Rackspace Launches First Kubernetes Private Cloud

Rackspace isn't afraid to make up its own new enterprise cloud markets.

On June 20 at the HPE Discover conference in Las Vegas, the internet services provider revealed that it has expanded its private cloud-as-a-service portfolio in collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to launch Rackspace Kubernetes-as-a-Service (RKaaS). This will include a pay-per-use infrastructure in a private cloud environment, which the company described as “an industry first.”

At the same time, Rackspace announced a similar deal with HPE to launch a Private Cloud-as-a-Service (PCaaS) powered by VMware, also using pay-per-use infrastructure.

The San Antonio-based company said that with both offerings, enterprises can deploy services for its elastic infrastructure and simplified IT in a private cloud environment located in their own data center, a colocation facility or a data center managed by Rackspace.

Kubernetes Orchestration as a Cloud Service

Kubernetes is an open-source project that provides container orchestration, deployment and management capabilities. While Kubernetes started off as a Google project and Google still contributes more code than anyone, it has been a multi-stakeholder effort run by the Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) since July 2015.

Kubernetes' roots go back to 2014, when Google publicly released the open source code for the project. But it was 2017 when Kubernetes' popularity took off, with nearly every major IT vendor now backing the platform--even onetime rivals, such as Docker.

Rackspace has been focused in recent months on creating a portfolio of Private Cloud-as-a-Service (PCaaS) solutions designed to relieve IT teams of their operational burden, the company said.

Rackspace Kubernetes-as-a-Service will help enterprises take advantage of the benefits of Kubernetes, such as the flexibility to easily move applications across multiple clouds, the ability to scale up to billions of containers and increased productivity managing containerized applications. It will do this by delivering:

• Pay-as-you-go service: Using HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity, customers pay for what they use in an on-demand model for infrastructure. This feature enables customers to more closely align resources without the need to pay for additional fixed capacity. This flexible capacity model allows customers to take full advantage of the instant enterprise-level scalability of Kubernetes.

• Agility, scalability and strategic flexibility: Users maintain the architectural and data control benefits of a private cloud environment while rapidly scaling their entire private cloud capacity in a public cloud-like manner. Because this solution is fully open-source using upstream Kubernetes, customers will avoid vendor lock-in.  Finally, customers will have the flexibility to scale their Kubernetes environments at their own pace in nearly any data center in the world, including the customer data center, Rackspace data center or third-party colocation facility.

• Transformed Day 2 operations: Rackspace helps ensure the transformation to container-based workloads. In addition to getting customers up and running, Rackspace goes a step further by managing ongoing “Day 2” operations for customers, including updates, zero downtime upgrades, patching and security hardening for Kubernetes, all managed cluster services and the node operating system.

• Enterprise-grade security: From the infrastructure to the cluster itself, including the containers running inside the cluster and additional services required to run the application, Rackspace secures Kubernetes using industry-best practices. Rackspace experts validate and vet each component of the service, provide static container scanning and ensure only authorized users can access the environment.

Rackspace Kubernetes-as-a-Service will be available in all regions this month, the company said. 

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