Rackspace, a managed cloud services provider, is expanding its services to move customers to Amazon Web Services.
This week, the company announced a joint initiative to AWS to combine their resources to help customers migrate to AWS.
AWS will relocate some of its professional service team to Rackspace’s San Antonio headquarters as part of the agreement. Rackspace claims that this will allow the companies to provide better support to their customers during cloud migrations.
Rackspace will also provide AWS-specific advisory services to their migration customers. Rackspace will provide AWS-specific advisory services to customers who are moving. “Rackspace can assess their current workloads, including server types and configurations, network topology and security requirements, and design the system architecture from AWS that is most suitable for their workloads,” said the company.
The third component of the partnership allows migration customers to access Rackspace’s migration software. This is described by the company as a “point-and-click, self service interface” that facilitates the migration of different workloads to AWS cloud.
According to Prashanth Chandrasekar (head of Rackspace’s AWS business), AWS will also offer significant resources to support proof-of-concept projects and migrations.
Rackspace’s relationship with AWS, a former rival, was strengthened by this week’s announcement. Rackspace is an AWS Partner Network Premier Consulting Partner and an Audited Managed Service Partner. It has been steadily increasing its number of AWS-certified “Rackers” to around 800, an increase from 300 employees last July.
Rackspace launched the AWS version of its cloud support services “Fanatical Support” in late 2015. It followed that up earlier this year by adding professional services support. Chandrasekar stated that the Fanatical Support for AWS service is the fastest growing in the company’s history.