Your Trusted Cloud Advisor: the Enterprise Cloud Architect

faroukkhan

Your Trusted Cloud Advisor: the Enterprise Cloud Architect

If you've come to Rackspace to see if an OpenStack private cloud is right for you, chances are you'll be talking with someone like me, an enterprise cloud architect.

First, your team will connect with a Rackspace cloud specialist, to determine your business goals and needs and see if they’re the right fit for an OpenStack private cloud. If so, that specialist will then contact me for a technical follow up.

Next, the cloud specialist and myself will meet with you and your team to discuss how your technical requirements will enable you to achieve your goals. These goals could include:

  • Providing self-service IT to your internal users.
  • Consolidating multiple platforms and applications into one trusted and reliable environment.
  • Migrating from an existing OpenStack cloud to Rackspace for better support and SLA's.
  • Performing a proof of concept to enable you to test the functionality of OpenStack with Rackspace.
  • Wanting Rackspace to manage an existing OpenStack cloud in your own datacenter, using our reference architecture and best practices.
  • Looking to certify your own technologies with different releases of OpenStack.

....and many more possibilities.

In each case, my goal is always the same: To give you world-class technical expertise and guidance that produces a solution that meets your goals and leaves you confident in Rackspace for the long-term.

We have the use case, what now?

Once we have identified and validated your use case(s), we will begin designing and documenting your private cloud. I cover designs across both of our OpenStack private cloud offerings, either our of OpenStack or Red Hat OpenStack Platform. Once we have a design in place, our OpenStack specialists will provide you with pricing, collateral and other documentation for you to share with others in your organization to help bring them on board.

We have a design and pricing — almost finished... right?

In a perfect world, yes, absolutely. But we live in one where things change faster than the blink of an eye, so we often have to adapt to unforeseen changes.

You could experience budget delays, changes in leadership or company focus, or teams opting to go in a new direction with their technology decisions. No matter the situation, we will remain diligent and responsive to support you in any way possible.

Fortunately, the process usually goes smoothly, and so we typically end up doing one or more of the following to help get you ready for your new cloud:

  • Traveling to meet you and your teams in person to walk through our vision and designs. Often, we’ll have executive meetings between Rackspace and your company, learning about one another's goals.
  • Performing demos to help your teams understand how your OpenStack private cloud will enable you to deploy and run your applications successfully.
  • Running design sessions with other teams who wish to use the cloud but have arrived later to the table. These design sessions are a great way to ensure the right workloads are deployed to the cloud, while also working on a long-term roadmap for moving other applications.

At Rackspace, we’re trusted advisors

As a trusted advisor, it is my pleasure to work with you closely and produce a technical design for an OpenStack private cloud that meets (and hopefully exceeds) your goals and expectations.

To do this successfully requires teamwork. That means I need to work closely with my fellow Rackers to ensure you are comfortable with the design we create and confident that it will deliver.

You can expect my team and me to be:

Responsive: We will respond with a sense of urgency every time, whether to a phone call or email, or when following up on important tasks. Your time is valuable and we respect that you choose to spend it working with us.

Accountable: This means acting as an internal champion for your cloud and ensuring all teams are ready to go when we need them to be. Fortunately, this is very easy when you work at Rackspace.

Transparent: In the case of an OpenStack private cloud design, transparency means validating the best fit for the environment, and being honest about what isn’t a good fit or best practice.

Committed: We will always ensure to deliver as promised from start to finish. What is that finish, you may ask? For the most part, that’s when your cloud goes online. You’ll also get the chance to interact with our excellent support and account development teams. If you opt to engage a Rackspace dedicated architect, he or she will be embedded with your team once you become a customer. Dedicated architects are a wonderful, complementary service to what cloud architects like myself do, and they’ll quickly come to know your cloud inside and out.

Once your private cloud goes live, my team and I won’t disappear — far from it. We will still be committed to help in any way we can, specifically ensuring all the great work we've done together up to this point is documented and shared with the Rackspace support and account development teams, so you never feel like you need to repeat yourself. Our aim is to give you a seamless experience.

I hope this post has given you an understanding of how Rackspace enterprise cloud architects support your journey with Rackspace OpenStack Private Cloud. I look forward to working with you and your team(s) soon.

Rackspace is the leading OpenStack service provider, with hundreds of clouds under management. To learn more and ask questions about whether private cloud as a service might be a good fit for your organization, take advantage of a free strategy session with a private cloud expert  — no strings attached. SIGN UP NOW.