
Welcome to Performance Cloud Servers – Have Some Benchmarks - jnoller
http://developer.rackspace.com/blog/welcome-to-performance-cloud-servers-have-some-benchmarks.html
======
bhauer
Very nice! The improved performance in the reworked architecture is
impressive.

> _Pick a language framework, pick a web framework, heck, pick a web server or
> entire application we can throw apachebench at with one of the 120GB
> monsters we have and we’ll put it together_

We've asked Rackspace to run our suite and the introduction [1] still contains
the following sentence: "How does EC2 compare to, say, Rackspace Cloud? We
don't have the data now, but if you have a Rackspace Cloud account and are
willing to run the full test suite, we'd like to be able to render that here."

We'd love to see Rackspace _Performance_ Cloud as another hardware tab
alongside our current i7 and EC2 results.

Separately, we had a contributor who put together some Windows Azure scripts
but we've not heard from him for a while and I think we need someone else to
volunteer to pick that up.

[1]
[http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=intro](http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=intro)

~~~
jnoller
Let me look into what can be done - I had been looking at your github repo,
which Performance Cloud instance would be equivalent to your i7 results?

~~~
bhauer
Excellent. I don't mean to put you on the spot. :) But I did figure this was
an opportunity to ping Rackspace again in case you might be interested in
running our test suite on your virtual servers.

The i7 hardware we test on is just our workstations, which are _possibly_
similar to your Performance 1 8GB, but you would probably be able to map it
more accurately. Specifically, they are Sandy Bridge i7-2600Ks with 8GB of
memory.

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oasisbob
As much as I love to see Rackspace roll out more highly-performing cloud
servers, as a customer I'd rather see stability improvements to their core
systems.

Their current ("next-gen") cloud offering has had serious noisy-neighbor
issues with networking performance, and the maintenance to attempt and resolve
these issues architecturally caused some serious pain during two consecutive
maintenance windows. ( Hour+ downtime for dozens of nodes. )

Management API availability and reliability also leaves a lot to be desired.

~~~
jnoller
This deserves a post of its own - but what you're saying has been a major
focus for our product teams. I can say that reliability, performance, build
times, etc have been greatly improved. Let me check with the team to see what
I can discuss externally. Drop me a line: jesse.noller@rackspace.com if you
have additional feedback

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gtaylor
This is definitely a nice improvement, but it's hard for me to get excited
about it since it isn't available on the lower end. I'd be all over this if I
could get a 1-2GB VM with the extra speed, though I understand that Rackspace
is probably more interested in the larger customers first.

Something I think that Linode has done really well with is making these next-
gen type upgrades available across their entire range of instance sizes. EC2
and Rackspace both created a separate (expensive) tier that you have to buy
into, whereas with Linode I just woke up one morning and had 2x the RAM, 2xThe
cores, better disk speed, etc.

Different companies, different strategies, but I do wish some of these new
instance types would trickle down.

~~~
jnoller
We still have the 1&2 GB flavor types - (1,2,4,8GB), quoting my post:

"We eliminated the lowest end flavor (512) and will start with the
competitively priced the 1GB flavor, while drastically increasing its
performance from the previous 1 GB offering (we have charts!). This means that
the price per month for a 1GB instance is now $29.20/Month ($0.04/Hr). All
together? The performance you get for the new prices across all of the
Performance Cloud Server flavors is amazingly competitive and a great
improvement to the Rackspace portfolio."

~~~
gtaylor
I do hope the 1&2 GB types have seen performance boosts, because at $30 and
$60/month respectively, you're a bit above Linode, which is pretty
performance-focused. Without very good performance from this "Performance 1"
tier, I suspect you'll further lose the lower end market. Though I get the
perception that Rackspace isn't interested in the lower end market, given the
prices for some of the higher end VMs and the dedicated boxes.

Are these charts on the previous and current performance for the 1&2GB
instances visible somewhere?

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jnoller
I'll be around all day to answer questions, or better yet - merge things into
the repo to run, execute more tests, etc. I have to hand it to plot.ly - they
definitely make charting... addictive.

~~~
larrys
How long will existing customers be able to get the previous low end VPS
(+-16/month)?

Are they grandfathered at that pricing? And for how long?

Can new customers even get that low end server today?

The blog post says "eventually" but some others have pointed out that the
pricing is missing today.

~~~
jnoller
Existing and new customers will continue to have access to the Standard flavor
class Cloud Servers - the price will continue at the current prices you pay
today for the Standard class. At a point in the future we will stop offering
the Standard flavor class for new accounts, but have not finalized on a date
for that yet.

Today, the Performance flavors are available in IAD only (additional regions
coming soon). The Standard flavors continue to be available in all regions
(IAD, ORD, DFW, SYD, HKG)

See also:
[http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/11/05/racks...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/11/05/rackspaces-
new-powerhouse-cloud-rolls-out/) for a good review.

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rowofpixels
"... completely re-engineered from the ground up to deliver..." has to be one
of the most overused marketing phrases in technology. As if redoing everything
is always a good thing.

That aside, I'll have to give them a test run. I was happy with rackspace
cloud servers before I switched to linode and now digital ocean. The only
thing that has had me switching is pricing, but if these perform well, I may
use them for certain applications. I'd love for a 3rd party to benchmark these
vs digital ocean so we can compare price and performance.

