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This post was written and contributed by Frederick Townes, CTO of Mashable and Developer for the W3 Total Cache plug-in, a Rackspace Cloud Tools partner.

WordPress is among the most popular open source publishing platforms on the planet. Out-of-the-box it performs in any hosting environment, but with W3 Total Cache, site performance is maximized leveraging the suite of tools it provides. User experience is one of the most important factors in site success and to improve it, reducing response times of your site is vital. Studies show that the faster your site loads, the longer visitors will stay, the more pages they will visit, the lower any learning curves become and the more favorably Google will rank your site. There are lots of optimizations W3 Total Cache does unobtrusively, without modifying plugins, theme, database etc.

Let’s take a look at some settings to get you started:

Page Cache:
Reduce load by caching pages and feeds after the first request (or even prime the cache if you prefer) and returning the saved file from either disk or memory.
Recommended Setting: Disk (enhanced)

Minify:
Remove white space, line breaks and other unnecessary characters to reduce file size so files are delivered faster. In the case of HTML, a minified file “feels” like it renders faster in the browser. While in the case of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript (JS) files, they are also respectively combined to reduce the number of transactions required to deliver a given page. Use the help tool on the minify settings tab to easily find and prune the CSS and JS files to minify for a given theme. Avoid minifying statistics, advertising or similar JS files when making selections.
Recommended Setting: Disk

Database Cache:
Reduce read operations on the database by caching responses for a short time. Consequently, the time required to generate new pages is also reduced. The result is that the response time after users post new comments, perform searches or request a page that has not been cached is a low as possible.
Recommended Setting: Off, but varies by site, try disk and verify if performance increases.

Object Cache:
A “higher level” cache than the database cache, the object cache is a “runtime” cache containing the various pieces of data needed
Recommended Setting: Off, but varies by site, try disk and verify if response times decrease.

Content Delivery Network:
Latency is among the easiest ways to improve the user experience (reduce load time) of a site. Rackspace Cloud Files can easily be enabled using W3 Total Cache on your site to allow WordPress core files, theme files and even the media library to be hosted on the Cloud Files Content Delivery Network by Limelight Networks. Site visitors will then have a highly responsive experience when browsing. Once Cloud Files account settings have been populated and desired files exported (uploaded), everything then works transparently; when new attachments are added to the media library they are automatically hosted with Cloud Files.
Recommended Setting: Rackspace Cloud Files

Browser Cache:
The web browser can keep copies of files downloaded from the web sites you visit. In terms of user experience, this is the lowest latency cache possible. Once a file is downloaded specific headers can allow the browser to quickly check if the local version is up-to-date. If it is, the browser can then either render the page instantly or request fewer objects for a given page making the page load much faster.
Recommended Setting: Defaults are a good start, experiment with settings to achieve desired policies.

User Agent Groups:
If your site has mobile users or if it uses various themes for respective groups of users. The User Agent Groups tab of the plugin allows you to assign groups of browsers or devices to use a specific theme or even redirect them to another web site. This feature also makes sure that specific browsers/devices have respective caches and therefore the lowest response times possible.
Recommended Setting: Defaults are a good start, settings may vary per site.

Tips:

• Use the import / export settings option of the general settings tab of W3 Total Cache to backup, save and share settings files.
• Import external media library objects, then export to CDN to make sure that every possible file is hosted with the content delivery network.
• Review the usage section of the frequently asked questions tab of the plugin for tips on measure performance.
• Reduce the images used in your CSS file by taking advantage of the spriteme.org bookmarklet which makes creating image sprites very simple.
• Review the Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Site section of the Yahoo! Developer Network site for even more tips.

Have ideas on how to make W3 Total Cache better? Need tips optimizing your site’s user experience? Use the various support form options on the support tab of the plugin to get in touch!

We're always looking for ways to make AWS an even better value for our customers. If you've been reading this blog for an extended period of time you know that we reduce prices on our services from time to time.

Effective September 1, 2010, we've reduced the On-Demand and Reserved Instance prices on the m2.2xlarge (High-Memory Double Extra Large) and the m2.4xlarge (High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large) by up to 19%.  If you have existing Reserved Instances your hourly usage rate will automatically be lowered to the new usage rate and your estimated bill will reflect these changes later this month.  As an example, the hourly cost for an m2.4xlarge instance running Linux/Unix in the us-east Region from $2.40 to $2.00. This price reduction means you can now run database, memcached, and other memory-intensive workloads at substantial savings. Here's the full EC2 price list.

