Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) vs. Rackspace Fabric

While the idea is to utilize it enterprise wide; it sometimes doesn't work well in smaller applications and that causes slowdowns and impacts productivity. Also when evaluating EFS versus EBS - one needs to look at cost as EFS is a lot more expensive to implement and run so you need to weigh cost benefits of both systems and choose the best for you.

Incentivized

I am highly likely to recommend Rackspace Cloud Monitoring to a colleague. This is assuming they have a decent background in working on cloud servers. If you don't mind digging in yourself to solve problems, then this is a great resource. If you are just learning how to set up servers on your own, then I recommend at least hiring someone to help you use the service. With that being said, Rackspace makes it easy for people you may hire to seamlessly work within your account. They get their own separate developer account.

Incentivized

• This is very easy to setup and has a great performance.
• As per the name, Elastic grows as your data grows.
• We can run multiple EC2 instances.

Incentivized

• Immediate email notifications: In case a service is down on our servers, we get immediate email notifications via rackspace cloud monitoring service. This helps us to know about the issues and we get in contact with support team to get it resolved.
• Configuration on specific services: We can configure this monitoring on specific services. So for example if i don't want to get notified if MySQL concurrent users limit reached, then I do not need to configure this monitoring for MySQL. I can just use it whenever needed for defined services.
• Group emails and technical contacts emails: The monitoring service can send email alerts to a number of email addresses. Primarily the ones who are added as a technical contact. It helps all people get notified about any issue.
• Auto ticket management: Rackspace automatically creates a support ticket when a service is down and is notified by their monitoring service.

Incentivized

• For early age start it would be costly
• Not necessary for small scale system, but very beneficial for system which have high TPS and huge user base

Incentivized

• It would be nice if there were more templates so that beginners could easily create complex monitors
• I seemed to stumble upon the cloud monitoring service after having Rackspace for a while

Incentivized

The documentation is sufficient for setting up and it is basic NFS for mounting so not much support is required. I have not had any issues to warrant a request with AWS support.

Incentivized

EFS is easier to configure, no need for Active Directory.

Incentivized

I also used Monitis as a monitoring service for our server. Rackspace'S monitoring sends immediate notifications while Monitis might take a couple minutes to understand if a service is down. Since Rackspace has their monitoring integrated with their support system, it helps us a lot and we don't need to call support all the time.

Incentivized

• Cost is always a paramount issue when looking at ROI
• It is fast and if that's what you need for your implementation - you probably will not find a better solution
• Expertise in EFS is sometimes hard to come by so it's best to look at your employee's ability to grasp this technology. Otherwise, it's a pretty steep learning curve.

Incentivized

• I have overpaid in the past for services I didn't need
• The steepish learning curve might slow things down at first
• I have learned a lot using Rackspace Cloud Monitoring!

Incentivized