“Why Do I Need Rackspace If I Can Just Run 'cf push'?”

With each conference, event and customer meeting, we learn more about the challenges our customers face.

What is making their job more difficult? How can we help them focus on what really matters, deploying value-add code? Pivotal’s annual SpringOne Platform, which wrapped up last week, provided an opportunity for the Rackspace team to hear more from stakeholders across organizations; from development and operations teams who focus on delivering and maintaining applications to product and marketing executives who need to meet market demands and increase profitability.

Among all the questions from each of these groups, we heard one over and over from developers: “Why do I need Rackspace if I can just run cf push?” (A “cf push” command allows for the quick deployment of an application on Cloud Foundry without manually running the deployment and configuring service connections.) The question highlights the fundamental change in IT that Pivotal Cloud Foundry is driving. With PCF, developers write code, push the code and it runs: simple.

But someone still needs to deploy and manage PCF, and that’s where Rackspace comes in: PCF simplifies the app deployment; we simplify the PCF deployment.

Rackspace Managed Pivotal Cloud Foundry provides full management and operation of PCF across all leading public and private clouds, including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, VMware — or even an organization’s own in-house infrastructure. Developers don’t have to worry about the “plumbing” — when they cf push, it just works. We take care of the initial deployment, upgrades and security patching while efficiently scaling to meet growth needs, and we do it all with our industry leading PCF API uptime guarantee.

This allows your operations team to concentrate on innovation and drive the next wave of productivity and security changes for your organization. It also helps reduce the friction sometimes inherent between development and operations teams, as Rackspace is proactively managing PCF operations.

Other highlights from SpringOne Platform 2018

Pivotal deployments are growing rapidly – both with enterprises selecting Pivotal Cloud Foundry for the first time as the platform to deploy new applications and among existing Pivotal users expanding their footprint. At Rackspace, we’re seeing similar growth patterns among our Managed PCF customers. Not surprisingly, conference attendance increased by more than half compared to last year as well.

Healthwatch, which monitors the performance and capacity of PCF, has been updated to provide an extensible user interface for operators, greatly improved support for Windows and .NET workloads along with the ability to extend a single PCF deployment across multiple data centers. These improvements will help users continually monitor the health of their platform.

The financial benefits and increase in productivity with PCF continue to make waves. Jason Williams, vice president of customer technology at Dick’s Sporting Goods, described a 25 percent increase in productivity, 65 percent faster lead times and zero hours spent planning security patches since implementing PCF just nine months ago.

https://youtu.be/Jip10Fz693U?t=51

Again, our experience has been similar. Rackspace Managed PCF customers have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in operational costs when implementing PCF. That’s because our engineers take a proactive, results-obsessed approach to deploying and managing PCF, while our 24x7x365 on-demand operational expertise allows customers to invest in their developers and deliver software faster. That obsession with results led to Pivotal naming Rackspace its Service Provider of the Year for 2018!

[Read more: Pivotal Names Rackspace 2018 Managed Service Provder Partner of the Year]

That obsession manifested itself in another way at SpringOne: I had the pleasure of seeing, multiple times during the conference, customers come to our booth, un-prompted, to give a shout-out to our engineers — by name. It really solidified what we already know, that our Rackspace team of Pivotal experts are beyond talented and truly dedicated to our customers’ success. Thank you to Matt Barlow, BK Box, Steve Katen and Brian Lobert — and thank you to the customers who put their trust in us.

Learn more about Managed Pivotal Cloud Foundry from Rackspace.