One of the really cool features of CloudFiles is StaticWeb. Essentially you can host whole static site within a CloudFiles CDN enabled container. I’m going to show you how to get a static site setup under CloudFiles.
You need to have a Rackspace Cloud account, which you can get here. Once you have your account setup, you can get your API key from the control panel. Authenticating with Rackspace Cloud looks a little like:
The cloud is open. Rackspace announced it’s open cloud on Wednesday. Essentially CloudServers is now running off Nova, part of Openstack. CloudFiles, which is an implementation of Swift, has been for a while now.
What I’m really enjoying about it, is we now have a whole suite of products to go with Servers and Files. Database as a Service (DBaaS) means you don’t have to run MySQL on your Server. The new mycloud.rackspace.com interface is really easy to use and clean. I recently had to setup a forum for someone and I was done setting up a server, dbaas and 2 dbs in 10 minutes.
I’ve been at Rackspace for six years. I don’t think I’ve stayed anywhere for that long. I spent the first five working in IT, at first as a developer, then the last year as a development manager. Then a little over a year ago I got the opportunity to move to CloudFiles as the engineering manager. I love where I’m at and my team is hella smart and easy to get along with.
Well we made it. 29 hours of driving through El Paso, Phoenix, LA and to San Francisco. I’m exhausted but it was a great trip. We had a pretty good vision of what we wanted to do. I don’t think we did as much work as we initially envisioned. The Clear modem didn’t work for most of the trip and our cell coverage was pretty spotty. I drove through a pretty gnarly sandstorm outside El Paso, the steering wheel was at a 45° angle or more due to the wind. Sleeping was kind of rough. It’s hard to sleep when you’re bouncing around due to 60mph gusts. We made it thought, with plenty of Red Bull and Monster.
On fridays at rackspace we get a bunch of foodtrucks that come and visit. It adds some really excellent variety to lunch and don’t have to go anywhere, which is really nice. I think the foodtruck folks like it too.