Rackspace is a managed hosting and cloud company, and its blog covers product launches, partnerships, and company news.
HN commenters link it for facts about Rackspace, such as its headquarters in a former mall, and for explainers on availability zones and customer cases.
Not sure about a toster, but there are benefits to having some household appliances connected to the internet. For example, a washing machine may be able to determine what hour it should operate for maximum energy savings, and ping you when finished. I guess a toaster could be similar; pre-loaded with bread so you could ask it to start toasting before getting up from the sofa.
> Consumers may find it totally cool to design images for toast using a smartphone. Meantime, the resulting data would help food companies understand how people approach breakfast, design new products and market to consumers more effectively.
http://blog.rackspace.com/internet-of-things-why-connected-toasters-and-other-smart-home-devices-matter
Rackspace's HQ in San Antonio, Texas was an old mall.
https://blog.rackspace.com/get-an-inside-look-at-the-rackspace-castle-via-google-street-view
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/realestate/commercial/rackspace-revitalizes-a-defunct-mall-into-an-unorthodox-tech-campus.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzXDRBp68W4
The Rackspace head offices were built in an abandoned Texas mall (Windsor Park Mall, now The Castle, in San Antonio [0]) which is a nice recycling of an otherwise dead space...
0. https://blog.rackspace.com/get-an-inside-look-at-the-rackspace-castle-via-google-street-view and https://youtu.be/J4b0UlAZcH4
>Thanks to the Internet of Things, the ability to collect massive amounts of data and use it in new and profoundly different ways also enters the picture.
http://blog.rackspace.com/internet-of-things-why-connected-toasters-and-other-smart-home-devices-matter
No thank you very much.
A single availability zone can be spread across many physical data centres.
According to this rackspace article, the largest AZ has 5 data centres.
https://blog.rackspace.com/aws-101-regions-availability-zones
Clicking that link, I see: 403 Forbidden --- nginx. If that's the service they provide...
http://blog.rackspace.com/newsarticles/rackspace-announces-aws-managed-service-offerings-at-reinvent/