The new buy, announced Thursday, will see the employees and assets of Exceptional Cloud Services, based in San Francisco, Calif., join Rackspace as a wholly owned subsidiary. This deal follows a similar acquisition of Object Rocket last month.

Exceptional has three sub-properties that got Rackspace interested:

• Exceptional.io – tracks errors in over 6,000 web applications.
• Airbrake.io – collects errors generated by applications and aggregates the results for review.
• Redis To Go – hosts the open-source Redis key value store for customers

Exceptional’s CEO Jonathan Siegel said yesterday that his company’s ideal customer is one which has end users who are going to have major issues if the customer’s application doesn’t function properly. Also the highest value of its products is realized by customers who have multiple clients, like browsers and phone operating systems, which need to access the customer’s applications simultaneously.

In other words, Web developers.

The next logical question, then, is whether Rackspace plans to integrate Exceptional’s IP with its Cloud SitesPlatform as a Service (PaaS).

Cloud Sites currently supports programming using the PHP and .NET frameworks, but Rackspace now has multiple properties that could theoretically expand the underpinnings of Cloud Sites, from MySQL as a service, the MongoDB NoSQL database, and now an in-memory database service in Redis To Go. Meanwhile Amazon, as usual, is the elephant in the room here; Rackspace is looking to edge in on territory – the next generation of Web developers — to which Amazon Web Services has already staked a firm claim.

I asked whether these acquisitions will give Cloud Sites a shot in the arm, and essentially got elevator music in response. It’s a fair bet, though, that Rackspace will look to boost its integrated offerings to reach developers to the extent Amazon has.

Trusted Advisor identifies cost inefficiencies, but also advises users of Amazon Web Services (AWS) on security gaps, high-availability misconfigurations and performance bottlenecks in their deployments. It’s available to users with a Business or Enterprise level of premium support from Amazon.

One of the users of third-party cost efficiency tools I interviewed for the previous article, Andres Silva of Inmar Inc., said he’ll probably use both Trusted Advisor and software from Cloudyn, especially since AWS is offering a free trial this month.

“Trusted Advisor now has things that Cloudyn doesn’t have yet, like security reports,” Silva said.

Two days later, AWS made the biggest cost-cutting move of all by reducing its prices for Reserved Instanceswith a Linux OS, in some cases by almost 28%.

Naturally, Silva was also happy as a clam about this, given his company is about to purchase some new Reserved Instances. However, those who have already purchased Reserved Instances won’t be so lucky — they’re locked in to previous pricing. Furthermore, commenters on Amazon’s post were also a little peeved about the lack of love for Windows.

This news came out less than a week after a price reduction by rival Rackspace for its cloud bandwidth, Cloud Files and content delivery network (CDN) services, continuing an ongoing pricing war in the public cloud that also includes HP.

The notion of using cloud-based services still terrifies enterprise IT pros, even though such services have advanced in both quality and variety for years. IT pros remain frozen by the specter of losing control of data, security breaches and random service outages. Some of these reasons may be losing validity.

In stark contrast to that fact, however, was the smashing success Amazon Web Services (AWS) had last week with re:Invent, its first conference  In the six years since AWS launched, cloud services have been increasingly embraced by start-ups and media delivery companies, along with a slew of forward-thinking developers .

Amazon executives, such as CTO Werner Vogels, a senior vice president Andy Jassey and founder Jeff Bezos, brought their value proposition to the masses in person. We’ve heard their case for cloud services before:  You can change Capex to variable expense, you can pay lower variable expenses, you don’t have to guess your capacity needs and you can have apps set up in minutes.

They hammered on traditional IT vendors, claiming the economics of AWS is disruptive to the HPs, Dells, Microsofts and Oracles of the world. Amazon is a low-volume, high-margin business and it’s not the game that the old guard can play, they said. They may have a point. With the possible exception of IBM, most of the long time stalwarts of the industry — many so reliant on hardware and more traditional services — have yet to present a compelling cloud services strategy that would make its largest customers disregard AWS.

For instance, you want security? AWS has all the standard security certifications, and the company can help implement them with a bigger and better team than you have.

