Hello, it’s been a while since we’ve posted anything but no worries, I have been experimenting with the Rackspace Cloud. As mentioned in our previous post, I started using it to host websites and applications. It is considerably more cost efficient (and energy efficient for our environmentally conscious friends) than a physical server. You can access the cloud server via command line just like you would a physical server. It’s also very easy to deploy and manage. However, I began to become curious, how do the cloud servers hold up when I run more than sites on them.

OSSEC is an Open Source monitoring and intrusion detection system. One can detect rootkits, perform log analysis, receive real time alerts and more. I wanted to use it to monitor newly installed systems for a customer of mine. In order to use it, one has to install an agent onto a system and then have the agent connect to your server installation.You can install a web interface as well to help in the management of OSSEC. I was going to install it on a physical server since that was my habit. I decided to try doing this on a cloud server.

I setup yet another cloud server running Fedora Core 11 (yes I know 12 is out now, haven’t made the conversion) and installed OSSEC. Following the simple instructions, I was able to get this up and running in almost no time. Then I headed to my customer’s site and installed 5 agents. Since Rackspace Cloud automatically gives you a static IP, pointing the agents to my server was painless. Install went pretty well but how did the software run? I decided to start raising some hell on one of the systems. Don’t worry, it was just a dummy system that I imaged later. I received all of my alert in real time! I received reports  just fine. It did what it was supposed to do. I was also able to administer the systems as planned. I did not suffer at all. I did see a speed decrease at some point but I was able to fix that in the Rackspce Cloud control panel. Next I want to try Splunk which has a little more horsepower than OSSEC and can run on a Linux server with a web interface.

One other thing I have done is use Rackspace Cloud Files as an online backup system. Online backups have become popular with the venture of cloud computing. There are some short comings though. Some people are concerned about security. Sometimes bandwidth becomes an issue when backing up several gigabytes of data over their pipeline. Sometimes there is a concern related to data continuity during transfer. However, the technology has evolved over time. Jungledisk is a tool that allows you to perform online backups onto both Rackspace Cloud and Amazon Web Services. For these purposes, I obviously used Rackspace Cloud, more specifically, the Rackspace Cloud Files. I set up a few customers on the Rackspace Cloud Files and we did online backups. Fortunately, we haven’t been put into a situation where we had to recover data but it comes it is good to know that our data is safe. I have checked data and it seems fine. Of course, with all the redundancies and routine maintenance at Rackspace, there is little to nothing to worry about. We even have information for medical clinics backed up! It is that secure.

Rackspace Cloud Files can also function as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) but I haven’t needed one lately. Hopefully I get an opportunity to use a CDN sometime soon and test the cloud file CDN. Maybe I’ll make a Torchlight video blog and use RackSpace Cloud Files as a CDN. Maybe a customer will need a CDN one of these days!

So what’s next to try out? I going to try to build a website using various applications installed on server. Will it work? Only one way to find out. I will post again next quarter!

Categories: Cloud Computing, Rackspace Cloud ~ Trackback