Service Levels (Legacy offering)

For a list of current offerings, refer to Rackspace Elastic Engineering and Optimizer +.

Fanatical Support for AWS combines tooling and automation with human experts to deliver a world-class experience. We offer two service levels, Navigator and Aviator, which are selected for each AWS account we support.

  • Navigator: “I want to do most things myself, but I want access to Rackspace’s AWS experts and tools.”

  • Aviator: “I want Rackspace to operate and manage my AWS environments for me or with me.”

Navigator and Aviator are now legacy service levels that existing customers can maintain on their accounts.

Starting in July 2019, Service Blocks are the standard support offers. Please see the Service Blocks section of the Product Guide for further information about these offers.

Features: Tooling and Automation

A curated set of Rackspace developed and best of breed AWS ecosystem tools:

  • AWS Account Generation Pre-Configured with Rackspace Best Practices

    • Service Levels: Navigator and Aviator

    • Features

      • AWS root account credentials encrypted and locked away

      • MFA enabled on root account and secret configuration key encrypted and locked away

      • No named IAM users; all AWS access via single, dynamically scoped IAM role and temporary STS credentials

      • CloudTrail and AWS Config enabled with centralized logging

      • Separate AWS accounts per environment (e.g. development, staging, production)

  • Access to AWS Trusted Advisor

    • Service Levels: Navigator, Aviator, Platform Essentials

    • Features

      • Access to all Trusted Advisor checks

  • CloudHealth

    • Service Levels: Navigator, Aviator, Platform Essentials

    • Features

      • Cost and usage visualizations

      • Savings recommendations

      • Governance through policies and actions

  • Rackspace Passport

    • Service Levels: Aviator, Manage & Operate (customer and Rackspace use)

    • Features

      • On-demand provisioning of bastions for secure network access to VPC resources

      • Automatic, temporary credential management via the In-Instance Credential Management Service

      • Full logging

  • In-Instance Credential Management Service

    • Service Levels: Aviator, Manage & Operate (customer and Rackspace use)

    • Features

      • Automatic certificate authority and SSH key rotation across your fleet of EC2 instances

      • Temporary, fast expiring keys with silent renewal

  • AWS Instance Scheduler

    • Service Levels: Aviator, Manage & Operate

    • Features

      • 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 Fanatical Support to your business 24x7x365. Available via ticket and phone.

  • AWS best practice and architecture consultation from 100% AWS certified experts

    • Service Levels: Navigator, Platform Essentials (standard use cases) and Aviator, Manage & Operate (customized to your specific application)

  • Hands-on management and assistance for all supported AWS services

    • Service Levels: Aviator, Manage & Operate

  • EC2 operating system management

    • Service Levels: Aviator, Manage & Operate

    • Features

    • Prerequisites: The following agents must be installed and working on your

    EC2 instances in order to be supported by Rackspace

    • Passport - The server agent allows Rackspace support team to access your instances via SSH (Linux®) or RDP (Windows®)

    • SSM - The AWS Systems Manager agent allows Rackspace to manage your EC2 instances remotely (instance configuration, maintenance of agent versions and updates, OS patching, software inventory monitoring)

      • IAM role “RackspaceMinimumSSMRole” with attached IAM policy “AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore” will be attached to EC2 instances that are provisioned without a role/instance profile attached.

      • IAM policy “AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore” will be 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: Aviator, Manage & Operate

    • Features

      • 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: Aviator, Architect & Deploy

  • Data restoration support (for EC2 and RDS exclusively)

    • Service Levels: Aviator, Manage & Operate

Response Time SLAs

Rackspace will respond to your support requests submitted to us via ticket in the following timeframes. All requests should be made directly to Rackspace and we will escalate to AWS directly, if needed.

  • Emergency (Business-Critical System Outage / Extreme Business Impact): If Rackspace Infrastructure monitoring and alerting services determines your AWS Services are inaccessible from the public internet, which may result in the inability to complete business transactions, our initial response to emergency monitoring alarms will occur within fifteen minutes (Aviator service level only; monitoring response is not included in the Navigator service level).

  • Urgent (Production System Outage / Significant Business Impact): If your AWS Services are functioning improperly or at less than optimal performance and the failure is impacting business transactions, our initial response is 60 minutes. Customers must call Rackspace immediately after creating the Urgent ticket to trigger the one hour response guarantee. This severity is only available for the Aviator service level.

  • High (Production System Impaired / Moderate Business Impact): If your AWS Services are functioning improperly or at less than optimal performance, but the failure is not impacting business transactions, our initial response to your support request submitted to us via a ticket will occur within four hours at the Aviator or Navigator service levels.

  • Normal (Issues and Requests / Minimal Business Impact): If your AWS Services are functioning normally but you have a time sensitive request, question, or issue that needs addressed, our initial response to your support request submitted to us via a ticket will occur within 12 hours at the Aviator and Navigator service levels.

  • Low (General Information, Questions, and Guidance): If your AWS Services are functioning normally but you require information or assistance, wish to schedule maintenance, or require the completion of any other non-immediate tasks, our initial response to your support request submitted to us via a ticket will occur within 24 hours at the Aviator and Navigator service levels.

Supported Operating Systems

Fanatical Support for AWS supports the following operating systems (OSs):

Operating System

Supported Until

Amazon Linux 2

June 30, 2023

Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) and CentOS® 7

June 30, 2024

RHEL and CentOS 8

May 2029

Ubuntu® 16.04 LTS

April 30, 2021

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

April 30, 2023

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

April 30, 2025

Windows Server® 2012 R2

October 2023

Windows Server 2016

January 2027

Windows Server 2019

January 2029

The following OSs are approaching End of Life (EOL) as determined by the OS vendor:

Operating System

EOL Date

RHEL and CentOS 6

November 2020

Amazon Linux (legacy)

December 2020

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

April 2021