Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Three free Rackspace Cloud backup images? Not so fast.

Biting the bullet, I went ahead and prepared a Gentoo 10.1 "stem cell" image on Rackspace Cloud so I can use it for my nascent infrastructure. I got it prepared (even though I made a mistake and started the bootstrap from 2008.1, but that is OK) and had the image backed up. According to the control panel:

To move an image to Cloud Files, click the Move link in the table below. You may keep as many images in Cloud Files as you want. A storage rate of 15 cents per gigabyte will be applied. Bandwidth charges will only be applied on image download.

If you move a scheduled image to Cloud Files, the schedule will continue to save the image in any available With Server slot.


However, I could not find the button that says "move". So I brought up a chat window for it and asked about it:

Hosh H: Hi. I am trying to move a cloud server backup image to cloud files.
Hosh H: It says there is a move link but I do not see it
Chris J: let me get you some info about that.
Chris J: I do apologize for any inconvenience, this feature is not fully enabled, if you would like to enable this feature, please know that there is fee of .15 cents per GB for using cloud files backups, and if you are in ORD datacenter all traffic would incur a $0.08/GB in and $0.22/GB out bandwidth charges. This feature is for the whole account and not per server. Once you change over you will not be able to go back to non cloud file backups. How would you like to continue?
Hosh H: Ok, so let me ask some questions
Hosh H: If I change over, I can still do the with-server backups, correct?
Chris J: no its either or.
Hosh H: Thats not what it says in the control panel.
Hosh H: "To move an image to Cloud Files, click the Move link in the table below. You may keep as many images in Cloud Files as you want. A storage rate of 15 cents per gigabyte will be applied. Bandwidth charges will only be applied on image download."
Hosh H: "If you move a scheduled image to Cloud Files, the schedule will continue to save the image in any available With Server slot."
Chris J: I am sorry this system is still very new, some of the wording is not very precise.
Hosh H: Ok, so I just want to make sure; the instruction on the control panel is wrong, is that correct?
Chris J: To the best of my knowledge yes.


Oh well. I was hoping to get three free server backup slots, but I was used to working with Slicehost where the backups slots costs an additional $5/mth. This makes more sense from a business standpoint, and besides, I had already decided to use Cloud Files images and the associated costs, since I wanted the "stem cell images" to be independent of any attached servers.

I'm sure, though, that other Rackspace Cloud customers may be puzzling over this. We'll see what happens when that ticket to change me over gets completed.

Update: The ticket finally came through, and guess what? I still have access to creating With-Server images, just like it says on the control panel. Maybe Rackspace is getting all the early adopters used to the idea of having to pay for With-Server images down the road. But hey, this works as I expected and it works well.

2 comments:

  1. Funny, same thing here 11/19/10. Search google
    trying to figure this out. Best guess, they don't
    want people to should down there servers. Because
    that's exactly what I want to do and that's the only way to do it and bring it back. I'm testing both EC2 and Rackspace. Everything says you can move images to Cloud Files, but then there's no way to do. Opened support ticket, same response.

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  2. I had the same issue: no move link. So I opened a chat and the girl told me to reload the page. I was all cocky, saying I had done that already, but - law and behold! - this time around a simple page refresh did the trick. The move link appeared and my problem was solved.

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