Thomas ClaytonWe’ve seen Amazon EC2′s usage. We’ve also seen GoGrid’s usage. In this post, we’ll take a peek at how many servers are being spun up by users of Rackspace Cloud Servers. In the State of the Cloud series Rackspace seems to be a close second to Amazon. Will the usage data provide confirmation of this? Let’s find out!
Quite like GoGrid, Rackspace Cloud Servers’ systems make the task of measuring usage quite straightforward. Server IDs are serial numbers and there are no hoops to jump through in order to make the calculations. I set about collecting samples over a period of approximately two weeks. Here’s what I found:
Over the timespan of two weeks 7241 servers were provisioned by Rackspace Cloud users. On average the result is 488 servers/day.
Of the three providers surveyed, the Rackspace Cloud retains its position in second place. While among the top-ranked public websites Rackspace comes in at a close second, in terms of servers provisioned the gap is tremendous. The Rackspace Cloud is ahead of GoGrid’s 181 servers/day but still a hundred times smaller than Amazon’s whopping 50,000 servers/day.
As I speculated regarding GoGrid, some of the difference might be explained by the more elastic nature of a typical Amazon deployment and the ecosystem of tools available for Amazon. I do suspect that Rackspace may be gaining traction at least among the sporadic development and testing use cases – simply due to their low entry-level pricing. I myself have found that if in need of a quick server with minimal demands then Rackspace’s $0.015/hour definitely beats Amazon’s $0.085/hour.
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