As a reminder, there are many different ways to optimize your costs. When compared to On-Demand instances, Reserved Instances enable you to reduce your overall instance costs by up to 56%.  You pay a low, one-time fee to reserve an instance for a one or three year period. You can then run that instance whenever you want, at a greatly reduced hourly rate.

For background processing and other jobs where you have flexibility in when they run, you can also use Spot Instances by placing a bid for unused capacity. You job will run as long as your bid is higher than the current spot price.

-- Jeff;

 

 

Mike from Cirrhus9 sent me some information about their recent implementation of FindTheBest. With his permission, I am sharing some of the details with you so that you can get a better idea of how a sophisticated developer brings together a wide variety of technologies in order to construct a complete web application.

What is FindTheBest?

FindTheBest is an objective comparison search engine that allows people to choose a topic, compare options and decide what's best for them. It makes for faster and more informed decisions by allowing for easy comparison between all of the available options.

FindTheBest is organized into nine broad categories including: Arts and Entertainment, Business and Economy, Education, Health, Reference, Science, Society, Sports and Recreation and Technology. Each category includes dozens of Apps from Adventure Travel Vacations to Job Websites. Each App consists of a variety of related listings — from Vail and Whistler ski resorts under the Ski Resorts App to Barack Obama and Angelina Jolie under the Celebrities App — and each listing can be sorted by numerous key filters.

FindTheBest's structured search allows the user to quickly sort through factors and filters important to them, ultimately helping them make more objective and more informed decisions to important questions and answers.

The user interface blends sorting, filtering, and comparison to produce fast, data-driven pages. Here's a page with information on over 9000 libraries:

How Was it Implemented?

FindTheBest runs on a 64-bit Ubuntu server. The server boots from an EBS volume and has an XFS RAID-0 two volume EBS storage configuration, with daily snapshot backups via cron-driven calls to Eric Hammond's ec2-consistent-snapshot script. The server runs a classic LAMP stack with the addition of a lightweight email server and a full-text search engine, all monitored by a custom-tuned Nagios/Groundwork setup.

-- Jeff;

 

Under normal conditions, an Amazon S3 object in a bucket that is part of a CloudFront distribution can be cached at a CloudFront edge location per the object's TTL (Time to Live). In many situations it is possible to come up with a reasonable value for the TTL ahead of time. In other cases you may want the benefits of CloudFront's caching but you may also need to make changes to the S3 object at unpredictable times.

We've just added a new invalidation function to the CloudFront API. You can now POST a list of one or more objects to a CloudFront distribution and the objects will be removed from all of the edge locations within minutes. The invalidation happens in an asynchronous fashion and you can have several invalidation requests pending at the same time.

You can use this new feature in many different ways. Here are some ideas:

1. Update a CSS style sheet or some JavaScript that changes very infrequently.
2. Remove a video that was not properly encoded.
3. Remove information (e.g. a news story) that is inaccurate or no longer relevant.
4. Remove information that is the subject of a DMCA takedown notice.

There are no charges for the first 1000 invalidations per month. After that, each one will cost you $0.005 (one half of one cent).

You can still use the TTL feature and you can also use versioned URLs. Both techniques are preferred when you have the ability to control or predict the proper hold time for an object. There's no additional cost for either one, and there's no need to wait for the invalidation to take effect (typically 10 to 15 minutes). Invalidation is appropriate when the hold time is unpredictable. 

TTLs and versioned URLs are great when you have tight control over the object's lifetime, with new objects replacing the old on a regular cycle or as part of a planned release. Invalidation is appropriate when objects can change with little or no notice.

The following third-party products already include support for this new feature:

• CloudBuddy Personal.
• CloudBerry Explorer.

Let me know if your product supports it, and I'll amend this blog post to include it. Leave a comment or email me at awseditor@amazon.com.

The AWS Simple Monthly Calculator now supports CloudFront Invalidations and RDS Reserved DB Instances.

-- Jeff;

The purpose of this post is to make you aware that beginning in September, Cloud Servers customers will be billed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) instances on a monthly rather than hourly basis.    Due to changes in our subscription arrangements with Red Hat, we can no longer offer Cloud customers hourly billing for RHEL licenses.  Rackspace will begin charging our customers a monthly licensing fee, starting in September. This license fee will not be prorated.

