Features

The features described here might not apply to all product offers.

Fanatical Support for AWS combines tooling and automation with human experts to deliver a world-class experience.

Features: Tooling and automation

The following features are a curated set of Rackspace-developed and best-of-breed AWS ecosystem tools. Some features depend on the services you consume. Feel free to create a support ticket if you have any questions.

  • AWS Account configuration: When you generate an AWS Account, it comes pre-configured with the following Rackspace best practices:
    • AWS root account credentials encrypted and locked away.
    • MFA enabled on the root account and secret configuration key encrypted and locked away.
    • No named IAM users. All AWS access available through a single, dynamically scoped IAM role and temporary STS credentials.
    • CloudTrail and AWS Config enabled with centralized logging.
    • Separate AWS accounts for each environment, such as development, staging, and production.
  • AWS Trusted Advisor:
    • Access to all Trusted Advisor checks.
  • CloudHealth:
    • Cost and usage visualizations.
    • Savings recommendations.
    • Tagging strategy.
    • Governance through policies and actions.
  • Rackspace Passport:
    • On-demand provisioning of bastions for secure network access to VPC resources.
    • Automatic, temporary credential management through the In-Instance Credential Management Service.
    • Full logging.
  • In-Instance Credential Management Service:
    • Automatic certificate authority and SSH key rotation across your fleet of EC2 instances.
    • Temporary, fast expiring keys with silent renewal.
  • AWS Instance Scheduler:
    • Deployment, configuration, and management of AWS Instance Scheduler.
    • Allows configuration of custom start and stop schedules for EC2 and RDS instances.
    • Provides cost saving on environments that aren’t used 24/7.

Features: Human experts

Tap into an army of certified AWS architects and engineers ready to deliver the Fanatical Experience to your business 24x7x365. Available by ticket and phone. We offer the following expert assistance:

  • AWS best practice and architecture consultation from 100 percent AWS-certified experts.
  • Hands-on management and assistance for all supported AWS services:
    • Service levels: Rackspace Elastic Engineering. Read more about the offers.
  • EC2 operating system management:
    • Service levels: Rackspace Elastic Engineering. See our latest offers
      to determine which bundle of offers best suits your needs.
    • See a list of supported operating systems in the Supported Operating Systems section.
    • Configuration, optimization, patching, and upgrades.
    • Prerequisites: You must install the following agents, which must work, on your EC2 instances for Rackspace Elastic Engineering to support you:
      • Passport: The server agent enables the Rackspace support team to access your instances through SSH (Linux®) or RDP (Windows®).
      • SSM The AWS Systems Manager agent enabless Rackspace to manage your EC2 instances remotely (instance configuration, maintenance of agent versions and updates, OS patching, and software inventory monitoring).
    • IAM role RackspaceMinimumSSMRole with associated IAM policy AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore attached to EC2 instances provisioned without a role or instance profile attached.
    • IAM policy AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore applied to EC2-attached instance roles in which the policy is absent.
    • Security group and network policies must allow access to SSM endpoints.
  • Rackspace Watchman:
    • Service levels: Modern Operations. Read more about our offers.
    • Rackspace AWS certified engineer response to CloudWatch alarms 24x7x365.
    • Set up CloudWatch alarms to a pre-configured SNS topic or let us do it for you.
  • Custom CloudFormation template creation:
    • Service levels: Rackspace Elastic Engineering
  • Data restoration support (for EC2 and RDS exclusively):
    • Service levels: Rackspace Elastic Engineering

Response time SLAs

Rackspace responds to support requests submitted to us through tickets within the following timeframes. If you did not purchase directly from AWS, make all requests directly to Rackspace so we can escalate to AWS. If you purchased from AWS then follow the AWS SLAs. Modern Operations is the only service level that includes SLA response to monitoring alerts.

Rackspace honors the following SLA timeframes:

  • Emergency (Business-Critical System Outage / Extreme Business Impact): Within 15 minutes
    Assumptions: Rackspace Infrastructure monitoring and alerting services determines your AWS Services are inaccessible from the public internet, which might result in the inability to complete business transactions and generates an emergency monitoring alarm.

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Emergency is only applicable to Modern Operations.

  • Urgent (Production System Outage / Significant Business Impact): Within 60 minutes
    Assumptions: Your AWS Services are functioning improperly or at less-than-optimal performance and the failure impacts business transactions.
    Customers must call Rackspace immediately after creating the Urgent ticket to trigger the one-hour response guarantee.
  • High (Production System Impaired / Moderate Business Impact): Within 4 hours
    Assumptions: Your AWS Services are functioning improperly or at less-than-optimal performance, but the failure does not impact business transactions.
    Customers must sunbmit the support request in a ticket.
  • Normal (Issues and Requests / Minimal Business Impact): Within 12 hours
    Assumptions: Your AWS Services are functioning normally, but you have a time-sensitive request or question, or you have an issue that needs to be addressed.
    Customers must submit the support request in a ticket.
  • Low (General Information, Questions, and Guidance): Within 24 hours
    Assumptions: Your AWS Services are functioning normally, but you require information or assistance, want to schedule maintenance, or require us to complete a non-immediate task.
    Customers must submit the support request in a ticket.

The following table shows supported operating systems:

Operating systemSupported until
Amazon Linux 2June 30, 2023
Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) and CentOS® 7June 30, 2024
RHEL and CentOS 8May 2029
Ubuntu 18.04 LTSApril 30, 2023
Ubuntu 20.04 LTSApril 30, 2025
Windows Server® 2012 R2October 2023
Windows Server 2016January 2027
Windows Server 2019January 2029