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Rackspace Doubles Down on AWS Partnership
Managed cloud services provider Rackspace is beefing up its arsenal of services aimed at moving customers to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The company this week announced a joint initiative with AWS to combine the two companies' respective resources in a bid to facilitate customer migrations to the AWS cloud.
As part of the deal's terms, AWS will move some of its professional services team to Rackspace's headquarters in San Antonio, Texas. This approach, according to Rackspace, will enable the two companies to provide their customers with more efficient and well-rounded support throughout their cloud migration process.
In addition, Rackspace will provide their migration customers with AWS-specific advisory services. "Rackspace can assess current workloads including server types and configurations, network topology, evaluate security, governance and compliance requirements, and design the systems architecture from the AWS catalogue that is the best fit for the customers' workloads," the company said.
The third prong of the partnership entails giving migration customers access to Rackspace's migration automation software. The company describes this as a "point & click, self-service interface" that's designed to ease the transition of various workloads to the AWS cloud.
For AWS' part, the cloud platform provider "will also be offering significant resources to support proof of concept projects and migrations," according to a blog post Tuesday by Prashanth Chandrasekar, head of the AWS business at Rackspace.
This week's announcement builds on Rackspace's existing relationship with onetime rival AWS. The company is a Premier Consulting Partner and an Audited Managed Service Partner within the AWS Partner Network. It has also been steadily growing its ranks of AWS-certified "Rackers," which now number around 800 employees, up from just 300 last July.
In late 2015, Rackspace launched an AWS version of its "Fanatical Support" brand of cloud support services, following that up earlier this year with the addition of professional services support. Chandrasekar said the Fanatical Support for AWS offering is the fastest-growing in the company's history.