Rackspace launches Customer Reliability Engineering and Managed Security Services for Google Cloud Platform

“Navigating the complexities of a digital transformation and understanding the impact it has on a business is challenging, so we’re focused on being the trusted advisor for customers to help guide them through each phase of this journey,” said Warren Jonas, General Manager of Managed Google Cloud Platform, EMEA, Rackspace. “Our new CRE offering provides a way for companies to pinpoint which applications matter most from a business perspective and then systematically measure and improve upon that. And with RMS and compliance assistance, we’re helping to ensure their data, applications and infrastructure are protected every step of the way. These offerings, paired with Rackspace and Google Cloud’s combined technical expertise, will make these applications more reliable and secure, and ultimately help drive greater business value.”

Rackspace CRE, one of many services in the company’s growing portfolio of GCP solutions, is ideal for customers running business critical applications that require high levels of performance and reliability. The CRE offering leverages the same principles and processes pioneered by Google Cloud, and will allow Rackspace to work with customers to assess their objectives, design, implementation and operational procedures of business-critical applications to help improve overall reliability and resiliency.

As Google Cloud’s first CRE managed service partner, the Rackspace CRE team was hand-selected by Google Cloud and has undergone extensive training with senior Google Cloud site reliability engineers (SREs). This programme, along with Rackspace’s first-hand experience in operating the world’s largest clouds, allows Rackspace CREs to lead a series of workshops designed to guide customers on how to implement SRE principles, improve the reliability of critical applications, address tradeoffs among performance, reliability and cost, and to solve key application issues. The specific content of these workshops focuses on:

• Understanding Site Reliability Engineering – Provides a detailed explanation of the SRE framework, while discussing real world examples of how SRE can be applied and the value it delivers to organisations.
• Identifying and Measuring Service Level Objects – Discusses fundamental concepts and techniques required to build a successful SRE team, why a well-defined and measured SLO is crucial to the SRE approach and where organisations should have SLOs defined. It also trains customers how to incorporate error budgeting and risk analysis into developer’s day-to-day workloads.
• Applying Operational Best Practices – Educates customers on the best way to apply processes and procedures to help ensure that their team can scale with their services by reducing toil, dealing with interrupts, being on-call, conducting incident response management and fostering a postmortem culture.
• Assessing Application Reliability –  Conducts an in-depth review of how to best prioritise and implement agreed upon SLOs in areas such as software and platform architecture, capacity and scaling, development and release engineering, failures and outages, security and risk assessments, among others.

“During our recent CRE workshop, Rackspace brought a high-level of knowledge and experience to the table based on numerous retail and e-commerce engagements,” said John Anthony, CIO of Spiraledge, a leading internet retailer and healthy living company, and Rackspace customer. “We worked with Rackspace to seamlessly migrate our SwimOutlet.com brand to Google Cloud. This site is critical to the overall success of our business and Rackspace’s CRE experts have now given us the training and skills needed to ensure this site maintains an optimal level of performance and reliability.”

In addition to CRE, Rackspace announced the launch of its new RMS Proactive Detection and Response, and Compliance Assistance for GCP offerings. Together, these offerings deliver swift breach detection and remediation, helping to minimise the time cyber criminals spend in an environment and to limit overall impact to the business.  With RMS, businesses can layer additional active security on GCP to detect and respond to advanced cyber threats. Rackspace utilises pre-approved actions to promptly remediate security incidents. This level of security strengthens customers’ environments beyond the operational network and infrastructure security provided by most cloud providers. It also complements the strategic planning, architectural guidance and 24x7x365 operational support available through Managed Services for Google Cloud Platform.