Mosso revamps cloud service tools

Mosso, the cloud computing division of hosting provider Rackspace, has added a new Web-based control panel and a behind-the-scenes provisioning system to its Hosting Cloud service.

The company said Wednesday the control panel makes it easier for users to set up and manage hosted applications. It includes a new Web-based file manager that gives users access to stored data so that they can create and decompress archives and change access permissions more easily.

The Mosso control panel includes a new Web-based file manager.

A snapshot tool, within the control panel, lets users access and reinstate previous versions of files in the case of accidental overwrite, the company said.

The provisioning system--used to deploy applications--shrinks the time needed to get an application up and running. The company built the new system using Apache's ServiceMix, according to co-founder Todd Morey. "We wrote our initial provisioning system in Java. As we have grown, we started to see some real strain on that system. The new provisioning system is a competitive advantage versus Amazon EC2, for example. We do a lot of the hard work for (the customer)."

Mosso's service, along with a hosted storage offering called CloudFS now in beta testing, competes against services from Amazon and others. Morey says Mosso's selling point versus competitors is that it is easy to set up and run. "Our key differentiator is that we're tightly integrated and easy to use."

The Hosting Cloud service is priced from $100 per month. "You pay for what you use--as you expand, your bandwidth expands," said Morey.

Click here to see more stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.