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Rackspace Extends 'Fanatical Support' to AWS
Confirming earlier rumors, Rackspace on Tuesday announced it is extending its cloud support offerings to onetime rival Amazon Web Services (AWS) Inc.
Rackspace's "Fanatical Support for AWS" offering is now available for customers in the United States and across all AWS datacenter regions (except for China and the AWS GovCloud). The announcement coincides with the start of the AWS re:Invent conference, which takes place this week in Las Vegas.
Under "Fanatical Support for AWS," organizations will receive tooling, automation and support from Rackspace's roster of 100 AWS-certified engineers. The service has two levels -- the Navigator level for organizations that want to retain overall control of their AWS environments, and the Aviator level for those that want to turn the full management load over to Rackspace.
Rackspace is also beta-testing "Managed Security for AWS" and "Compliance Assistance for AWS," which provide round-the-clock security support and compliance consulting services, respectively.
The deal between Rackspace and AWS was first reported in late September by The Wall Street Journal, which cited unnamed sources.
Just this past summer, Rackspace announced a similar agreement with Microsoft to support the latter's Azure cloud platform. Like AWS, Microsoft was once a rival of Rackspace in the public cloud arena, so that announcement was met with surprise from many quarters. Tuesday's agreement with Rackspace had much the same reception, which is possibly what prompted this post on the Rackspace blog explaining the deal.
"We have a long history of providing the world's best expertise and customer service for the world's leading technologies. We help businesses tap the power of the cloud without the pain and expense of managing it all themselves. We have gone deep on support for platforms such as OpenStack, Microsoft and VMware. Our success in leading the managed cloud market for those technologies has been validated by industry experts such as Gartner and, most importantly, by our 300,000-plus business customers," wrote Rackspace President and CEO Taylor Rhodes.
"We at Rackspace have always sought out the world's leading technologies and provided expertise and Fanatical Support on top of them, even if we already supported a 'competing' solution," Rhodes added.