of their business challenges and came to my own conclusion that they have been defeated in cloud computing but have not declared defeat yet.

So it's just my opinion but I think Rackspace cloud is dead/defeated and will meet its fate soon enough, maybe to be sold off or something. Just my opinion.

Interesting. About 3 years ago I had a similar project - see http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts/original/ and http://stani.sh/walter/cims/ - but ex-employer decided they wanted to keep IP, so I haven't been able to open source it.

Never sign IP clauses, they're criminally unfair.

Rackspace was the only cloud provider that would rather have paying customers, and this signals you they're out of the game?

Rackspace has been taken private and sold; the company has refocused its efforts on its original mission: fanatical support. They are now selling support for the other major cloud providers. They still run datacenters and a public cloud but those mostly exist for their support customers that need them. They have basically killed off all of the cloud R&D functions that defined them in the early part of this decade.

Incidentally, NetBoot.xyz is hosted in Rackspace by a Racker, or at least he was when I worked there.

> Lets you do things like make RAM only Postgres databases servers, or run your web server applications purely from RAM without any login, for speed and security.

Holy crap, I've been wishing for this for a long time! Thank you very much for creating this!

Edit: http://www.bootrino.com doesn't seem to load.

Yes Bootrino is finished but I haven't released it yet. Some other urgent things have drawn me away.

I have not yet decided if/when to release bootrino - I'm not sure if there's enough demand to be able to do this sort of thing.

You can however have a look at Lunikernel.com which is closely related to bootrino.

I made Lunikernel.com because I needed a standard packaging format for tiny operating systems for bootrino to run.

Lunikernel.com isn't as exciting as Bootrino, but it's something to look at whilst i think about whether the world needs the ability to boot any OS on any cloud. Seems to me that serverless has taken the wind out of the sails of tiny operating systems and Unikernels.

I'm definitely interested in Bootrino, even if it was paid, heck I'll say it, how can I beg, pay or otherwise bribe you to alpha test Bootrino?

I've been looking at a cloud based project that is actually completely blocked because of a vendor who is focused on supporting a use case centred on a "rack and run" deployment method. Their entire stack is designed on PXE booting. Their software is actually a pretty huge enabling factor in this project so if I could PXE boot it on AWS this would be a viable project.

My email address is in my profile - drop me a note.

If you would be so kind please elaborate your complication on Softlayer. I am an engineer there and am curious.

Well if you boot a SoftLayer machine and format the hard disk and overwrite it with your own OS/kernel then Softlayer detects it somehow and has a major meltdown and reports it as a critical system failure and the sysadmins contact you and tell you not to do it anymore.