Managing your Rackspace account¶
When you log in to your Cloud Control Panel, you can examine and change your managed cloud configuration. For example, you can create a cloud server or delete a block storage volume. You can also examine and change your account itself in several areas:
Billing and Payments gives you access to your current balance, billing history, billing address, and credit card information.
Usage Overview shows you today’s usage-based billing for the current billing cycle, service by service. For Cloud Servers, you can see separate subtotals for hourly usage, image storage, and outgoing bandwidth.
Account Settings lets you change the account password, establish a security question, enable two-factor authentication, reset your API key, and maintain your contact information.
User Management lets you define users of your account and give them specific access, so that some can have full access to the account and some can have per-product limitations.
Resource Limits compares current activity to the limits established for your account and provides a method of requesting an increase of those limits.
Support Tickets shows all the open and closed tickets associated with your account and provides a method of creating a new ticket.
Upgrade Service Level identifies the support service level currently in effect for your account, compares it to other available service levels, and provides a method of requesting more information prior to making a change.
Managing role-based access to services¶
Using role-based access control (RBAC), you can divide responsibilities among members of your team. For example, you can enable a database administrator to schedule database backups and enable a network administrator to expand a load balancing group. The roles that make sense for your team are likely to change as your workload grows, your team grows, and you add more services to your configuration. You can see suggested role configurations at Managing: Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).
Managing expenses by limiting workload¶
Enforcing limits on some activities makes it easier to control costs. Because you pay for only what you use in the Rackspace Managed Cloud, limits mean that you will not be surprised by a sudden spike in billable activity. Limits can also protect you from workloads beyond the capacity of your configuration.
Limits on your account’s activity are initially set by Rackspace. You can change some limits yourself to suit your workload; to change other limits, contact Rackspace.
Absolute limits¶
Absolute limits control the total number of service resources that the user can possess simultaneously. For example, an absolute limit controls the amount of RAM that can be assigned in a Cloud Servers configuration.
Default absolute limits are set to provide you with a reasonable amount of resources for testing and moderately-sized environments and applications. If you need additional resource capacity, you can request an increase of your absolute limits by opening a ticket in the Cloud Control Panel or by contacting Rackspace Support.
When you are logged in to the Cloud Control Panel, you can see absolute limits defined for servers, along with your current consumption of the limited resources, by clicking the Account: yourUserName menu and selecting Resource Limits.
Rate limits¶
Rate limits control the frequency at which the user can issue specific requests. Rate limits are reset after a certain amount of time passes. For example, a rate limit controls the number of GET requests that can be processed during a one-minute period.
Default rate limits are set such that most users won’t encounter them, however if needed, you can raise your rate limits by opening a ticket in the Cloud Control Panel or by contacting Rackspace Support.
Limits for specific services¶
The following table shows some examples of limits, with links to API documentation for more examples and complete details.
Service |
Absolute limit example |
Rate limit example |
|---|---|---|
Cloud Block Storage |
No limits |
|
Cloud Servers |
||
Cloud Images |
No limits |
No limits |
Cloud Networks |
No limits |
No limits |
The services mentioned here are not the only ones with absolute limits or rate limits. Some services have no limits. We publish the limits relevant to any service in that service’s API documentation. You can find those details by going to Rackspace Cloud Technical Documentation and searching for limits.
You can also avoid surprises in your usage-based billing with the help of several tools:
In the Cloud Control Panel, check current usage frequently.
Combine Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Intelligence to help you recognize extreme usage peaks.
Use Auto Scale to increase resources only when needed.