Rackspace has teamed up with HPE to bring a pay-as-you-go, Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS) private cloud offering to the market.
The company also announced the launch of a Private Cloud-as-a-Service (PCaaS) offering powered by VMware, also available on pay-per-use contracts.
The KaaS solution allows businesses to pay based on consumption for elastic infrastructure in a private cloud environment based on an HPE stack located in their datacentre, a co-location facility or a datacentre managed by Rackspace.
It comes a month after Rackspace announced its general KaaS offering, which it claimed to be the industry’s “simplest consumption model” by delivering Kubernetes fully configured, tested and validated at enterprise scale with the managed cluster services customers need to effectively run their applications.
Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications. In essence, that means it is a way of running online software across a vast array of machines as efficiently as possible.
The company hopes to entice companies struggling to building, deploy and operate their own private cloud stack, as well as those concerned about vendor lock-in. The inclusion of KaaS in the offering gives users the flexibility to move applications across multiple clouds, the ability to scale up to billions of containers and increased productivity managing containerized applications.
Rackspace, which made the announcement at HPE Discover conference in Las Vegas this week, said: “Customers 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 the solution is fully open-source using upstream Kubernetes, customers will avoid vendor lock-in and 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.
Rackspace also announced a new pay-as-you-go service for a VMware-based private cloud. Both services are delivered via HPE’s GreenLake Hybrid Cloud, the latest expansion of the HPE’s on-premise metered consumption GreenLake suite.
Pay-per-use is growing in popularity as IT teams seek greater flexibility in their contracts. One IT procurement specialist told Computer Business Review: “I’ve seen more hidden nasties in contracts from most vendors than you can image, many of them resulting in heavy and unexpected penalties owing to over use, change of data centre hardware or other such issues.”
According to IDC, 80 percent of IT infrastructure will be bought on a pay-as-you-go basis by 2020. The need for more economic pricing models and flexible capacity planning is growing rapidly. As Rackspace emphasises, IT managers are more frequently faced with challenges such as managing unpredictable growth and bursts in workloads.
“In addition, they must deal with increased pressure from their development team to deploy services faster, all while budgets continue to shrink and they are forced to do more with less. By leveraging a “pay-as-you-go” model for private cloud, customers pay for what they use, allowing them to better handle erratic growth and bursts in workloads without paying for unnecessary fixed capacity or upfront equipment cost.e