But still, many IT shops have the same reasons for not moving forward.  They are risk averse, they don’t throw things out, legacy apps are hard to move and there are few examples of traditional enterprises that have made the leap. Amazon trots out its old standby, Netflix, along with more recent enterprises, including  NASDAQ, NASA, the United States Tennis Association, McGraw Hill and Novartis to name a few. Comcast, for instance, has been reinventing parts of its business using AWS, spending two years quietly refashioning its media delivery network.

Real enterprises still look for accounts they can relate to. At the conference, Amazon touted its prized new public customer Pinterest — not exactly a revenue-generating machine that supports a legacy back end.

And try to dig up a customer reference on the exhibit floor. One energetic marketing manager brightened when I asked for a name. He offered up Grindr.com. If you don’t know who they are, look them up. Hint: It’s not a competitor to the Subway chain of sandwich shops.

Not too far into the future, enterprises will absorb the cultural changes associated with cloud adoption. Amazon with AWS will be a winner, and some of its competitors will win as well. In the 1990s, we had the likes of Gates and Ballmer, Ellison and others, armed with “kill the competitor” strategies that generated high margins. This is a different game. For example, at re: Invent, AWS followed Google when it dropped the price of its cloud storage by 25%. The next morning, someone from Hitachi told me his customers asked, “Why does storage have to cost so much?” Is it getting hot in here or what?

In data-driven 21st century architectures, apps and processes must be automated as business shifts, as IT shops will be determined to not get stuck with hardware — and software — limitations. Security is integrated from the ground up. There are new attitudes. Failure is not an option? Forget that. AWS CTO Vogels says to regard failure is normal. Failure is always around the corner. Embrace it. It’s the new black.

The main thing is that if you are not constraining yourself up front, you will build more successful architectures. It will take more time, which is fine because this team, like another team from Seattle that forged new ground 30 years ago, has the long view. Amazon, and its competitors, look increasingly inevitable.

Margie Semilof is editorial director of the Data Center & Virtualization media group.

Millions of viewers tuned in to NASA’s website to watch streamed live coverage of its ‘Curiosity’ rover landing on the surface of Mars earlier this month and though it all went off without a hitch, a server outage or a website blip could have done some serious damage to NASA’s reputation.

It was an ambitious project to say the least, and NASA knew its site would be hit with possibly its highest amount of website traffic for those seven, nail biting minutes. So how did it ensure everything ran smoothly with so much at stake? The space program turned to SOASTA‘s cloud testing software.

The NASA and SOASTA collaboration came about as a referral, of sorts, from folks at Amazon Web Services (AWS), a SOASTA technology partner. And with an already hefty bill of $25 million riding on the project, NASA wanted an audience and wanted to guarantee that audience saw an uninterrupted stream of the landing.

Often, a company’s reputation and the contents of its wallet are at stake.

“When Knight Capital crashed, it caused them to lose $16 million per minute just because they were down,” said Tom Lounibos, CEO of SOASTA. “If Twitter is down, it costs advertisers $25 million per minute.”

It really is about anticipating failure — imagining worst-case scenarios — so that when the actual moment comes, companies are ready to face adversity and deal with it. SOASTA used its predictive analysis software, GlobalTest, to imitate traffic conditions on NASA’s website three days before the Curiosity rover launch.

Predictive analysis allows you to understand when something could fail and why that happened. “We are in the business of adding more intelligence to the process,” Lounibos said. “We go through a lot of what if situations with predictive analysis.”

Some what-if situations in the NASA project consisted of load testing to help understand what might happen if there is an unexpected spike in traffic, or when back-end services require more capacity. By doing simulations and observing data, SOASTA can predict the effects on infrastructure, a Web application and the database, so that companies can optimize a website or applications to accommodate these changes.

NASA’s biggest issue was it could not predict how many people were going to watch the landing, Lounibos said. “We were able to help predict how much server capacity NASA would need,” he added.

SOASTA also helped NASA prepare for a failure scenario by simulating an outage on a portion of Web servers and proving that failover plans were indeed effective.

“When you’re streaming for millions of people you can’t afford to have failure because there is only one first,” Lounibos concluded.

Fernanda Laspe is the editorial assistant for SearchCloudComputing.com.

In conjunction with the LulzSec raids on the Web farms of the body politic, the FBI seized servers in Virginia. This, of course, knocked out a number of perfectly innocent websites and services that were on the same servers as whatever the FBI was after.

