Rackspace knows that our customers have varying needs at different stages of their cloud journey. That’s why we provide a set of support offers that address your needs at any stage of your cloud lifecycle. Our services offer you access to certified cloud specialists through a flexible POD-based model. We have experts who can implement industry-best cloud monitoring technologies, suggest cost optimization recommendations, solve your IT challenges, and provide other value-added services, all backed by AWS-certified engineers and architects.

Our offers enable you to customize your experience and choose the service options to match your needs.

Rackspace Elastic Engineering

Rackspace Elastic Engineering is a managed support model that provides on-demand access to public cloud experts through ongoing sprints that continually remediate, innovate, evolve, and improve the customer environments. Rackspace Elastic Engineering has tiers of service that include a number of hours per month.

This flexible, collaborative approach to professional services enables customers to dynamically change scope and priorities based on business needs while collaborating side-by-side with highly skilled Rackspace Technology cloud experts to build, migrate, optimize, and maintain the customer cloud environments.

The following table provides a sample of the types of services provided with Rackspace Elastic Engineering. We coordinate tasks, scheduling, and priorities between Rackspace Technology and the customer.


Infrastructure builds	Deploy infrastructure or applications into the environment Modify infrastructure to reduce cost, increase performance, and scale optimization
DevOps and automation	Manage, maintain, and enhance automation systems for operational effectiveness, stability, and security Change existing automation systems or develop new automation systems
Cloud Maturity	Elastic Engineering developed framework for evaluating an organization’s progress on their cloud journey Help identify opportunities to empower a customer on their cloud journey
Performance management	Identify performance targets and continuously adjust infrastructure to deliver the desired performance at the optimal cost Tune applications and provide detailed analysis of application-level performance problems
Database management	Scale databases and provide performance management and maintenance services Create database clusters, read slaves, and so on
Application operations	Manage the configuration and patching of common, off-the-shelf applications Provide custom upgrades and patches for off-the-shelf applications, develop configuration frameworks and methodologies for custom applications
Security management	Use architectural best practices to maintain environment security Respond to security incidents identified by the Customer Security Team Deploy customer-provided third-party security tools Create reports or contribute to reports that a customer needs as part of an infrastructure audit for certification purposes
Disaster recovery planning	Run disaster recovery solutions, extend existing solutions, and run customer-directed tests of disaster recovery systems
Planned maintenance	Perform preventative maintenance so that infrastructure, database, and application operations are stable and secure Perform optional maintenance and customer-directed changes, which can include applying security patches regularly
Cost optimization	Implement architectural changes to support cost management decisions
Advice and support	Answer questions and make recommendations related to cloud usage and best practices

Modern Operations

Modern Operations by Rackspace Technology provides customers with 24x7 operational and sys admin support, across AWS, leveraging decades of cloud expertise. This managed offering is designed to meet customers in any cloud maturity model, providing a broad range of services support, for end-to-end lifecycle management of customers cloud environments. Regardless of a customer’s cloud maturity, Modern Operations allows the freedom to innovate and transform to achieve core business objectives, while ensuring adapting business needs are supported.

ModOps services

Modern Operations is a stand-alone service that provides 24/7/365 ticket- and phone-based support for operational and systems administration tasks in the cloud. Additionally, Modern Operations provides a glide path to modernization via our expertise based support model and compatibility with Rackspace Elastic Engineering.

Modern Operations Includes:

24x7x365 access to cloud experts
24x7x365 cloud infrastructure operations management
Phone and ticket-based support
Monitoring, response and incident management
Backup and patch management
Expertise catalog over restrictive sphere of management
Technical Account Manager (for qualifying customers)
Optional lead engineer add on
Architecture and infrastructure deployment

Dependencies:

All customers purchasing AWS cloud infrastructure directly from Rackspace (resell) are required to have Optimizer+ or Optimizer+ Platform Support due to integration, tooling, and contractual requirements.  If Optimizer+, customer must maintain Business Support or better.
All customers purchasing AWS cloud infrastructure directly from AWS (no-resell) are not required to purchase Optimizer+ or Optimizer+ Platform Support but must have AWS Business Support or better.
Modern Operations ticket automation, required for monitoring, will not function correctly for resources deployed on the AWS Program Management account (Payer). These resources will need to be moved to a member account to function properly.