What this means for our Rackspace Cloud Servers customers using RHEL:

• Instead of being billed for your RHEL license on an hourly basis, customers using Red Hat will be billed on a monthly basis (30 day billing cycle).  The Cloud Server will continue to be billed on a utility basis.
• The new fee for RHEL will be $20 per month per server, which is an average savings of $1.60 per month for each server for a full month’s usage. This fee replaces the $.03/hour fee per server using Red Hat that is currently in place.
• Every Cloud Server that you spin up with RHEL will be subject to a full month’s license fee, no matter how long you use it. If a Cloud Server with RHEL is running for any portion of a month, then you will be billed for that month’s license fee.

Thank you for your understanding as we shift to monthly billing for RHEL users on Rackspace Cloud Servers.

We want to make you aware that beginning in September, due to a change in our underlying subscription arrangements with Red Hat, we can no longer offer a daily pro-rated billing option for RHEL instances. Slicehost customers will be billed for RHEL instances on a monthly rather than pro-rated daily basis.

However, the total cost of service for most RHEL customers will likely go down under the monthly billing model.

Both Rackspace Cloud and Slicehost will begin charging RHEL customers a monthly $20 licensing fee. This license fee won’t be prorated, so every Slice you spin up with RHEL will be subject to a full month’s license fee.

What this means for Slice customers:

• Instead of being billed for your RHEL license on a pro-rated daily basis, customers using Red Hat will be billed on a monthly basis (normal monthly billing cycle).

• The Slice itself will continue to be billed on a pro-rated basis - this only affects the RHEL license.

• The new fee for RHEL has been reduced to $20 per month per Slice.

• Every Slice you spin up with RHEL will be subject to a full month’s license fee, no matter how long you use it. If a Slice with RHEL is running for any portion of a month, then you will be billed for that month’s license fee.

Thank you for your understanding as we shift to monthly billing for RHEL users. If you would like help understanding how this might affect your personal usage please feel free to submit a ticket via the SliceManager, email us (support@slicehost.com) or pop into chat 24/7.

This post was written and contributed by Major Hayden, Linux Systems Engineer for the Rackspace Cloud. He’s also known as “Racker Hacker.”

Regardless of the type of hosting you’re using – dedicated or cloud – it’s important to take network interface security seriously. Most often, threats from the internet are the only ones mentioned. However, if you share a private network with other customers, you have just as much risk on that interface.

Many cloud providers allow you access to a private network environment where you can exchange data with other instances or other services offered by the provider. The convenience of this access comes with a price: other instances can access your instance on the private network just as easily as they could on the public interface.

Here are some security tips for your private interfaces:

Disable the private interface

This one is pretty simple. If you have only one instance or server, and you don’t need to communicate privately with any other instances, just disable the interface. Remember to configure your networking scripts to leave the interface disabled after reboots.

Use packet filtering

The actual mechanism will vary based on your operating system, but filtering packets is the one of the simplest ways to secure your private interface. You can take some different approaches with them, but I find the easiest method is to allow access from your other instances and reject all other traffic.

For additional security, you can limit access based on ports as well as source IP addresses. This could prevent an attacker from having easy access to your other instances if they’re able to break into one of them.

Configure your daemons to listen on the appropriate interfaces

If there are services that don’t need to be listening on the private network, don’t allow them to listen on your private interface. For example, MySQL might need to listen on the private interface so the web server can talk to it, but apache won’t need to listen on the private interface. This reduces the profile of your instance on the private network and makes it a less likely target for attack.

Use hosts.allow and hosts.deny

Many new systems administrators forget about how handy tcpwrappers can be for limiting access. If your firewall is down in error, host.allow and hosts.deny could be an extra layer of protection. It’s important to ensure that the daemons you are attempting to control are built with tcpwrappers support. Daemons like sshd support it, but apache and MySQL do not.

Encrypt all traffic on the private network

Just because it’s called a “private” network doesn’t mean that your traffic can traverse the network privately. You should always err on the side of caution and encrypt all traffic traversing the private network. You can use ssh tunnels, stunnel, or the built-in SSL features found in most daemons.

This also brings up an important point: you should know how your provider’s private network works. Are there safeguards to prevent sniffing? Could someone else possibly ARP spoof your instance’s private IP addresses? Is your private network’s subnet shared among many customers?