This has happened before. In 2009, minor hoster Core IP was raided by the FBI and dozens of the company’s customers were suddenly high and dry. The FBI took servers willy-nilly, not caring who or what was hosted on them.

The end of the story is this: Core IP was, among others, implicated in widespread telecom fraud and probably dirty. All the innocent customers who hosted in good faith? SOL, according to the FBI. Whether they knew about it or not, if they partook of a service that was used in conjunction with criminal activities, they were on the hook.

That’s a bit bizarre to anyone even slightly familiar with technology who understands how multitenancy works and does not believe in guilt by association, but it has real world parallels — a distribution center being used for smuggling gets shut down even if legitimate goods are going through and everyone suffers.

But it does seem particularly awful in the virtual world, since incriminating data can so easily be identified and passed to authorities without burning the entire operation to the ground. It’s just so stupidly, pointlessly destructive that it makes the nerd in us grind our teeth in frustration.

Anyway, it’s either spite, pre-trial collective punishment or willful ignorance by the FBI, but two’s enough for a trend. The implications for cloud computing are clear, since they are almost by definition multitenant environments; host in public and you are at terrible risk from naughty neighbors. The whole thing can blow up in your face overnight, and then the FBI has all your junk. Therefore, private cloud is way to go, right?

Wrong. “Do not host with small-time operators” is the lesson here. Until the day the FBI marches out of Equinix trundling a rack or two or Amazon’s gear, I will not believe that this risk will ever touch service providers over a certain scale. The limit on that scale is an in-house legal department (or a law firm on retainer), if I’m not very much mistaken.

Much for the same reason they don’t sent SWAT teams to rich people’s houses, the FBI does not flash into Google or Microsoft or Amazon data centers and start kicking things over. They engage in protracted, legally sanctioned and highly specific co-operation with those providers, because the FBI does not want to dragged into court and possibly curtailed in its ability to abuse those without the legal resources.

When the feds need data or user information or evidence from MS/Google/etc, you can be sure that it is an employee of one of those providers handing it over to them. Hey, it’s plainly stated in most web services and cloud providers SLAs — “We fully co-operate with legal investigations” or something.

So don’t worry about this happening to you if you use Amazon Web Services or Rackspace Cloud. Worry about encrypting your data. And this certainly doesn’t do a thing to change the current calculus on on enterprise data security and the cloud (which is “MONGO SAY CLOUD BAAAAD!!!”).

Or instead, worry about what your lemur-brained development crew is doing on Amazon’s cloud. There we find a rich source of security delights, from crappy apps running in public to this little gem: The pool of publicly available, user created Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) is riddled with highly insecure, vulnerable virtual machine images, according to new research from Darmstadt Research Center for Advanced Security (CASED) in Germany.

Out of 1100 user created AMIs they tested, 30% were vulnerable to compromise right from launch. Don’t you feel better now?

Instead, what I heard was that Amazon not only does not disclose relevant technical information but it apparently also does not understand what customers are asking for. Potential clients were both refused operational security details and also told wildly different answers on whether or not AWS staff could access data stored in users’ S3 accounts: “No, never,” and “Yes, under some circumstances.” That’s, um, kind of a big deal. They also refuse to indemnify themselves against potential failures and data loss as a matter of course.

Typically, a big enterprise IT organization has a set of procedures and policies it has to follow when provisioning infrastructure; charts are made, checkboxes checked, and someone, somewhere, will eventually claim that information and park it somewhere. This includes minor details like “who can access our data and how,” and “how does a service provider protect our assets and will they compensate us if they fail.” A big customer and a provider will sit down, discuss how the hoster can meet the needs of the organization, assign a value to the business revenue being generated for the enterprise, and agree to pay that amount for any outages.

Everybody is aware of this

Even their biggest fans are somewhat down on AWS for this. Cloud consultant Shlomo Swidler said in an email that Amazon’s efforts to brush up their security picture, like the launch of the AWS Vulnerability Reporting and Penetration Testing program, was the right idea, but Amazon had neutered it by not letting customers use it in a meaningful way. “Without a way to test how things will really behave under simulated attack conditions — including the AWS defensive responses — I don’t understand what will happen under real attack conditions,” he said. The Vulnerability Reporting and Penetration Testing program can reportedly only be used with pre-approval from AWS staff, meaning it can never simulate an in-the-wild attack.

