[December 12, 2013]

Rackspace Announces New DevOps Automation Service to Increase Speed and Agility for Software Developers and IT

Rackspace (News - Alert)® Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the open cloud company, today announced it is extending its Fanatical Support® to help customers automate their cloud infrastructure with a new managed support service for DevOps tools. The new DevOps Automation Service will help developers automate the process of deploying and scaling hybrid cloud infrastructure for fast-growing applications, while advancing the adoption of the DevOps methodology among software and IT teams.

The DevOps Automation Service will enable developers and IT departments to accelerate time to market for their products and features by allowing them to deploy, scale and test new configurations in hours rather than days. In addition, the service will help improve the quality of software deployments and to create more frequent software releases, as automating processes will allow organizations to provision servers consistently and free of mistakes typically caused by manual installation and configuration.

"Today's market demands the speed and efficiency of IT automation. Rather than sacrificing quality or uptime because of avoidable human errors, DevOps methodology and practices of agility and automation can reduce human interaction with code and infrastructure, allowing development and other teams to focus on their primary objectives and business," said 451 Research (News - Alert) Senior Analyst Jay Lyman. "This continuous deployment approach to infrastructure can accelerate release time and time-to-market for applications and features by reducing errors and test time and supporting DevOps processes."

"It's hard to find, recruit and train DevOps talent, so our customers and prospects wanted us to provide the expertise they need to automate their own IT needs," said Jonathan Siegel, product director, Rackspace. "The DevOps Automation Service is comprised of the same tools and best-practices that enabled Rackspace to launch 18 new cloud products, push code into production more than 2,500 times and run over 15,000 automated tests last year. These tools have had a significant and positive impact on our ability to execute and, through the service, we look to extend the same value to our customers."

Benefits of the new DevOps Automation Service include:

• Enhanced Infrastructure Automation - Enables customers to improve quality and velocity of software release, and to synchronize development and staging environments with production environment using configuration management tools such as Chef; collect application performance metrics (APM (News - Alert)) to view code impact changes with application monitoring tools such as New Relic, statsD, Graphite, or Cloud Monitoring; build workflows to automate routine maintenance tasks using workflow automation tools such as Rundeck and Jenkins, aggregate logs from all devices to identify patterns and spot anomalies using lo aggregation tools such as logstash; manage caching needs with tools such as Memcache, Varnish and more. Multi-server environments are now provisioned in minutes instead of the hours it previously took without automation tools.
• Managed Services - Enables customers to focus on innovation and other tasks that add value to the business by allowing Rackspace to design, build, configure, monitor and optimize both the infrastructure, software stack and the automation tools.
• Support for Linux-based technologies (Windows coming soon) - Supports DevOps tools up and down the stack, ranging from application and infrastructure monitoring to MongoDB and MySQL database support including PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, Java, Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Flask, Meteor, MySQL, MongoDB, Riak, Cassandra, Solr, Elasticsearch, Hadoop, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Memcache, Varnish, Redis, Cloud Monitoring, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ and more.

• Enforce consistency - Customers are able to create identical development, staging, and testing environments based on same configurations.
• Manage configurations - Customers are getting the right balance of base images and instance configuration at build time, simplifying image management and instance building across infrastructure types.
• Manage change - Rackspace helps adhere to strict source control practices for customer environments so that any changes can always be audited, tracked and reversed if needed.
• Respond to monitoring alerts - Rackspace configures the monitoring, manages the environment, and responds to alerts as they occur so that customers can focus on their application.

"Without this service, we would have to manage 24/7 operations, hire additional staff to perform critical work on our environment, and worry about whether our environments were always in sync with each other," said Trevor White, chief technology officer, LeadOutcome. "With DevOps, we can take advantage of the extensive knowledge, best practices and experience Rackspace brings to the table. Having one company support both the infrastructure and the DevOps tools gives us more confidence that things will work the way we need them to work 100 percent of the time."

For more information about Rackspace's DevOps Automation Service, please visit: http://www.rackspace.com/devops/.

About Rackspace

Rackspace^® (NYSE: RAX) is the global leader in hybrid cloud and founder of OpenStack^®, the open-source operating system for the cloud. Hundreds of thousands of customers look to Rackspace to deliver the best-fit infrastructure for their IT needs, leveraging a product portfolio that allows workloads to run where they perform best-whether on the public cloud, private cloud, dedicated servers, or a combination of platforms. The company's award-winning Fanatical Support^® helps customers successfully architect, deploy and run their most critical applications. Headquartered in San Antonio, TX, Rackspace operates data centers on four continents. Rackspace is featured on Fortune's list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. For more information, visit www.rackspace.com.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting (News - Alert) could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements concerning expected development, performance or market acceptance associated with the Rackspace DevOps Automation Service; anticipated operational and financial benefits from the DevOps Automation Service; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the possibility that expected benefits from the DevOps Automation Service may not materialize because the services are not generally accepted in the marketplace, which could occur due to certain factors including (i) a failure to market the products or services cost effectively, differentiate the products and services from competitive products and services or communicate differentiations effectively, (ii) the reliability, quality or compatibility associated with the products or services, (iii) changes in technology which adversely affect the benefits of the product, (iv) slowdowns in the general economy or technology industry that impact consumer spending habits, (v) internal strategy decisions that impact the products and services, and (vi) and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2013, filed with the SEC (News - Alert) on November 11, 2013. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

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