Rackspace offers Managed Azure Kubernetes Service

As a Microsoft® Azure® Expert Managed Service Provider, Rackspace is focused on delivering high-value services for customers who are actively running cloud-native applications and for customers who are interested in modernizing existing applications to take advantage of the performance, availability, and cost savings that they can realize by leveraging a container-based microservices architecture.

Introduction

Rackspace’s Fanatical Support for Azure offering continues to evolve, and we are excited to announce that our most recent enhancement to our managed services helps our customers remove the difficulty of architecting, deploying, and operating Kubernetes® at scale and helps customers choose the right solution for their needs to deliver containers services in Azure. We have developed a set of management capabilities for the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) that allows our customers to accelerate their Kubernetes journey and align their digital transformation and container strategies.

Adopting newer technologies into production environments can present significant challenges for businesses of all sizes. Rackspace works with our customers across the entire lifecycle of a Kubernetes service, from application inception through production deployment. Additionally, the effort to make AKS production-ready in a specific application environment requires deep Kubernetes skill sets, broad Azure experience, and a 24x7x365 Cloud Operations team that many customers prefer not to develop on their own.

Our customers not only need assistance in setting up their AKS environment with the right performance, availability, and cost designs in mind, but they also need assistance to meet their specific security requirements. Our Fanatical Support for Azure offering helps our customers simplify the process to set network policies and provide Azure role-based access and security management capabilities that are needed to securely reach the compliance and regulatory controls within their AKS environments.

Rackspace’s deep partnership with Microsoft enables us to consider the features and capabilities customers are looking for as they adopt containers within Rackspace managed environments and start moving more production workloads to Azure. Rackspace consistently delivers new sets of capabilities and provides customers with the management services for the solutions that they require.

Rackspace’s AKS offering

Some highlights of the Rackspace AKS offering capabilities include the following services and solutions:

• Architectural design and infrastructure deployment of Azure and AKS services.
  • Design solutions to meet your developer and application requirements with a team of dedicated Azure and Kubernetes experts to ensure optimal workload productivity, placement, size for nodes and node pools, network infrastructure, and security to Azure and the AKS resources.
• High availability and auto-repair recovery solutions.
  • Maximize uptime and availability for your workloads, including use of region pairs, multiple clusters with Azure Traffic Manager, and geo-replication of container images.
  • Proactively support self-healing clusters and the auto-repair of nodes and node pools as part of the recovery solution.
• Multi-cluster management.
  • Include multi-tenancy core components and physical and logical isolation with namespaces for development workloads and production workloads, as well as a multi-team approach to microservices architecture.
• Monitoring, Alerting and Operations Management.
  • Design solutions to monitor the performance of container workloads deployed to AKS, providing performance visibility by collecting memory and processor metrics from controllers, nodes, and containers.
  • Understand the behavior of the cluster under average and heaviest loads.
  • Provide knowledge to identify capacity needs and determine the maximum load that the cluster can sustain.
• Zero downtime cluster upgrades.
  • Include orchestration for both the Kubernetes master and agent components to safely cordon and drain each AKS node and perform the upgrade without interruption to existing services.
• Role-based access control and single sign-on support with Azure Active Directory (AD).
  • Include integration with AD by using role-based access controls (RBAC) and pod identities.
• Application Modernization for containers.
  • Offer professional services capabilities to help transform your legacy application into a microservices architecture to take full advantages of the AKS platform.
• Application Lifecycle Management.
  • Provide professional service capabilities to help manage the applications lifecycle of third-party applications, such as Grafana®, Prometheus®, Istio®, and so on.
• Comprehensive security solutions for container images and infrastructure.
  • Secure the image and runtimes by using trusted registries and automated builds on base image updates.
  • Secure access to resources, limiting credential exposure and using pod identities and digital key vaults.
• Rackspace Fanatical Experience™ with 24x7x365 support services to always be there when you need us.

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Optimize your environment with expert administration, management, and configuration

Rackspace’s Application services (RAS) experts provide the following professional and managed servicesacross a broad portfolio of applications:

• eCommerce and Digital Experience platforms
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
• Business Intelligence
• Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Databases
• Email Hosting and Productivity

We deliver:

• Unbiased expertise: We simplify and guide your modernization journey, focusing on the capabilities that deliver immediate value.
• Fanatical Experience™: We combine a process first, technology second approach with dedicated technical support to provide comprehensive solutions.
• Unrivaled portfolio: We apply extensive cloud experience to help you choose and deploy the right technology on the right cloud.
• Agile delivery: We meet you where you are in your journey and align our success with yours.

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