Cloud Computing: Rackspace versus Amazon – the big data edition
October 29, 2012
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.
Rackspace is busy building a Hadoop service, giving the company one more avenue to compete with cloud kingpin Amazon Web Services. However, the two services — along with several others on the market — highlight just how different seemingly similar cloud services can be.
Rackspace has been on a tear over the past few months releasing new features that map closely to the core features of the Amazon Web Services platform, only with a Rackspace flavor that favors service over scale. Its next target is Amazon Elastic MapReduce, which Rackspace will be countering with its own Hadoop service in 2013. If AWS and Rackspace are, indeed, the No. 1 and No. 2 cloud computing providers around, it might be easy enough to make a decision between the two platforms. In the cloud, however, the choices are never as simple as black or white…
Amazon versus Rackspace is a matter of control
Discussing its forthcoming Hadoop service during a phone call on Friday, Rackspace CTO John Engates highlighted the fundamental product-level differences between his company and its biggest competitor, AWS. Right now, for users, it’s primarily a question of how much control they want over the systems they’re renting — and Rackspace comes down firmly on the side of maximum control. For Hadoop specifically, Engates said Rackspace’s service will “really put [users] in the driver’s seat in terms of how they’re running it” by giving them granular control over how their systems are configured and how their jobs run (courtesy of the OpenStack APIs, of course). Rackspace is even working on optimizing a portion of its cloud so the Hadoop service will run on servers, storage and networking gear designed specifically for big data workloads. Essentially, Engates added, Rackspace wants to give users the experience of owning a Hadoop cluster without actually owning any of the hardware…
Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/rackspace-versus-amazon-the-big-data-edition/