With all of that said, it’s also very important to have proper change control policies so that administrators working after you are fully aware of the security measures in place and why they are important. This will ensure that all of the administrators on your instances will understand the security of the system and they should be able to make sensible adjustments later for future functionality.

We’ll be on the road in September evangelizing the Rackspace Cloud and would love to meet you. If you’re in one of the cities where we’ll be, drop us a line and we’ll schedule a time to meet up.

TechCrunch Disrupt

Sep 27-29th, San Francisco, CA

TechCrunch Disrupt is a three-day, single-track conference and startup competition to immerse you in the debate about what’s changing in technology right now, what’s causing it and what we need to do about it to survive and thrive in real time.

Web 2.0 Expo

Sep 27-30th, New York City, NY

Web 2.0 Expo New York focuses on Platforms for Growth, diving into the platform opportunities for the whole web ecosystem, particularly mobile, real-time, and the social web.

Surge

Sept 20th-Oct 1st, Baltimore, MD

Surge is an exciting new event bringing together experts from around the world to share their stories and demonstrate proven concepts in Web Architectures and Scalable Designs.

Mike Mayo is the mobile apps developer for the Rackspace Cloud and OpenStack.

Since OpenStack was announced, we’ve seen a flurry of activity in the developer community. Hundreds of people have made over a thousand contributions and we couldn’t be more excited.

Today I’d like to share one of the more unconventional contributions with you. Most of the development activity in OpenStack is in the storage and compute systems, but we also have front end projects for people who use OpenStack and need an easy way to manage their cloud resources.

One of these projects is the OpenStack iPad app, which is based on the Rackspace Cloud Pro iPad app that is currently in the App Store. This app uses the OpenStack compute and storage APIs to help you manage your cloud resources, and offers a few features outside of the scope of the APIs, such as viewing RSS system status feeds, pinging your compute nodes from several locations around the world, and emailing files from OpenStack Object Storage.

Our newest feature, made possible by working with people from Opscode, is integrated with Chef and the Opscode Platform. Before, when you created a compute node on the iPad, you would then need to log into the node and manually install any software, data, and configurations you may need. This could take a considerable amount of time and effort for some deployments, but not anymore. If you’re a Chef user, you can configure the iPad app with your Chef or Opscode credentials to automatically run any recipes or role assignments immediately after the node is provisioned. Look ma, no shell!

Let’s suppose you’re running a Cassandra cluster to horizontally scale your data, and you’re out of town on a business trip. Your laptop is in your hotel room, and you’re stuck in a conference room across town with only your iPad. Then, your monitoring service sends you an SMS telling you that all of your Cassandra machines are running at capacity. But you were smart; you used Chef to automate your infrastructure by creating roles for all of your compute nodes. You simply log into the iPad app and provision a new node with “role[cassandra]“ as your run list. The machine boots up and adds itself to your Cassandra cluster without requiring anything else from you. Awesome!

I’ve included a video below showing you the entire process as I bootstrap a compute node running Apache 2 and MySQL. I hope you enjoy it, and if you have any questions or want to talk about contributing to the OpenStack iOS apps, get in touch with me via email at mike@openstack.org, Twitter at @greenisus, or on the phone at 901-299-9306. Even if you’re new to Objective-C and Cocoa, I’ll be happy to help you get started and learn everything you need to know to help make the OpenStack apps even better.

Chef Meets the iPad with OpenStack from Michael Mayo on Vimeo.

After a rigorous and comprehensive assessment, Appian has received an Authority to Operate (ATO) from the U.S .Department of Education for the Department's Appian Anywhere BPM (Business Process Management) application, which is built on AWS. Appian Anywhere provides IT request management, marketing request management, and project management using a SaaS model.

The assessment covered the solution's management, operational, and technical security controls and was performed under the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA for those of you inside of the Capital Beltway). The FISMA framework is used for managing information security for all information systems used or operated by a U.S. federal government agency or by a contractor or other organization on behalf of a federal agency.

Net-net, Government agencies will now have access to a cloud computing solution from Appian and Amazon Web Services that has gone through the rigorous Certification and Accreditation based on the government’s FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002).

You can listen to a pair of episodes of the BPM4U podcast learn more about Appian, Appian Anywhere, and the ATO (first episode, second episode).

If you are in the Washington DC area, check out the AWS Cloud for the Federal Government event (September 23 in Crystal City).

