Jonathan and Todd, can you give us a bit of your background and some background on Mosso? Jonathan: Todd and I have been working at Rackspace for close to nine years now. I come from a development background, and Todd comes from the design side. We created Mosso to let people like us get a Web application up and running quickly without worrying about the infrastructure. We've created an environment that makes it easy to scale and secure those Web applications. With Mosso, we have a scalable hosting cloud that is focused on providing application stacks for LAMP, Ruby, ASP.NET, Classic ASP, etc.
Todd: I have been working with Jonathan from the beginning of our Rackspace days. Like Jonathan said, I am on the design and advertising side of things and I am also heavily involved in UI design.
We differentiate our cloud offering from some of the other folks out there, Amazon in particular, in that we are building a wholly integrated solution that is easy to use and set up.
If you started building out a Web site on Amazon's cloud, you lease some EC2 instances and go through a process of wiring those together, and connecting them to an S3 data storage backend. With Mosso, you have everything set up and ready to go in about five minutes. You just upload code and have it deployed across all the servers. Our focus is on providing a comprehensive solution that is easy to use and gets you scalable hosting right away so you can focus on what you love doing as a site creator or developer, which is the process of creating and developing content.
You mentioned Amazon's EC2 Cloud, which is built on top of RHEL. What are the differences between Mosso's cloud and Amazon's? Jonathan: Amazon has brought some innovative things to market, but it is definitely focused on people who are more infrastructure minded. You have to realize at the end of the day that all you are getting with EC2 is a server. You have a virtual server that you need to maintain and patch. You have to figure out how to load balance it, back it up, and all of those sorts of things. We have focused on creating a solution that goes as far up the stack as possible, so if all you want to do is write code, that is all that you have to do. It is our responsibility to take care of all the traffic and IT infrastructure issues.
Given that Windows is a core part of the Mosso infrastructure, what do you think of it as a platform for Cloud Computing? Jonathan: One of the biggest scaling stories we had to date was on Windows. We hosted the Teen Choice Awards, which is a competition where all of the voting happens online. There is a period of time when the voting is open, and during this time they had 32 million votes. The site was all backed by a SQL Server database and a .NET front end. If you look at their traffic over the past few months as they built up to show time, their levels were 10 times higher than usual.
Do you think then that Microsoft empowers developers with the tools that they need? Jonathan: From our perspective, it is very important to empower our developers with tools that they know and enjoy. For example, there are Cloud offerings like Google that only offer Python, which is great for Python developers but not for everyone else.
Microsoft has always done a good job at providing robust developer tools, and we have a lot of interest in the .NET Framework. The tools that Microsoft provides developers are a compelling reason for people to adopt a Microsoft-based Cloud environment.
Do you think Microsoft helps the average developer more than the LAMP community does, by providing developers with the right resources? Jonathan: I think the nice thing about Microsoft is that they give you one right way to do something. It's blueprints and it's prescriptive. In our environment, we have hundreds of servers on the LAMP side, and we have really strong Linux technicians, but there are a lot of options with the LAMP stack, so there are always a lot of debates internally about what to do for directory services (we've used several), what distribution to use, how to handle patching, and how to do management.
With Microsoft, there are a lot of prescriptive recipes and patterns for directory and patch management. For example, with Microsoft's Active Directory, you get an internal DNS that is already configured; those kinds of things really help out when you are putting up 10, 15, or 20 servers and you need to join them to the domain. All of the other servers in the domain know about them. They have all of the shared authentication information. You know that their security policies are applied, and in an environment where you are putting up and taking down a lot of machines, those things definitely help.
The same kinds of things spill over on the developer side, which is why I think developers like .NET. They work in an environment with .NET that has built in support for creating database-driven applications. Developers do not need to spend a week setting up their development environment. It's there, it's ready to go, and they know they can just deploy their application to SQL Server and IIS and it will function the same on the production server as it did on their development machine.
Todd: I think the story that Jonathan mentioned with Teen Choice is an important one, because it shows that Microsoft technology is absolutely capable of supporting the scale and the demand that Linux traditionally has been known for in the Web space.
You can no longer say that you are choosing Linux because Microsoft doesn't scale; that's not true. Microsoft is also really good at providing developer tools. .NET is a developer environment where developers can be extremely productive, and it is awesome that Microsoft has built the right back-end technology, especially the new versions of IIS that have an incredible amount of scalability.
Some in the Linux community would say that Linux is simply a better choice for the Cloud. What would you say to that? Jonathan: There's nothing really inherent to Linux that makes it more suited to being the underlying operating system for a Cloud infrastructure.
What's been your experience in working with Microsoft as partner? Jonathan: We have been able to participate in go-live programs for IIS 7.0 and SQL Server 2008, which has given us the opportunity to see the code early and to interact with the development teams that are building the products while they are building them. We have been able to give them feedback and get questions answered early on. By contrast, that is not something that we have not seen from our Linux vendors.
One consideration with the Cloud of course is cost. What are your thoughts on the perspective that Linux is free and hence is ideally suited to be the foundation for the Cloud? Jonathan: The point of the Cloud is that you should be able to pick whatever environment you want to work in. Microsoft does have a good, cost effective licensing program for hosters. It's not like we lose our shirts when someone chooses Microsoft over Linux. That's why we are able to give developers a choice of Windows or Linux and let them decide if they want to use LAMP or .NET. I think that is totally what the Cloud should be doing. It should be letting you choose what tools you want to use, and that is basically the only decision you should have to make.
In closing, what's your vision for the Cloud in the years ahead? Jonathan: You know, the case studies we do for people like the Teen Choice awards are a great story, but what I really like is when we enable the dreamers, the people who ten years ago wouldn't be able to execute on their dreams. They wouldn't be able to do all the things they can do now with the Cloud, because they would have to worry about all the infrastructure considerations first. We're helping to make it a shorter road for them between coming up with an idea and launching it as a product or service.
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