With EC2, I can make have a virtual machine that I only turn on when I need it. I only pay for disk space, and don't have to pay operating costs when it's off. EC2 is the only cloud provider with this feature, which is very useful for me.

need to be able to run a database larger than 620GBs

It'd be great if you could build a FreeBSD image for CloudServers, so that I can deploy some FreeBSD-specific applications.

While the internal IPs are nice, they are still open to the rest of the rackspace world, right?

Having a secure VPN interface that is accessible only to the other machines in the rackspace account would be awesome.

Currently I have clients in ORD1 and I am in DFW1. No local traffic between the two... I need to have the ability to specify which Data Center my cloud instances spawn in.

Also, as we get bigger, it'd be awesome to choose which data centers to spawn in so that we are not centrally geo-located.

I would love to see it posible to configure/administrate IP address, such that the IP address can be reused on upgraded (virtual) servers. A feature similar to AWS "Elastic IP address" (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#features) is what I am looking for.

Support for IPv6 on Servers. Ipv4 exhaustion will occur in 6-9 months and then there will be no more to give out. All the major ISPs have Ipv6 either in production or beta with secondary ISPs trying to catch up. Where is Rackspace?

I want to be able to take a cloud server back-up and move it to another account and create a server off of it

Using the Rackspace suggested method of building new servers and using rsync to copy over data from existing servers - in our case complex application and database configurations and data - would be slow and possibly prone to error. If a server could be moved to another account - let's say a new customer for Rackspace account - then all that would be necessary would be for said new customer to update his DNS and he is ready to go live.

For instance, I would like each of my webserver instances to share the same iptables configuration, and furthermore to be communicate between each other without having to reconfigure each server's iptables every time an instance is added or removed.

Permit an account holder to change the account's username.

This would allow us to boot the image using VM Ware Fusion or Virtualbox. We could then use that as a local development system. This would ensure that our local development matches the deployment environment.

Provide backup/snapshot ability for 4Gb & above.

Shared IP addresses are awesome for automatic failover. We should have functionality like this as well for internal only servers (like databases) that never get accessed from the outside world.

It would be really nice to set up backup policies for cloud servers.

For example, keep one backup for each:
1 day old
2 days old
1 week old
1 month old

There's a lot of great pre-packed servers out there such as AsteriskNOW can you make that available or let me install server from ISO?

We can ask for as many external IP addresses as we want, but can't ask for extra internal IPs on a machine.

This is surely madness.