I have a pure web service application layer using .NET. I was originally planning to use Amazon EC2, but rolling my own autoscaling procedures is a bit intimidating, and the scaling isn't very granular from a cost perspective. If the app is successful, we could be looking at relatively high scale (millions of requests per month).
The app uses Amazon SimpleDB as the database layer. As a test, I have the app running successfully in Rackspace Cloud Sites. Performance seems to be equal to (if not better than) a standard EC2 instance, even with the added latency of the SimpleDB requests travelling to the Rackspace network. However, testing at this stage is at a very low scale.
My question is this: has anyone had real-world experience running a high scale application on Rackspace Cloud Sites? Moreover, once you pass the "included" 10,000 compute cycles per month, does the overall cost seem to be lower than rolling lots of EC2 instances? My assumption would be that with completely smooth scaling (i.e. only adding compute resources as needed), the cost could be lower on average. However, their stated goal of calibrating 10,000 CCs as a single 1.2 Ghz CPU seems on average to be much more expensive than EC2.
I like the idea of no-touch scaling, but is it too good to be true?
