Rackspace, HPE expand on-premises cloud with pay-as-you-go Kubernetes

HPE and Rackspace are building on their alliance from last November, when they first introduced an OpenStack-based pay-per-use system designed to compete with public cloud providers.

The two now offer pay as you go to Rackspace’s VMware and Kubernetes private cloud services. Rackspace launched its Kubernetes private cloud managed service just last month. The initial pay-as-you-go system was for standard server-side apps. This new feature adds Kubernetes container management as an option.

Rackspace has deployed HPE’s new GreenLake Flex Capacity service to provide the pay-as-you-go pricing model. GreenLake is one of many programs by enterprise hardware vendors to provide on-demand pricing to companies looking to rein in data center costs.

Rackspace is more of a connection manager and provider, but it does have its own data centers. It manages private cloud infrastructure in the client’s own data centers, in third-party colocation facilities such as Equinix, or at Rackspace’s own data centers.

In addition to the pay-as-you-go service, Rackspace notes customers maintain the architectural and data control benefits of a private cloud environment while still being able to rapidly scale their private cloud capacity in a public cloud-like manner. Customers will have the flexibility to scale their Kubernetes environments at their own pace in nearly any data center in the world, including their own.

Rackspace offers daily maintenance and helps ensure uptime by doing all the patching and hardware management. It also secures the Kubernetes containers using industry best practices to validate and vet each component of the service, provide static container scanning, and ensure only authorized users can access the environment.

VMware-based Private Cloud as a Service

In addition to the Kubernetes service, Rackspace announced a VMware-based private cloud service offering. The company first launched its Private Cloud as a Service (PCaaS) with HPE in November. But that was built on an OpenStack cloud consumption billing model.

This new PCaaS is built on a VMware-virtualized and container-based infrastructure that runs on-premises of the customer, in a colocation facility, or in a Rackspace data center. The service is metered and billed solely on usage.

This further builds on the relationship Rackspace has with VMware. Last August, it said it would offer its Fanatical Support for VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS) through VMware’s Managed Service Provider (MSP) program.

VMware Cloud on AWS enables customers to run applications across VMware vSphere-based private, public and hybrid cloud environments, with optimized access to AWS services.

It offers a multi-cloud choice, so customers can choose to run their VMware workloads out of the data center that best suites the application, ranging from their own data center to Rackspace data centers or VMware Cloud on AWS.

Both the Kubernetes services and VMware private cloud will become available later in the summer.