What tools do you use to help you manage your cloud, specially with rackspace cloud?
Things like Provisioning, Monitoring, Autoscaling, Alerting etc... I'm just a developer, and for a little while I'm on devops duty.
Here is some background information, of why I am asking:
I am a developer that has been managing several medium sized ( 300,000 to 550,000 page views monthly ) custom web applications. We are running them in one single rackspace server 16 cores / 32 GB Ram / Raid Stripping
Some of the legacy applications are not the better designed and can be resource hungry and the server has been known to be overwhelmed frequently.
Another company just adquired us and we now have to manage their sites. I estimate 350 more views a month.
We need to move into the cloud, because of adminitrative reasons, and are interested about its posbilities of autoscaling. However we are tied to Rackspace Cloud.
Configuration of the servers is no problem as we have several chef recipes to do most of the heavy lifting.
What we need is a way to spin up new servers easily, and something that monitors the servers and either alerts us and maybe create a replacement server.
I have tried to use Scalr.net but after a promising first day it everything went downhill. Then it started to behave erratically: - some servers didn't boot - others went into error mode - scalr wasn't receiving statistics ( so no autoscaling ) - at one time I deleted the servers and scalr didn't noticed
Im still waiting on scalr support. To tell you the truth rackspace maybe partially at fault, but scalr is heavily geared towards AWS so integration with rackspace isn't as solid. Rackspace hasn't been any help either. They are still to provide an explanation.
Then I tried Rightscale, my second choice because of price and openness, but it seems it suffers from the same problems as scalr. They make rackspace a second class citizen.
UPDATE: Actually asked a question :)
550k pageviews per month is roughly one every five seconds.
I'd recommend fixing whatever's making a very powerful server unable to serve 0.2 pageviews a second. Moving to the cloud is not a magic bullet in this sort of situation.
I work for Gigaspaces. We have an opensource, free product named Cloudify that can take any of your application, deploy, monitor, scale and self-heal it on rackspace as well as on many other private and public clouds without any code change.
Cloudify applies a devops approach with a recipe orchestration plan that takes care of the entire application lifecycle.
You can try the quick start guide for to experience it yourself in few minutes.