Rackspace has announced the expansion of its managed service offerings for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud to include a portfolio of Professional Services. The Fanatical Support for AWS Professional Services are tailored to support customers who are new to, or growing on, AWS and need deep, customized expertise to help enable their AWS Cloud journey in key areas such as architectural design, migrations, cloud automation and DevOps. This new offering aligns with Rackspace's broader efforts to develop professional services that deliver end-to-end support and expertise to help customers move workloads out of their data centers and onto the world's leading cloud platforms. 

The addition of Fanatical Support for AWS Professional Services to the Rackspace suite of managed services for AWS reflects a continued commitment to help customers take full advantage of AWS. AWS-certified architects and engineers will work with customers to enable their journey to AWS, helping to ensure they achieve maximum performance, agility and cost-efficiency.

"Rackspace is famous for its support, and we use it a lot," said Paul Keen, CTO of Airtasker, a Fanatical Support for AWS customer. "We work with the Rackspace Professional Services team for any projects we can't do in-house, as well as using security services to tighten up our systems, and we iterate monthly to improve our services. Rackspace really cares about its customers. We expected that level of care during the sales cycle, but it has continued throughout our engagement with them. That's what really sets them apart." 

"We are seeing significant interest from AWS customers for specialized expertise in discrete, value added areas, and we are committed to developing our offers and capabilities to help them fully leverage AWS throughout the entirety of their cloud journey," said Prashanth Chandrasekar, vice president & general manager of Fanatical Support for AWS at Rackspace. 

Fanatical Support for AWS Professional Services address three critical areas where customers need support along their cloud journey:

• Architecture Strategy & Guidance:Delivers extensive planning, review and consulting around architecture best practices, customer environments, account planning and review of customers' proposed VPC infrastructure design. Also included in this offer is guidance for AWS services that provide functionality in networking, storage, security and operations on AWS.
• Cloud Migration: Provides assistance with moving web and database workloads to AWS using tried and tested migration tools and methodologies. In addition, Fanatical Support for AWS Professional Services gives customers solutions expertise and ongoing operational support throughout the migration process for a wide array of workloads. 
• Cloud Automation: Offers assistance with building and delivering products using AWS and DevOps best practices, including serverless and containerized workloads. This also includes the implementation of Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), infrastructure automation and application deployment, plus integration of third-party tools and services. 

"At AWS, we're excited about helping customers realize their target business outcomes more quickly through a combination of Rackspace's migration capabilities, and Fanatical Support with our AWS architects and implementation specialists," said Todd Weatherby, vice president of AWS Professional Services Worldwide. 

In addition to offering professional services, Rackspace continues to develop its managed services offerings for AWS by investing in the expertise and software tooling necessary to keep pace with the growing complexity of AWS services. Rackspace was recently recognized as a Premier Consulting Partner, the highest tier within the AWS Partner Network, and a leader in the industry. The Fanatical Support for AWS team of experts has amassed more than 800 AWS technical certifications, and been awarded AWS Competency designations for their expertise in supporting DevOps and Marketing & Commerce workloads on AWS.

To learn more about Fanatical Support for AWS and the new Fanatical Support for AWS Professional Services, please visit www.rackspace.com/managed-aws/services.