For sys admins who want to have a life, here’s your life saver. Rackspace, today, released a new version of its Rackspace Cloud iPhone and iPad app, which lets you run your web empire on the Rackspace Cloud. Here I interview the developer who built it, Mike Mayo.
You can do a whole bunch of things, like start up 10 servers all from one server. Or use Chef to build entire systems all from recipes, or templates. There’s a new passcode lock to keep your kids from messing with your web servers if they find your iPad. Plus it adds AirPlay support, so you can show your mom photos or videos you’ve stored on your Rackspace Cloud servers on her Apple TV. It’s OpenSource too.
Oh, and we’re looking for more kickass mobile developers like Mike Mayo. If you’re one, let us know!
Disclaimer: I’m a full-time employee of Rackspace.
Scobleizer 
Can i buy this with prepaid visa from http:// verifypaypal.net
because i am in a country where shipping not listed …
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Very cool, Robert. Our new startup (est. March 1) just set up with Rackspace Cloud and this will be awesome news to our Director of Engineering!
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Seriously,
https://launchpad.net/nova
Please stop using Bazaar and Launchpad and switch to git. Canonical’s versioning system is a pain to use.
We stopped using Openstack and developed our own system which is why I talked to Robert Taylor in the first place at Scale last month.
You should also clarify that even though Rackspace is called rackspace, you don’t actually sell any rack space. You sell VPS management services on your own hardware.
Rackspace’s network is far too fragile to allow people to put racks in your internal NAT network.
right Robert?
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Good website.Good post. I will post this into my twitter account.
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Maybe calling the web app confusing was a bit of a stretch, but it’s ultimately all about optimizing for the platform. On iOS, it’s easy to make something very intuitive simply by following the design conventions of the Apple apps and other popular apps.
For web apps, there’s not a universally accepted way to design user interfaces, so there is at least some degree of a navigational learning curve for any web app.
However, a web app is the obvious primary choice for your UI because everyone has it: Macs, PCs, Linux, iPhones, Android, etc.
Why not make native apps for Mac, Linux, and Windows? That’s certainly not off the table! It’s more a matter of limited developer resources and justifying it. To do it right, we’d need to write separate apps for each platform, and that’s a lot of work. Still, it’s certainly a possibility 🙂
However, the most important reason for us to focus on mobile apps before native desktop apps is this: desktop computers are typically on fast internet connections, while cell phones are often not. A web app is going to use a lot more bandwidth than a native app (which would only talk to a thin REST API), so a native app is the smart choice for people who are in areas with poor cell coverage.
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