RightScale
I’ve blogged in the past about RightScale when talking about managing your Amazon EC2 instances. They have a nice platform and developers can get a free account with limited services to get your feet wet in the service. I have such an account and have launched a few servers with it. I wasn’t setting my ports to open correctly, so I couldn’t connect to it via SSH or HTTP, but that’s my fault, not RightScale’s.
Yesterday, when talking about Amazon’s various announcements, I called Rightscale “expensive.” I’d like to clarify that a bit. In my position as a web development manager at a small, liberal-arts college, RightScale looks, at first glance, expensive. But, if you were a small or medium sized business who was migrating a lot of services towards AWS and EC2, a solution like RightScale makes a lot of sense, and in that scenario, is really quite affordable. Being able to quickly and easily scale up and down your server instances is probably worth the price of admission alone. But mostly, it’s takes a large amount of the work out of managing, maintaining and scaling your EC2 based servers. That’s something you can directly look at and see the ROI, in terms of staff time, up or down time and other infrastructure resources.
I got an email yesterday from the CTO of Rightscale, and I’ve asked if I can send him some questions to answer about RightScale, higher education usage and more.
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Thanks for the clarification! Please don’t hesitate to use the free edition. As long as you don’t care about redundant multi-server clusters you’re really not missing much and if you do care it’s presumably because you’re running a business and then we’d love to be paid
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Re: “my position as a web development manager at a small, liberal-arts college” please email us/me if there is a feature of the paid version you need and we can see what can be done…
Re: the ports, yup, a real pain. For users who signed-up fairly recently we ask at the beginning whether they want us to open ports 22 and 80, which almost everyone wants. That has cut down the support requests about “I can’t reach my server” a lot. I suppose you signed-up before we made that change.
Hope you continue to enjoy RightScale and EC2!