-- Jeff;

Web logs are, in my experience, under-utilized. People new to running their own web server in particular don't always realize how much useful information can be found in the logs, and how much more they can gather if they set up a custom log format. To help, we have some articles on working with web logs and web server troubleshooting.

First on our list is the topic of finding and reading web logs, for apache and nginx:

Reading apache web logs

Reading nginx web logs

Once you've looked an access log over it can help to know what the status codes it records mean and what can cause them:

Interpreting common status codes in web logs

If you want to add more detail to what gets recorded in the logs, or want the server to create additional logs to hold those details (like the time the server took to return a request or the contents of cookies when requests are sent), this will help:

Customizing apache web logs Customizing nginx web logs

And Lee brings it all together with an excellent guide to troubleshooting server outages that you should keep handy:

Solve Slice or Website 'Down' Issues Quickly

If you have questions about anything from those articles, or anything that has nothing to do with those articles, we have techs in support chat 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, ready with answers.

Thanks for reading!

One of the major benefits of utilizing Rackspace Cloud Files is having the opportunity to deliver content to your users around the globe at blazing speeds over the Limelight Network’s content delivery network (CDN).   To learn more about how this CDN experience can excel your web presence, we invite you to join us for a free webinar on Tues, Sep 14th.

Megan Wohlford, Rackspace Cloud Files Product Manager, and Jason Thibeault, Sr. Director of Technology Alliances and Cloud Strategy at Limelight Networks, will discuss the power of a CDN, and how to use it to your advantage.  Whether you’re a current CDN customer, thinking about it, or just interested in the technology, join us for a presentation followed by a live Q&A.

Date: Tuesday, September 14th
Time: 1pm CDT

Click here to sign up.

I almost missed a really important anniversary! Yesterday marked Amazon EC2's fourth birthday. Here are some of the ways that EC2 has grown and changed in the last four years:

Category 2006 2010 Regions One Four Availability Zones One Ten Availability Zones Instance Types One Nine Pricing Models One Three Storage Ephemeral Storage
Ephemeral Storage
Elastic Block Store
Operating Systems Linux Linux, Windows, OpenSolaris
Management Tools Command-Line Tools Command-Line Tools
AWS Management Console
Third-Party Tools Ancillary Services - Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, CloudWatch
High Performance Computing - Elastic Map Reduce, Cluster Compute Instances

We've done quite a bit, but we're not resting, not for a minute. We have a lot of open positions on the AWS team, including a really interesting developer position within the EC2 team. This developer will focus on EC2's dynamic market pricing features. In addition to experience with Ruby, Perl, Java, C, or C++, candidates should have some experience building large-scale distributed systems and an interest in operational scheduling, optimization, and constraint satisfaction. You can read more here and you can send your resume directly to amazon-ec2-spot-jobs@amazon.com.

While I am on the subject of anniversaries, eight years ago this month I abandoned my full-time consulting practice to take a development position with the Amazon Associates Team, with the agreement that I could spend some of my time helping out with the effort to create and market the E-Commerce Service (which has since become the Product Advertising API). A few months in, I was asked if I would mind speaking at a conference. I guess I did ok, because they asked me to do another one, and before too long they invited me to apply for the position of Web Services Evangelist. I took on that title in the spring of 2003 and have been spreading the word about our web service efforts ever since. All things considered, this is a really awesome place to work. Day after day, week after week, things get more and more exciting around here. The pace is quick and I do my best to keep up. We do our best to understand and to meet the needs of our customers with regard to features, reliability, scale, business models, and price. I get to work with and to learn from a huge number of world-class intellects. If this sounds like the kind of place for you, check out our list of open jobs and apply today!

-- Jeff;

This post written and contributed by, Bill Harrison, President of Epicom, a Rackspace Cloud customer.

Epicom builds and supports high-performance web-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and through our partnership with the Rackspace Cloud, we also host CRM systems for a wide variety of industries.

Although we’ve worked with lots of CRM systems over the years, we love SugarCRM because of its flexibility, ease of use, and value.  Epicom has been a SugarCRM partner since 2006 and last year we stepped-up to Sugar’s elite Gold Partner status.

Incorporating the use of a CRM system into the daily routine of your company is the key to realizing the value of CRM.  Great system design is critical so that user’s can get their jobs done with minimal effort.  Training is also high on the list of critical success factors.  Epicom offers a wide variety of SugarCRM training programs designed to get you up and running quickly.

