Rackspace offers DevOps as a service

With DevOps having already made it to the 2014 predictions list of Rackspace Technology VP, Nigel Beighton, the company has now launched a new DevOps Automation Service, that it reckons should increase speed and agility for software developers and business IT departments.

The service is an addition to the company’s Fanatical Support capabilities and is intended to help customers automate their cloud infrastructure with a new managed support service for DevOps tools. It has been designed to help developers automate the process of deploying and scaling hybrid cloud infrastructure for fast-growing applications, while advancing the adoption of the DevOps methodology among software and IT teams.

The DevOps Automation Service will enable developers and IT departments to accelerate time to market for their products and features by allowing them to deploy, scale and test new configurations in hours rather than days. In addition, the service will help improve the quality of software deployments and create more frequent software releases, as automating processes will allow organisations to provision servers consistently and free of mistakes typically caused by manual installation and configuration.

“Today's market demands the speed and efficiency of IT automation. Rather than sacrificing quality or uptime because of avoidable human errors, devOps methodology and practices of agility and automation can reduce human interaction with code and infrastructure, allowing development and other teams to focus on their primary objectives and business,” said 451 Research Senior Analyst Jay Lyman. “This continuous deployment approach to infrastructure can accelerate release time and time-to-market for applications and features by reducing errors and test time and supporting devOps processes."

There is currently a shortage of developer talent with DevOps skills, according to Rackspace product director, Jonathan Siegel, so trhe company is now pitching at providing as a service. The company claims it uses the same tools and best-practices that enabled it to launch 18 new cloud products, push code into production more than 2,500 times and run over 15,000 automated tests last year.

The benefits the company sees the DevOps Automation Service providing include the provision of Enhanced Infrastructure Automation, enabling customers to improve quality and velocity of software release, and to synchronise development and staging environments with production environment using configuration management tools such as Chef.

They will be able to collect application performance metrics (APM) to view code impact changes with application monitoring tools such as New Relic, statsD, Graphite, or Cloud Monitoring and build workflows to automate routine maintenance tasks using workflow automation tools such as Rundeck and Jenkins. It will also provide aggregate logs from all devices to help identify patterns, and spot anomalies using log aggregation tools such as logstash. Managing caching needs will be possible with tools such as Memcache, and Varnish, while multi-server environments can be provisioned in minutes instead of hours.

Managed Services will enable customers to focus on innovation and other tasks that add value to the business by allowing Rackspace to design, build, configure, monitor and optimise both the infrastructure, software stack and the automation tools.

For now, the service will only support Linux-based technologies, though Windows services are said to be coming soon.

It has been built to help improve various phases of the application lifecycle. It can be used to enforce consistency, manage configurations and change, and help with prompt responses to monitoring alerts.