Rackspace announces enhanced DevOps Automation Service

Available in the U.S. and UK, enhancements to the Rackspace DevOps Automation Service offering provide customers with additional services and Fanatical Support® through the new managed operations service level. These enhancements will help customers design, manage and scale their cloud operations and enable a continuous application delivery model.

“We want to offer our customers the very best DevOps service on the market," said Chris Jackson, Practice Area CTO (DevOps) at Rackspace UK. “Since we launched Rackspace DevOps Automation last year, we have been working hard to build on this to continually improve the service we offer.

“Extending our support to Windows and expanding the environment stacks we support is just one example of how we are always working to build on the success of our initial offering. The new DevOps Advisory Service will help companies accelerate their internal transformation to adopt DevOps principles and methodologies. Fundamentally, these enhancements let our customers build and deploy features faster, quickly scale out their technology infrastructure and improve developer productivity.

Rackspace DevOps Automation Service is also expanding its scope to support Windows and new environment stack features, including:
· Windows Support: Rackspace DevOps Automation Service now supports Windows, featuring Microsoft DSC, an extension of PowerShell. With Windows support, the service utilises Rackspace modules to deploy infrastructure quickly and consistently, using Desired State Configuration (DSC) and source-controlled code. Customers also will be able to take advantage of orchestration and monitoring that will help deploy and maintain more reliable application environments.
· Expanding Environment Stacks: Rackspace now supports the following environment stacks, which can be deployed in hours on the Rackspace Hybrid Cloud: Chef, Rails, Node.js, PHP, Tomcat and Python. Customers can use recommended stack architectures and will receive updates, security patches and the latest versions of environment stacks, which are constantly maintained and tested by Rackspace DevOps engineers.

“At WePay, we have doubled our transaction volume from December to March of this year which puts a huge load on our servers,” said Bill Clerico, CEO at WePay. “Rackspace specialists help set up Chef scripts, configure our servers, configure monitoring and more. In fact, with Rackspace DevOps Automation Service we were able to spin up basically an entire new data centre at Rackspace in the time that it would have taken us to add just couple of servers in our internal set up.”

In addition to Rackspace DevOps Automation Service, Rackspace is also launching the new DevOps Advisory Service. Rackspace DevOps specialists work with customers from stakeholder through front-line levels to help map and plan that organisation’s shift to DevOps practices. Rackspace’s transformation methodology leverages DevOps foundations to assess each customer’s current capability and manage gaps. The service then uses a variety of methods to help drive progress, including:
· DevOps Workshops: Rackspace is working with customers to perform a range of services including application assessment, transformation planning and knowledge transfer, plus enablement around key areas like Configuration Management Tools, Provisioning and Deployments, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) and Monitoring.
· DevOps Strategy Planning: Rackspace DevOps specialists work with customers to understand their requirements and help create a custom project plan for their business needs and timeline.
· DevOps Professional Services: Rackspace provides access to DevOps professional services from writing infrastructure code to designing structure and building migration plans for applications. This helps customers automate, deploy and test their infrastructure for their main applications, or a set of proof of concepts that the customer helps build.