Here are a few quick and easy tips for CRM success:

• CUSTOMIZE. Modern CRM systems like SugarCRM are easy to customize using simple drag-and-drop features.  Screens can be reorganized, custom fields added and workflow automation rules constructed all without the need of a programmer.  Individuals can tailor reports and dashboards to their individual needs, making their CRM experience more personalized and efficient.  Take advantage of these features to increase system value and user acceptance.
• ORGANIZE. Make sure the data in your CRM system is accurate and up to date.  Starting a new system deployment with high quality data makes users happy and productive.
• MANAGE. Have users manage all aspects of their day through the CRM system, regardless of the roles.  SugarCRM has awesome tools for managing tasks and appointments, tracking notes and calls, as well as more sophisticated sales pipeline and customer support tools.  Managing daily activities through CRM increases system value and helps users “live in the system.”
• MOBILIZE. SugarCRM works great with mobile devices like iPhones and iPads.  Take advantage of great mobility to take your CRM experience on the road.

SugarCRM Hosting

We love SugarCRM for its flexible deployment options. By hosting SugarCRM with Epicom, customers can tailor a hosting environment with the speed and security ideally suited to their business. In conjunction with the release of SugarCRM Version 6 Epicom is rolling out improved hosting packages designed specifically for SugarCRM users. Sugar 6 is the easiest-to-use enterprise-grade CRM on the market.  Taking advantage of its cool new features requires a hosting platform with all the power and performance that the Rackspace Cloud provides.

We use the Rackspace Cloud Servers platform so that every SugarCRM customer has its own virtual server. In addition, we have upgraded to Rackspace’s new state-of-the-art data center in Chicago with an off-site backup center in Texas. This yields far better performance and security compared to shared hosting environments.

Using redundant Rackspace Cloud Servers as the foundation, Epicom now offers a high availability service, which eliminates any server downtime. We also provide a four method back-up policy that includes application snapshots throughout the data to protect against data loss.

With the Rackspace Cloud providing the infrastructure, and Epicom providing application management, customers get carefree CRM performance at an awesome price.

For more information about Epicom’s new hosting platform, please visit http://www.epicom.com/sugarcrm-hosting/

To learn more about SugarCRM and the cool new features of SugarCRM 6, visit http://www.epicom.com/sugarcrminfo/

In this video, Senior Software Engineer for Epicom, Eric Wikman, discusses the advantages of Epicom’s hosting platform and the technical upgrades included in the expanded hosting packages.

In their continuing tests of cloud computing services, Network World recently did tests on a series of cloud storage providers, including Rackspace Cloud Files. Other services tested were Amazon S3, Egnyte’s On Demand File Server, Nasuni Cloud Storage, and Nirvanix’s Storage Delivery Network.

Here’s what the tests encompassed at a glance:

• Accessed the cloud vendor’s site through their supplied APIs, where applicable.
• Moved data either from virtual machines in their cabinet at n|Frame in Indianapolis at 100Mbps, or from their lab connected via standard Comcast broadband.
• Pounded each site with a variety of file sizes ranging from 500KB to 1GB.
• Tested in two periods, daytime and nighttime, to see if Internet congestion played a role in cloud storage performance.

Network World quotes:

Rackspace delivered the best overall performance, with an average speed 2.57Mbps for uploads and roughly 650Kbps for downloads.

Click here to read the full article.

Good news for all those interested in security...we've released the fourth version of our Overview of Security Processes whitepaper. It contains ten pages of new and additional detailed information. Highlights of new content include:

• A description of the AWS control environment
• A list of our SAS-70 Type II Control Objectives
• Some discussion of risk management and shared responsibility principles
• Greater visibility into our monitoring and communication processes and our employee lifecycle
• Descriptions of our physical security, environmental safeguards, configuration management, and business continuity management processes and plans
• Updated summaries of new AWS security features
• Additional detail about the security attributes of various AWS components

The additional information and greater level of detail should help to answer many common questions. As always, feel free to reach out to us if you're still needing more information.

> Steve <

A new kernel, 2.6.35.1, is now available in the SliceManager for all slices located in our STL-B, DFW, and ORD data centers. Additionally, it is now set as the default kernel when rebuilding an existing slice or for any new slices that you may add to your account.

If you would like to upgrade the kernel on your pre-existing slice, you can do so by following the steps described in this blog post. Please keep in mind that this process will require a reboot of your slice in order to fully complete.

