December and January have been bad for performance from our perspective. Between January 2009 and early November 2009 we’d been happy with performance (and it did well on a large Halloween site (halloween.com), without hiccups that our DQC server had in 2008). See the first two links below give a pretty good overview of the recent issues - TechCrunch was quite unhappy as are a lot of other people.
I am to the point of moving the site to AWS until Rackspace gets performance up. My understanding of the process is this for EE:
1. Swapping RDS addresses for the current mysql addresses in the EE config files.
2. Picking an AMI to use.
3. Customize it.
4. Uploading the content to a persistent directory and then moving it to the server or doing a sym link to that directory.
5. Getting an elastic IP from Amazon.
6. Build and upload the new AMI
7. After testing, switching DNS entries to point there.
If anyone has additional tips (e.g. a good AMI to use, whether to use a persistent directory and sym link or what?) or steps that are missing etc, I would love to hear them.
I truly think that Rackspace is trying, but I think the clusters in the cloud are over-sold or over-used (or have config issues?) and while they are attempting to fix it, it isn’t as if they can just switch on 500 more machines over night to fix it. All that is conjecture since they haven’t really given a lot of details which is frustrating. (If you look here, you can see even more, including the spikes in page download time in January: http://www.christianriley.com/2010/01/the-cloud-is-raining-degraded-rackspace-cloud-and-no-suitable-nodes-on-rackspace-cloud/ )
Anyway, these two links give a good overview, here is what TechCrunch said:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/18/rackspace-down/
and here:
http://strategyinprinciple.com/case-study-how-do-we-get-fanatical-support
Some other links that describe the issues:
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/01/14/performance-problems-for-rackspace-cloud/
http://cloudfail.net/category/rackspace/rackspace-cloud-sites
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=767
I’m also interested in Amazon EC2/RDS combination for EE. From what I read, AMI’s are configured to run Tomcat and work with EC2Deploy.
The EC2 core framework manages EC2 instances, configures MySQL, Tomcat, Terracotta and Apache and deploys the application.
Chris, what kind of issues have you had using Rackspace Cloud? I was thinking about that as an alternative option.