~~~
jnoller
You should (using the methodology and scripts/notes) be able to run the same
comparisons yourself: let me know if I omitted anything that would prevent you
from running the same tests.

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samirk
Very interesting, but how does this compare with other providers out there?

~~~
jnoller
Personally; I'll leave that up to others - as a Rackspace employee, I'm more
focused on improving what we do, how we do it, and what we offer and being
transparent about that than with direct comparisons to other competitors (real
and perceived).

Ideally I want to get the code in place to empower others to run the same set
of tests on the host of their choice, but I personally won't participate -
just like the fact we don't comment on, or take advantage of others'
downtime[1], I don't want to get in a shooting match, especially as I
represent one of the vendors, and can be accused of bias.

[1]:
[https://github.com/rackspace/social_media_guidelines/blob/ma...](https://github.com/rackspace/social_media_guidelines/blob/master/Rackspace_Social_Media_Playbook.md)

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kephra
My tests with rackspace old servers showed that they are slow as hell, if
compared with my Euro4/month Xen server at Ingate. I dont know how they
managed to cripple Xen, to be worse the VZ, but they did.

The new so called performance cloud servers are in a price range, that calls
for a dedicated server at Hetzner or OVH.

Sorry, no bounty: Xen should be cheaper then dedicated, and not crippled. I
wont recommend Rackspace. Not even to my competition.

~~~
kordless
I don't think a claim like this holds much weight until you run the tests and
compare the new servers to other offerings. I understand you did tests on
their older virtualized servers and are applying some type of logic to those
results to claim the new servers are 'crippled'. Unfortunately, until you run
the tests on the new servers, and are transparent about how you conducted
those tests, it's unlikely your recommendations will be fair and balanced.

I'd be interested in how you test your servers and what methodology you use to
make comparisons in performance and pricing. It's an issue everyone in the
industry will need to address as compute moves toward becoming commodity.

~~~
kephra
I had been testing Rackspace servers with real life applications, e.g Modx,
Magento or Wordpress. And rackspace had been several times slower than my
Ingate Euro4/month Xen system. Both in terms of CPU performance (wondering how
to cripple this) and even worse in terms of bandwidth.

About pricing: $5-$20 is a good price range for Xen. $25-$100 is a good range
for dedicated servers. $100++ calls for colocation. The 'cheapest' of your
performance servers compares to a cheap Hetzner or S4U dedicated server, that
allows to run Linux Containers.

And most important: !NEVER! bundle hosting contract with domain name contract,
so you can switch easily, if your site hits traffic.

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boobear19
Not sure if it's just me, however the new servers are not appearing in `nova
flavor-list` as described in the article (only standard servers are).

~~~
jnoller
Change your region to IAD - I'm amending the post now.

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Justin_K
I have a next gen server and am in the control panel - I can't see anywhere to
create a new performance server or convert my existing next gen to
performance. Am I missing something?

My current server is Win 2008 1GB.

~~~
jnoller
Swap to the IAD region - I just pushed notes on rollout and availability to
the post.

~~~
Justin_K
There it is - Guess I'll wait till it makes it to DFW. When you roll out to
the other regions, will there be a simple upgrade / migration path?

~~~
jnoller
Migration is documented; I'd love to make this process easier, but the disk
sizing is problematic

[http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/migrating-...](http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/migrating-
to-a-performance-cloud-server)

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ye
Your pricing is insane, especially considering you provide vCPUs. I don't see
why I would choose your servers over, let's say, Hetzner or Linode.

~~~
moe
Seconded. These prices are ridiculous even by cloud-standards.

$2000/mo for a 60G box...

For that money you can _buy_ an equivalent server every month.

And don't get me started on $4000/mo for 120G, that's almost _two_ equivalent
servers. Every month.

~~~
bsenftner
Don't buy into the cloud hype. Buy your own servers and colocate. In less than
a year, I've been able to build up a server rack at my colo by purchasing for
pennies on the dollar lease-expired top of the line servers: 16 cores minimum
& 32 gigs ram minimum, for usually around $100. They are all reliable servers,
which I clean up and rack. Today, I offer hosting as a side business with $200
per month providing the equal to what RackSpace's Performance servers offer in
triplicate: dev, hosting & staging, with git migration and programmatic file
synchronization between them. For the "critical" pieces and parts I've custom
designed and built heavy iron servers that are simply not available anywhere.
Why be a drop in someone else's cloud when you can easily create your own
entire sky?

~~~
TY
If you don't mind sharing, where do you buy such servers for around $100? I'm
thinking about setting up a home lab...

~~~
bsenftner
I know people who manage server farms for medium to large companies. They
lease their servers, and when the lease is over you can often directly contact
the lessor and learn they have a room of such servers just collecting dust.
Likewise, my colo has customers who abandon accounts - leaving perfectly fine
hardware behind. Just keeping one's eyes and ears open for the opportunities
pays off.

