Rackspace launches DevOps Automation Service

Rackspace® Hosting is extending its Fanatical Support® to help customers automate their cloud infrastructure with a new managed support service for DevOps tools. The new DevOps Automation Service will help developers automate the process of deploying and scaling hybrid cloud infrastructure for fast-growing applications, while advancing the adoption of the DevOps methodology among software and IT teams.

The DevOps Automation Service will enable developers and IT departments to accelerate time to market for their products and features by allowing them to deploy, scale and test new configurations in hours rather than days. In addition, the service will help improve the quality of software deployments and to create more frequent software releases, as automating processes will allow organisations to provision servers consistently and free of mistakes typically caused by manual installation and configuration.

“Today's market demands the speed and efficiency of IT automation. Rather than sacrificing quality or uptime because of avoidable human errors, devops methodology and practices of agility and automation can reduce human interaction with code and infrastructure, allowing development and other teams to focus on their primary objectives and business,” said 451 Research Senior Analyst Jay Lyman. “This continuous deployment approach to infrastructure can accelerate release time and time-to-market for applications and features by reducing errors and test time and supporting devops processes."

“It’s hard to find, recruit and train DevOps talent, so our customers and prospects wanted us to provide the expertise they need to automate their own IT needs,” said Jonathan Siegel, product director, Rackspace. “The DevOps Automation Service is comprised of the same tools and best-practices that enabled Rackspace to launch 18 new cloud products, push code into production more than 2,500 times and run over 15,000 automated tests last year. These tools have had a significant and positive impact on our ability to execute and, through the service, we look to extend the same value to our customers.”

Benefits of the new DevOps Automation Service include:
· Enhanced Infrastructure Automation – Enables customers to improve quality and velocity of software release, and to synchronise development and staging environments with production environment using configuration management tools such as Chef; collect application performance metrics (APM) to view code impact changes with application monitoring tools such as New Relic, statsD, Graphite, or Cloud Monitoring; build workflows to automate routine maintenance tasks using workflow automation tools such as Rundeck and Jenkins, aggregate logs from all devices to identify patterns and spot anomalies using log aggregation tools such as logstash; manage caching needs with tools such as Memcache, Varnish and more. Multi-server environments are now provisioned in minutes instead of the hours it previously took without automation tools.
· Managed Services – Enables customers to focus on innovation and other tasks that add value to the business by allowing Rackspace to design, build, configure, monitor and optimise both the infrastructure, software stack and the automation tools.
· Support for Linux-based technologies (Windows coming soon) – Supports DevOps tools up and down the stack, ranging from application and infrastructure monitoring to MongoDB and MySQL database support including PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, Java, Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Flask, Meteor, MySQL, MongoDB, Riak, Cassandra, Solr, Elasticsearch, Hadoop, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Memcache, Varnish, Redis, Cloud Monitoring, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ and more.

The new DevOps Automation Service offering is built to help improve various phases of the application lifecycle. Customers in the Rackspace early access programme are using the DevOps Automation Service to:
· Enforce consistency – Customers are able to create identical development, staging, and testing environments based on same configurations.
· Manage configurations – Customers are getting the right balance of base images and instance configuration at build time, simplifying image management and instance building across infrastructure types.
· Manage change - Rackspace helps adhere to strict source control practices for customer environments so that any changes can always be audited, tracked and reversed if needed.
· Respond to monitoring alerts - Rackspace configures the monitoring, manages the environment, and responds to alerts as they occur so that customers can focus on their application.

"Without this service, we would have to manage 24/7 operations, hire additional staff to perform critical work on our environment, and worry about whether our environments were always in sync with each other,” said Trevor White, chief technology officer, LeadOutcome. “With DevOps, we can take advantage of the extensive knowledge, best practices and experience Rackspace brings to the table. Having one company support both the infrastructure and the DevOps tools gives us more confidence that things will work the way we need them to work 100 percent of the time."