Rackspace is broadening its professional services and tools for large enterprise cloud migration to AWS.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

August 1, 2017

3 Min Read
Rackspace Tightens Amazon Embrace

Rackspace is adding new services to its portfolio of tools for helping enterprises move workloads to Amazon Web Services, to better serve large and midsized enterprise customers.

Rackspace said it's providing technical data, professional services and a self-service interface for enterprises looking to make the shift to cloud.

The announcement is a step in a multi-year journey from Rackspace from a cloud provider in its own right to providing professional services for AWS, Microsoft Azure and VMware, while continuing to provide dedicated hosting and its own OpenStack cloud platform. (See Rackspace Sees Big Bucks in Pro Services.)

Figure 1:

Rackspace launched AWS support in late 2015, providing services for designing and building AWS environments, primarily for greenfield applications for enterprises. Early this year, Rackspace added services for migration of existing workloads for monolithic, legacy applications, Prashanth Chandrasekar, vice president and general manager for Rackspace's AWS business unit, tells Enterprise Cloud News.

Now, Rackspace is broadening its AWS services to suit the needs of bigger enterprise customers. "It takes a village to get these things accomplished -- moving larger enterprises to AWS cloud," Chandrasekar says.

"Customers who are looking to migrate to AWS often lack the internal resources and expertise needed to move workloads rapidly and effectively," Rackspace said on its blog Monday.

Under the new service, Rackspace helps plan migration of applications and data, assessing current workloads, including server types and configuration, network topology, security, governance and compliance requirements. Rackspace uses that information to design a systems architecture for AWS.

Rackspace and AWS Professional Services share space inside Rackspace to efficiently migrate and provision new applications.

And Advanced Migration Tooling provides a self-service interface in the Rackspace Control Panel to automate moving workloads to AWS.

Rackspace went private at the end of 2016 in a $4.3 billion deal, laid off about 6% of its workforce at the beginning of the year, and CEO Taylor Rhodes announced in May that he would be stepping down. Rackspace named Joe Eazor to the top job later that month.

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About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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