What Does Rackspace Do in the Cloud?

Rackspace Public Cloud customers can choose from two service levels. But what do these service levels really mean for you? This article briefly describes each service level in more detail.

Managed Infrastructure Service Level

This section describes the Managed Infrastructure service level.

Technical Support

The Managed Infrastructure service level gives you 24x7x365 access to our support teams. You can communicate with these experts by chat, phone, or by creating a ticket. These technicians can provide guidance, but they do not have access to log in to your servers directly. If you experience an issue with your server or web site, they can still attempt to help you as a best-effort case.

Architecture Advice

This service level also allows technicians to advise on the best solutions for the architecture of your Rackspace OpenStack Public Cloud. For example, if you expect an increase in traffic, they can provide advice regarding how to set up your environment.

Security Guidance

Rackspace Technicians are also available to provide security guidance. While they cannot log in to your servers to make changes, they can suggest ways to make your server more secure, such as using firewall rules to lock down access to the server.

Development Help

Finally, you also have access to limited code development assistance. If your code leverages our API interfaces, we can try to help you ensure that it is accessing them correctly. We cannot adjust your code, but we can help you troubleshoot any API errors that you might encounter.

Managed Operations Service Level

The Managed SysOps, or Managed Operations, service level includes the basic pillars of support that Managed Infrastructure does, and also provides additional services.

Technical Support

Similar to the Managed Infrastructure service level, you have access to our Cloud Engineers. However, at the Managed SysOps level, they are able to access your servers. If you experience an issue with your server or website, they are able to log in to the machine and help pinpoint the cause. If the cause is code-related, your developer will know where to go to resolve it.

Architecture Advice

At the Managed SysOps service level, a dedicated Technical Account Manager is assigned to your account. This person works with you to ensure your success. For example, if you aware of an upcoming event that will drive an
unusually high amount of traffic to your site, your Technical Account Manager can provide guidance about how to configure your environment.

Development Help

This service level offers code development assistance. If your code leverages our API interfaces, we help you ensure that it is accessing them correctly. Similar to the Managed Infrastructure service level, we cannot adjust your code. However, we can log in to the server, review what you are doing, and test accessing the interfaces from your server to ensure that there aren't any issues with access. These checks help determine whether an issue is code-related. If so, your developer will know how to address the issue.

Backups

At this service level, we preinstall Cloud Backup on your servers and configure weekly backups of your standard system configuration files. (File storage fees apply). We also restore, monitor, and troubleshoot backup jobs.
If you have additional files or folders beyond the standard ones that you want to back up, we can also assist with creating new backup jobs.

Other Support

Rackspace configures, monitors, and troubleshoots common services for you. We keep your server up to date with the latest patches and firmware updates, which we configure to run automatically.

We can install and configure common web servers, app servers, databases, and language frameworks for Linux® and Windows®. For Linux this includes (but is not limited to) the following technologies:

• Apache®
• MySQL®
• PHP®

For Windows this includes (but is not limited to) the following technologies:

• Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5 and 8.0
• Microsoft® SQL Server®
• ASP.NET

We can configure the servers to serve website content and assist with troubleshooting if the site experiences issues.

We can also configure monitoring alerts for your needs, and respond to any alarm conditions 24x7x365. If an alarm triggers at 2 AM on a Saturday morning, our Cloud Engineers will find a resolution.

Your Account Manager is your first point of contact for any account-related questions, billing questions, Control Panel questions, or account guidance.

Conclusion

This article presents a brief comparison of the differences between Rackspace cloud service levels. Each service level has additional, smaller differences. No service level is necessarily better than another. Choose the service level
that's best for your own business needs.