Others are more charitable, and point to Amazon’s track record. IT security auditor Andrew Plato was asked about the new white paper and responded via email.

“From what’s in there, they seem to be doing the right things. They’ve got a good risk management framework, good firewalls, monitoring, they’re following ISO and COBIT , They’ve got change management; they seem to be doing all the good practices that we advise clients to do,” said Plato, president of Anitian Enterprise Security. But he noted that all we had to go on was Amazon’s good word. ”The long and short of it is the content says they’re doing the right things — now, they could be lying,” he said, tongue only partly in cheek.

Plato isn’t worried about Amazon’s security. I’m positive they aren’t lying about anything in their white paper. Nobody should be worried; they have an amazing track record, but we’ll never know, at this rate, exactly what they’re so proud of.

The problem is enterprises are picky

Here’s the problem: IT does not work like baby shoes and garden rakes. It’s not enough to just deliver the goods. You have to show your work, or the IT practitioner cannot trust what you are giving him, at a certain level. All hosting providers know this, and they are proud to show off what they’ve done. After all, they’ve spent a lot of money to get best-in-class gear so they can make money off it.

Hell, Rackspace will drag a hobo off the street to show them around the data center, they’ll talk your ear off; you’ll know what color socks the hard drive guy is wearing on Tuesdays if that’s important to you.

Now, it’s OK that Amazon doesn’t work quite that way. We all understand that the amazing feat they have managed to pull off is to offer real-time self-service IT and charge for it by the hour, and that users are responsible for their own foolishness, and Amazon backs only access and uptime. Most of Amazon’s customers are more than happy with that; they can’t afford to care about what kind of firewall and load balancers run the AWS cloud.

But if Amazon is going to compete for the enterprise customer, and they are explicit that they are trying for those customers, they are going to have to get over it and spill the beans. Not to me, although that would be nice, and not to their competition (though that’s hardly relevant now since their nearest cloud competitor, Rackspace, is apparently $400 million dollars shy of eating their lunch) but definitely to enterprise customers. It’s a fact of life. Enterprises won’t come unless you play their ball game.

CloudAudit?

There are all sorts of ways AWS can address this without giving away the goose. CloudAudit is one idea; that’s self-service security audits on an API; it fits right in to the AWS worldview. Talking to analysts and professionals under NDA is another. AWS must at the very least match what other service providers offer if it is sincere in competing for enterprise users.

Robbins said Chris Pinkham, creator of EC2 along with Chris Brown (and later joined by Wiljem Van Biljon recruited in South Africa)was itching to go back to South Africa right around the time Amazon started noodling around with the idea of selling virtual servers. At the time, Robbins was in charge of all of Amazon’s outward facing web properties and keeping them running.

“Chris really, really wanted to be back in South Africa,” said Robbins, and rather than lose the formidable talent behind Amazon’s then VP of engineering, Amazon brass cleared the project and off they went with a freedom to innovate that many might be jealous of.

“It might never have happened if they weren’t so far away from the mothership”, Amazon’s Seatlle headquarters, said Robbins.

Now half a world away, Christopher Brown, who joined Pinkham as a founding member, architect, and lead developer for EC2, set about finding resources to test his ideas on automation in a fully virtualized server environment. Robbins, who knew about the project, gave Brown the interdepartmental cold shoulder.

“I was horrified at the thought of the dirty, public Internet touching MY beautiful operations,” he said with all the relish of a born operator. Robbins had his hands on the reins of the worlds most successful online retail operation from soup to nuts and wasn’t about to let it be mucked up with long-distance experimentation.

To this day he gets a kick out of the apparently unquenchable (and totally untrue) rumour that EC2 came about because Amazon had spare capacity in its data centers, because his attitude at the time was, like every IT operations manager in a big organization, was that there is no such thing as spare capacity. It’s ALL good for something and NOBODY gets any of it if you can humanly prevent it. It’s‘mine, mine, mine’ as the duck said.

