RightScale Testimonial

TODO:

Please provide us with a quote that describes your overall experience or a targeted testimonial about working with us:

RightScale's platform provided us with tools we needed to build a very sophisticated architecture on top of Amazon EC2.  RightScale's pre-built server templates solved some difficult problems and provided us with a fully scriptable and reproducable build environment.  RightScale's technical team has tremendous knowledge and has been very responsive to our inquiries.  RightScale is without question the industry leader in this space.

What name/title would you like us to use for the quote?

AaronF - CEO  ???

May we use some of your feedback above to write a case study similar to those on our website?

Yes
 

What were your technical challenges before coming to RightScale?

Before moving to RightScale/AWS, capacity planning was difficult. Bringing a new server online involved contacting our hosting provider, waiting several days for the build to be completed, then applying our configuration to the box.  This required a large lead time for scaling up, and scaling back down was nearly impossible. 

Another challenge was ensuring that our server configurations were always the same.  Hardware configuration, partitioning schemes, and supported operating systems often changed and we were left with a hodgepodge of servers with different capabilities.

How did the RightScale platform help solve those problems?

RightScale solved our scaling problem by allowing us to very easily scale up and down and only pay for the capacity we needed at that time.  A new server can be launched and available within minutes instead of days.

With RightScale ServerTemplates and RightScripts, we have a repeatable installation process that guarantees our servers will have the identical capabilities.  Because the entire installation process is scripted and automated, recovering from a server failure is a much less painful process!

What has your experience been working with the dashboard interface and templates?

The RightScale dashboard provides a much easier way to interact with Amazon EC2.  There are no API tools, certificates, ssh keys to install and I don't have to read the EC2 API documentation when I want to launch a new instance, associate an elastic IP address, or decommission a server.  

The pre-built RightScale templates were also extremely helpful for solving common problems.  For example, the templates for MySQL master-slave replication with continuous backups to Amazon S3 were a huge time saver.  Solving that problem on our own would have taken a considerable amount of time and isn't something we wanted to maintain.

Another useful feature for us is the ability to clone scripts, templates, and entire deployments.  This makes testing new features much easier since we can quickly duplicate an existing configuration and test new code, troubleshoot issues, etc without affecting our production environment.

What has been your impression working with the RightScale engineering and support team?

The engineering and support team has been very responsive to our inquiries.  For example, we had a very large number of databases to backup which caused some RightScripts to fail.  They provided us with updated scripts in less than a day.

When Enterprise Block Storage was announced, a member of the engineering team discussed several implementation options with us and clearly laid out the pros and cons of each approach.  It was valuable information that we otherwise probably would have learned the hard way!

What do you like best about this platform?

By far, the best feature of the RightScale/EC2 platform is it's flexibility and programmability.  Adding and removing servers from a cluster only takes minutes and we only pay for the computing power we need.  Being able to automatically scale up and down based on server load, memory usage, or any other metric that can be measured gives us so many options that simply weren't possible with traditional hosting models.

What could we do to improve your experience?

We'd like to see more RightScripts for EBS to handle common scenarios.  For example, running mysql on a local disk with backups being copied to an EBS volume. 

Another feature that would be handy would be the ability to edit and publish rightscripts directly from a running instance.  When developing a new script, I usually write it locally then have to copy/paste my script into the RightScale dashboard and test it again there.  It would be nice to be able to publish directly from the local machine (similar to how Google App Engine's appcfg.py update works).

Any other comments or feedback?

I find the RightScale Blog to be a great resource.  I'd love to see more posts there (no matter how insignificant they may seem). 

How did you find out about us?

Not sure actually :)  Most likely a blog post.