Moving from AWS to Rackspace

I’ve moved my little cloud instance from Amazon AWS to Rackspace, which includes hosting of this blog. It was a simple process, but I thought I’d write a few notes about it. There are a few reasons I wanted to move, but the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back was lack of proper IPv6 support on AWS.

It is possible to get very basic IPv6 support on AWS by putting an Elastic Load Balancer in front of one or more EC2 instances that are IPv4-only, but I wanted to have native IPv6 on the server instance for testing outbound connections as well. And really, setting up a load balancer in front of a single instance just to proxy IPv6 requests just seems dumb.

We use both Rackspace and AWS at work, and I’ve been liking the steady improvements in services and support I’ve been seeing from Rackspace in the past couple of years. I also really like that they’re openly talking about how they do things (I follow their devops blog) and participating in the building of open source tools that they use in their business, like OpenStack.

I’m also pleasantly surprised that Rackspace Cloud DNS is free. Not that AWS Route 53 is expensive, I think DNS for my few domains only costs around $4/month, but if I don’t have to pay that I’m happy not to. The Rackspace DNS is differently highly-available, using anycast name servers instead of Route 53 “brute force” distributed (separate AWS zones and separate TLDs for the name servers) – but either is fine for my purposes.

So, I’ll let you know how it goes!