Brown, therefore, grumbled up his own data center (not that that was a stretch for him; Pinkham ran South Africa’s first ISP), set to work, and out popped the world’s first commercially successful cloud, running independently of Amazon’s regular IT. The rest is history (the cartoon in the link is “Ali Baba Bunny“(1957)).

UPDATE: A factual error and the omission of Christopher Brown as Chris Pinkham’s original counterpart in the move from the US to South Africa has been corrected. I regret the error and unintended omission.

Amazon does not break out its AWS revenue, but its headstart and leadership position in cloud computing mean that any indicators on how this business is doing are a helpful data point for the rest of the industry.

So far, companies using AWS are typically in the high performance computing space, it’s pharmaceutical firms, oil and gas, financial services and academic institutions. Also, web retailers and startups are early adopters.

We’d like to hear feedback from any organization that’s testing AWS or using it on and ongoing basis to help shape our coverage of this topic on SearchCloudComputing.com.

You can reach me at jmaitland@techtarget.com.

Cheers,

Jo

Rackspace released the API specification under the Creative Commons license. Source for the software used by the APIs is under the MIT X11 free software license. Find it at http://github.com/rackspace and start your own cloud.

Speaking from OSCON, Rackspace’s Erik Carlin said the company would maintain the code in traditional style.

“The intention was to open it up — we’d love to get to the point where we have external committers,” said Carlin. Currently, Rackspace is the only commiter (an entity that can make final changes to any open source project) for the code that’s been released. Carlin said Rackspace wanted to steer a “canonical set of bindings” on top of the project but looked forward to seeing what developers would do with the project.

“I hate to create our own interface and add to the [plethora of cloud APIs], but there was nothing we could embrace,” Carlin said. As it stands, the proliferation of both open and closed cloud interfaces has been an impediment to cloud computing adoption, he said.

Going forward, Carlin said he hoped to see standards emerge that will prune out the thicket of cloud technolgies and specifications, and said Rackspace will jump all over an open standard when it emerges.

Asked why Rackspace built its interface around webby ReSt instead of XML-y SOAP, like Amazon, Carlin said there was a trend toward web interfaces on the front end. Furthermore, there are plenty of other aspects to a cloud than just the user screen, he said. For example, issues like competing virtual machine formats and management specs still need to be hammered out.

“APIs are only half the battle,” he said.

Anyways, what the mess of ess’ and clatter of consonants means is that Citrix, as part of its big show this week is announcing their Citrix’ XenApp software is now available for rent, from AWS, to run Citrix servers on Amazon’s cloud.

C3 stands for Citrix Cloud Center, their management suite for IaaS providers.

That’s the Citrix Citrix Cloud Center Lab, for those who collect poorly thought out product names.

The brain-pain part comes from the fact that Amazon itself runs its cloud on Xen, so a customer of Citrix Citrix would, technically, be using XenApps to use Xen virtual machines to manage and deploy public cloud resources to their customers as a customer using public cloud resources running on Xen virtual machines.

Hey, that may be great and just what C3 users want and it may work just fine, but it’s a hell of a rabbit hole to send your data down, ontologically speaking. We’re not prejudiced, we’re just trying to keep up.

Also, according to the article published today by SearchEnterpriseDesktop.com News Director Alex Barrett, you’ll be able to do it all from your iPhone. I think they should call the app, “DRINK ME”, but no-one reads anymore, they’ll never get it.

This is doubtless targeted at developers who want to play with Citrix distributed computing offerings, and the odd IT shop that wants to offer Citrix AND call itself “cloud” and can’t afford its own data center.

Really, though, it’s just another way of proving that Amazon’s cloud model is still the top of heap. Oracle, IBM, now Citrix, and others are essentially opening Amazon storefronts, only it’s buzzword-friendly grid computing instead of baby clothes and lawn sprinklers. Amazon doesn’t care- they have a two and a half year leap on everyone else wanting to offer public cloud instances, the best distribution channel extant and plenty of headroom. All they have to do is make space, keep the lights on, let their little playfriends from the middleware/manageware classroom play in their pool, and rake in the dough.

I’ll scrape together some time soon and poke around, see how good a job Citrix has done making this work and post some screenshots and an update in a day or so. Just a head’s up, ladies and gentlemen: I may never been seen again.