If you have any questions or run into any issues, we are available 24/7 in SliceChat. We can also be reached by submitting a ticket through the SliceManager or emailing us directly at support@slicehost.com.

We just released version 1.0.8 of theAWS SDK for Java. In addition to some bug fixes, the SDK includes the following new features:

• Support for the new Reserved DB Instances.
• Improved constructors for the Amazon RDS model classes.
• A new StepFactory class to simplify the process of creating Elastic MapReduce job flows.
• Improved support for EC2 security groups.
• Improved constructors for the EC2 model classes.
• Additional diagnostic information in AWS responses including request IDs, S3 host IDs, and SimpleDB box usage.

The SDK includes the AWS Java library and some helpful code samples. You may also want to check out the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse.

-- Jeff;

One of the most commonly asked questions my team receives from customers and prospects is: Can I run multiple websites on a single IP? The answer is yes, you can.

For this example, I will use Apache web server. During the initial configuration of apache, you will need to manage your virtual host file, commonly referred to as vhost. For the techies out there this post will be basic, however, we get a BUNCH of questions around running multiple websites on a single server.

After configuring Apache and creating the root directories for your websites, you will access the vhost file for each domain hosted on your cloud server. This is where you let Apache know where it can find each domain’s root directory. My vhost file for this website looks like this:

It’s a relatively simple process. In our Rackspace Cloud Knowledge Base, we have an article that explains how a vhost works and a more technical post on how to actually configure virtual hosts. Please note the links are for Ubuntu, you can view a conclusive list of all operating systems here.

Now that you know its simple to host multiple domains on a single IP, you may still be wondering about additional IP’s. By default, you get 1 IP address per instance. If you need additional IP’s, justification is needed. That justification would need to be SSL requirements for unique IPs per domain. For this, you can get an additional 4 IPs per instance, for a total of 5. This total is per instance. If you need additional IPs above 5, you would need to provision additional instances.

I hope you found this information useful. If you have additional questions about Cloud Servers or any of the Rackspace Cloud products, please catch us in live chat or give us a call at 1.877.934.0409.

Every year, Rackspace gets heavily involved in SXSW and this year will be no different. It’s an event that brings some of the brightest minds in the tech industry into one vibrant city, right up the road from our headquarters.

With SXSW 2011 being right around the corner, now is the time to pick the SXSW panels that you are most interested in hearing about. The SXSW PanelPicker allows the community to have a significant voice in programming Interactive, Film, and Music conference activities for SXSW.

Rackspace has submitted five different panels for the Interactive event. Here are the various Rackspace panels you can vote on:

• A Showdown at the Database Corral

Jonathan Bryce will be discussing interesting new industry efforts that are underway to architect next generation databases that can scale massively by pairing open source databases and content management technologies with cloud computing. This panel will include discussions around traditional, distributive, non-relational databases as well as include discussions around popular open source platforms like Cassandra, Drizzle and Drupal.

• OpenStack – Unlocking the Cloud

Lew Moorman will lead this panel in exploring the state of open cloud standards, relevant players, and benefit to end users, including the acceleration of cloud technologies and the ability to freely move workloads from private to public clouds, or among different service providers.

• Successful People-Based Acquisition: Buying People, Not Code

Bill Boebel will provide effective tips on how to transform your culture from startup to big business after the “marriage” without losing the magic. Rackspace acquired Webmail.us in 2007, and today an astounding nine out of the ten original employees including the founders are still at the company and going strong.

• Web 2.0 My Ass: Relationships Matter

Rob Lagesse will discuss how social media is a relationship enabler and how job functions and industries are changing in large part to the new social web. This panel will cover best tools to make the most out of the connections you make through social media.

• OMG, My Customer’s Pissed and He Knows How to Use Twitter

Rob Lagesse will discuss how critical it is to understanding how to address everything from a crisis to the everyday question quickly and effectively with customers via social media. Learn about some of the biggest flubs from 2010, how the ball was dropped and what could have been done differently.

Voting is Easy – Here’s how to do it:

First, create a PanelPicker account. If you have set up a PanelPicker account previously, click here to sign in. After you have signed up for an account, you will receive a verification e-mail. Click on the link inside this e-mail and you will be ready to go.

Voting ends 11:59 CDT on Friday, August 27.

For more information, please visit http://panelpicker.sxsw.com