Announcing the launch of Rackspace Teams
Rackspace Teams is a unique engagement model that we purposely developed based on feedback from customers who asked for the ability to gain in-depth cloud expertise on-demand without a long-term commitment to hire staff.
Introduction
These customers want to combine the ability to dynamically change scope and priorities typically provided when using internal teams with top-shelf expertise in the following areas, to name a few:
- Amazon® Web Services (AWS) cloud
- Infrastructure as Code
- Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD)
- DevOps transformation
- Containers
Challenges
The traditional consulting model, based on hourly time and material engagements with pre-defined deliverables and milestones, is too rigid. Dealing with change can be costly, particularly if the change is frequent or ongoing. The traditional managed services model focuses too much on monitoring and maintaining systems and infrastructure or meeting incident and uptime SLAs and doesn’t prioritize optimizations and improvements.
The Rackspace Teams solution
Rackspace Teams addresses those challenges by doing the following:
- Focus on a collaborative partnership with customers.
- Use disciplined agile project management methodologies.
- Build teams of highly skilled cloud engineers and architects with strong IT operations background. These skills are particularly handy when you need to build, migrate to, optimize, or maintain live production environments.
Rackspace provides the Teams service offering to customers who do not need onsite access.
How it works
Customers generally start with Rackspace Teams when dealing with a migration to AWS or when they need help to improve or optimize their AWS deployment. Customers engage with a group of Rackers called a Pod.
A Pod consists of highly skilled senior and junior Rackers who proactively work with customers to scope, define, and deliver “mini” cloud projects. Pod Rackers use the Agile framework for software development and delivery. At the beginning of each sprint, Pod Rackers curate a backlog of deliverables for the customer. As a result of this grooming process, customers see real value delivered at the end of each sprint.
An assigned engagement manager and Pod lead help the customer plan projects for Pod rackers. Some projects that we have completed for our customers include building out CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes deployments, implementing enhanced monitoring, and cloud migrations.
Expertise
Rackspace Teams provides unbiased expertise. Pod Rackers work within your environment using tooling and technology sets that already exist within your internal IT organization. For example, Customer A might use GitHub along with CiricleCI® for source control and CI/CD, whereas Customer B might use bitbucket and Jenkins. Highly skilled Pod Rackers can help both customers by adopting the tooling in place in each customer’s environment. After helping many customers in their journey to the cloud, we have developed expertise in various cloud technologies such as Terraform and AWS. We share this expertise with our customers when needed.
Conclusion
Our collaborative do with approach of managing and maintaining a customer’s environment results in higher customer satisfaction. We are offering Rackspace teams to AWS customers in North America, and we expect to expand this offering to other major public clouds in other regions as well.
Learn more about Rackspace Managed Dedicated Server Hosting.
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