Rackspace, the popular managed and cloud hosting provider, has made available a set of tools for Visual Studio 2010 to allow developers to work more easily with their Rackspace Cloud Servers for Windows.
The Rackspace Cloud is a cluster of servers managed by Rackspace, running either Linux or Windows, available as a per-server hourly rental cost to allow customers to scale sites easily and as required. Unlike Windows Azure, which is a more managed solution providing an “App Fabric” which seamlessly runs across multiple machines, the Rackspace Cloud presents developers with the physical machines, which they may then image using Windows Server as they wish.
The Visual Studio plugin provides developers making use of the Rackspace Cloud APIs for Windows servers right from the development interface you’re used to working in. This includes launching, rebooting, and controlling servers; creating and rebuilding servers from system images; scheduling backups; and much more.
“The Rackspace Plug-In for Visual Studio 2010 is intended to help with developers looking for an easier way to deploy their applications, websites and blogs to the cloud” said Scott Guthrie, Vice President of the Developer Division at Microsoft.
“We hope to help the vast MSDN community streamline and simplify its deployment and management of applications on the cloud. This new toolkit will eliminate the need to toggle back and forth between the development platform and a separate cloud management panel, and save developers precious time” added Pat Matthews, Vice President of Cloud at Rackspace.
You can find out more about the Visual Studio plugin and get started with it straight away at Rackspace Tools.
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