Rackspace Delivers OpenStack as a Service, Powered by Red Hat

By Christian Foster - February 11, 2016

OpenStack is complicated. It’s hard to deploy and talent is hard to come by.

We’ve heard this refrain from technology leaders loud and clear: they want the power of OpenStack deployed for the benefit of their business, but don’t know how to unravel the complexity on their own. That’s why Rackspace offers a superior model: OpenStack-as-a-Service. We simplify, we deploy a prescribed solution, we give customers access to the most experienced operators on the globe and we provide OpenStack with an SLA.

Rackspace is also all about customer choice: we provide Fanatical Support on the world’s leading technologies. With this in mind for our OpenStack-as-a-Service portfolio, we’re pleased to announce the addition of a managed OpenStack private cloud powered by Red Hat.

We will continue to offer our own upstream OpenStack powered private cloud, of course, but for companies who’ve built their stacks around a Red Hat partnership and are looking for an additional level of ongoing, expert support, Rackspace now has you covered.

We’re not just taking Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution as is. We’re refining the architecture so it’s a supportable, production-ready private cloud we can back with our industry-leading 99.99 percent uptime SLA guarantee — or as one of our developers said, “We don’t just pull it off the shelf, we engineer it to make it awesome.”

This partnership expands the already deep relationship between Red Hat and Rackspace, which have worked together for more than a decade now. Rackspace has been a Red Hat certified cloud and service provider since 2012, and last year Racker Carl Thompson was named Red Hat’s Certified Professional of the Year, one of more than 170 Red Hat certified professionals working at Rackspace.

Expanding our OpenStack-as-a-service offerings, Rackspace will manage and maintain the Red Hat environment, including the underlying Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack platform, allowing customers to focus on their business applications.

As the leading provider of OpenStack, we’ve come to believe and advocate something fundamental: OpenStack is best thought of, not as a product, but as a set of projects, blueprints and tools that allow organizations to deploy applications to the cloud and achieve scale, efficiency, flexibility, speed-to-market and speed-to-revenue.

OpenStack is like a major auto parts store: it’s got an awesome array of parts and tools on the shelves, but most consumers can’t — or don’t want to — take on the building and maintaining of their cars.

Of course, many companies can help design and build an OpenStack Lamborghini from scratch, with one-of-a-kind integrations and unique design and deployment. But that’s where their role ends. There’s no ongoing operating structure associated with maintaining, optimizing, upgrading, monitoring and operating that beautiful vehicle. There is no team of experts behind you 24x7x365 and no guarantees for level of service or uptime.

Unless, of course, your company is doing it the Rackspace way: OpenStack-as-a-Service.

This model delivers a very specific reference architecture that has already been delivered to hundreds of customers across almost every industry. OpenStack-as-a-service provides access to the single largest team of people operating OpenStack since its inception. It prescribes an answer for every configuration choice, because only the most stable OpenStack projects and features can be deployed at scale with an SLA. And it includes options for training, services to overcome adoption barriers and dedicated resources that get to know your cloud, your workloads, your business and your team.

Thanks to our partnership with Red Hat, companies happy with their Red Hat Enterprise Linux stacks can stay right where they are, and still enjoy a prescriptive and managed private cloud deployment, our data center or ours, combining the agility and efficiency of a public cloud with the enhanced security, control and performance of an enterprise environment.

Next Monday, Feb. 15, here on the blog, Rackspace Senior Director of Product Management Bryan Thompson, who leads the product team for Rackspace Private Cloud, will offer an in-depth look at the architecture, supported software, infrastructure components and support levels that make up our OpenStack private cloud powered by Red Hat. He'll also invite interested readers to attend a webinar offering an even deeper dive later this month.

I encourage you to come back and check it out.