One of the cool things we do on the Cloud Databases operations side of the house is come up with statistics that can help us gain insight to hardware performance to identify issues with systems. We use some really cool tools, but one of the most versatile tools we work with is logstash. The goal of this article is to get you started pushing metrics with logstash that you may already collect to Graphite. Along the way, I’ll be showing you how to get started with logstash, test your configuration locally and then start pushing your first metrics to Graphite with some different examples along the way.

It’s no secret that Rackspace has taken an interest in innovative startups that can get their arms around emerging Big Data technologies, package them in a hosted environment and sell them as a service. The trend is good for customers who won’t have to build and scale out infrastructure. It’s good for stimulating open technologies. It’s good for our partners in the Rackspace Startup Program. And it’s good for Rackspace.

One such prototypical effort has been under development by our friends at Qbox.io, which just launched a search-as-a-service project around Hosted ElasticSearch. The project was built out by StackSearch, a Fayetteville, Ark.-based startup, and a Startup Program member. Along with Apache Solr, ElasticSearch is the bleeding edge of open-source search servers. ElasticSearch, the open-source project, began four years ago, led by Shay Bannon, who now leads a for-profit company by the same name. The eco-system is growing rapidly, as evidenced by some astounding fundraising by the Amsterdam-based company.

We’ve announced some new features for Cloud Files on the Rackspace Blog this week. Cloud Files now supports the following features:

API-Only:

• Container Quotas
• TempURL File Name Overrides
• Bulk Operations (Delete & Auto-Expand Archive)
• Static Large Object support

Now in Control Panel:

• Multiple File Upload
• Editing Headers

Features in the control panel are great, but I’d rather get my hands dirty with the API. Let’s take a look at the new API features one by one.

As we describe our release frequencies with “times per day” instead of “times per year”, clunky performance testing solutions that require interaction or supervising no longer fit in the deployment pipeline. In Email & Apps, our latest and greatest code commits are hammered to their limits to enforce strict standards of performance.

The basic idea starts with Jenkins pulling the latest performance testing scripts from GitHub and submitting them to machines running Flood, a Node.js tool written in-house. These jobs can do anything Node.js can do; a typical use-case is sending requests to an HTTP endpoint. When the results come back, Jenkins can decide whether to fail the build, produce graphs, or whatever your desired behavior may be.

As we hinted at in our post earlier this week, Rackspace is working towards an official release of node.js SDK bindings for the Rackspace Cloud. I thought it was important to provide more clarity on exactly what we’re doing and why.

Enter pkgcloud

Rackspace is now sponsoring development to an existing multi-cloud provisioning package for node.js called pkgcloud authored primarily by the team at Nodejitsu. We evaluated a number of options for our node.js SDK strategy, including authoring our own package, but we felt that contributing back to the prominent cloud provisioning package for node.js aligned with strategies we already have in place for Ruby with fog and Java with jclouds.

When we talk about an official release, in actuality we’re saying it’s our first supported release of pkgcloud. You can download and use pkgcloud against the Rackspace Cloud today, but we’re not yet ready to call the current version official.

The pkgcloud 0.7.2 release supports First Generation Cloud Servers, Cloud Files, and Cloud Databases.

As part of the Google I/O keynote yesterday, several new features for Google Compute Engine were announced. First, GCE is now available to everyone in a preview and available for signups. They also announced Cloud Datastore, a NoSQL database solution and several other features.

Google Compute Engine looks great, but it’s the same old thing from a cloud standpoint. AWS and GCE are both single-vendor, lock-in prone providers. You can’t run GCE in your own datacenter. You can’t customize and install GCE on both a $200 One-laptop-per-child notebook and a $4,000 MacBook Pro. These platforms are not open.

This year at SXSW, I spoke on why open matters. I used examples to explain how open can triumph over closed like the open Internet and AOL, or Linux vs. Windows. One of my favorite examples is the Betamax.

It’s been a few crazy weeks since I started at Rackspace, and while I’ve already been to San Antonio multiple times, as well as attending my first OpenStack Summit and meeting all of the awesome folks at the SF Rackspace office, I’ve spent the majority of my time getting up to speed on pkgcloud.

For the uninitiated, pkgcloud is a multi-provider cloud provisioning library from Nodejitsu for Node.js, with bindings for Rackspace, Amazon, Azure, Openstack, and Joyent compute clouds. The objective is to define a standard interface for cloud assets, such that you don’t have to spend a significant amount of energy learning multiple APIs; you just focus on the integration.

Over on the Rackspace Blog we’ve announced that we are now offering support to developers writing applications on our cloud infrastructure:

We take customer support pretty seriously around here. Our philosophy is to include super valuable and responsive support with all our offers. For example, when you’re a customer and find out you’re going on national TV to pitch your product, we’ll be there to help with architecting and operating the situation at no additional cost. This is clearly not the standard level of support in the cloud space where even the most basic support costs a lot more on top of core cloud costs. Starting today, we take this already high standard to a new level with the launch of Rackspace Developer Support, an extension of our Fanatical Support specifically for developers.

Rackspace Developer Support marks the first time we will officially support your application code. When you’re programming your application to interact with the Rackspace Cloud powered by OpenStack, we want to make sure it is as easy as possible. We offer Software Development Kits for the world’s most popular programming languages. Right now, this includes PHP, Java, Python, Ruby and .Net. We are also working on node.js, which we hope to release soon.

Read the full announcement here.

Those of us who have been aligned with DevOps for some time already know that the greater agility and closer collaboration it enables deliver real business value for our organizations.

But until recently, our knowledge was based largely on our personal experience, and that of our friends and colleagues. So Puppet Labs and IT Revolution Press partnered late last year to survey sysadmins, developers and other technology professionals in search of hard data that would tell us whether DevOps really does deliver solid results.

Kord Campbell (@stackgeek) recently interviewed some developers at our San Francisco office about why they like working with OpenStack. We liked it so much we wanted to share it with you. Enjoy!