Modern Operations Monitoring and Resolution (MOMR)

MOMR includes:

Optionated deployment of cloud services monitoring using known best-practices
24x7x365 monitoring coverage backed by cloud experts
Improved resolution timelines by leveraging Rackspace Technology automation
Guidance for a default list of alerts and thresholds, which we can customize to meet customer needs
Ongoing support to adjust monitoring as the customer environment grows

Modern Operations Patching

Modern Operations provides standard baseline patching. Customers can create custom patch baselines, patch groups, and maintenance windows to adhere to their own patching strategy. The API makes all of these services available for customization.

Best practices for each Operating System (OS) define the patch baselines, but we customize them to fit customer needs.

In addition, customers can inject their own customization for patching to enable process interruptions like reboots, non-standard package downloads, and so on.

Modern Operations Patching UI provides the following services:

Reporting
Support
API and UI access through the Rackspace Technology Control Panel

Optimizer+

Optimizer+ is a lightweight support option that provides world-class operational tooling, support, and expert guidance needed to get the most out of public cloud infrastructure. With Optimizer+, a team of cost optimization experts provides detailed actions and recommendations to maximize workload performance while saving money and supplementing your IT staff.

The Optimizer+ service includes:

Unified billing for all of customer Rackspace Technology platforms and other managed public cloud accounts
Access to the Rackspace Technology Customer Portal for account and user management
Cost Optimization expertise
Architecture reviews
Planned event support
AWS expertise

Cost optimization

Rackspace Technology provides cost optimization guidance and assistance through cloud-native and third-party tooling. Customers can create tickets for cost optimization questions and request general guidance for infrastructure spend. After receiving a customer request, the Rackspace Technology Optimizer+ Team provides best practice guidance that maximizes workload performance and saves money. Depending on customer spend, cost optimization efforts can include the following activities:

Access to CloudHealth, which is the leading multi-cloud management platform designed to drive increased business value at every stage of your cloud journey
Initial cost optimization review
Cost guidance
Tagging strategy reviews
Saving recommendations
VM supervision and licensing reviews
Regular cost reviews

Architecture reviews

Rackspace Technology provides, at your request, an architecture review following the best practices in your cloud of choice. We evaluate your security posture, technological architecture, and use of cloud services, among other things. At the end of that engagement, you get a report you can use to ensure your environment is compliant with best practice recommendations.

Planned event support

Twice a year, Rackspace can help you to plan for and manage a large-scale event. Commonly customers use this to help with events like Black Friday or their Shark Tank moment. We evaluate your architecture, services utilization, and resiliency to help you form a strategy to withstand the sudden spike in visitors to your application. AWS Expertise

As part of Optimizer+, we can provide guidance and best practices across a wide range of AWS products and services. We can also (by request) set up a standard array of monitoring alerts for your AWS environment. These alerts cover basic monitoring like instance performance checks, low disk alerts, and domain health. While we don’t respond to these alerts when they fire under Optimizer+, we are more than happy to assist or guide you in getting them configured.

Optimizer+ with Platform Support

Optimizer+ with Platform Support includes all Optimizer+ services plus the following public cloud support services powered by certified Rackspace Technology engineers and backed by top-level direct public cloud support.

Rackspace Technology can:

Provide escalation management 24x7x365.
Escalate issues at any time until we achieve resolution. This escalation might be hierarchical (to a more senior engineer or the service delivery manager) or functional (involving specialized technical expertise from other functional groups or partner cloud teams).
Escalate to a technology or service vendor in the event of an incident.
Offer advice about the appropriate workaround to restore service.
Provide customers the opportunity to confirm issue resolution before closing the ticket.

Account reviews

Through the customer’s Rackspace Technology Customer Success Manager, Rackspace Technology provides reviews to analyze the performance of the customer’s cloud environment and recommendations from our Cost Optimization Team. By using cloud-provider billing reports and Rackspace Technology tooling, some of these recommendations include committed-use discounts and investigations for performance improvements. The review can include the following items:

Support tickets
Monitoring alerts
Upcoming maintenance events
Product roadmap updates
Potential cost optimization
Rackspace Technology and cloud provider best practice recommendations
Recent environment changes
Upcoming customer events
Product announcements

For a list of legacy offerings, visit our website.