Rackspace boosts private cloud agility with virtualization

According to Litchford, obtaining licensing and spinning up 350 virtual load balancers was quick and easy. He says that preparation for the migrations consisted primarily of deployment scripting by a couple of Rackspace engineers, who then pushed one button to deploy the base image.

“We quite literally made the decision and by Monday of the next week, we had already started moving customers,” says Litchford. “We hit the ground running.” Another hardware deployment, on the other hand, might have taken weeks for delivery, racking and cabling, and configuration.

“By adopting the virtual edition—versus trying to go with hardware—we cut down the delivery time for the infrastructure migrations to nothing,” says Litchford. “Rackspace’s ability to leverage the F5 technology quickly was awesome.”

Although the large Rackspace IT staff boasts significant expertise, F5 support still helped ensure deployment went quickly and smoothly. Litchford notes, “We definitely leaned on the F5 team for configuration translation and to understand what features of our previous vendor’s technology might have been enabled for a one-off customer.”

In addition, he believes the playbooks and proven operating procedures available for the F5 solution sped implementation and documentation. “It was easy for us to adapt those to a CSP scale rather than building them ourselves.”

In general, he says, “I’m really pleased with the level of support that BIG-IP Virtual Edition has on the cloud platforms we run within private cloud.”

The Rackspace migration to BIG-IP VE empowers the company’s engineers to increase automation and save themselves time. As a CSP providing hosting environments for many customers, Rackspace’s approach to automation differs from that of a typical enterprise IT team, and it uses a number of orchestration and automation platforms. But similar principles apply.

“More usage of a single platform encourages us to use more of the platform’s capabilities,” explains Litchford, who praises the solution for its extensibility. “And it’s really easy to automate against, which is great. We incorporated some of the F5 tooling into the automation and orchestration we already have to help us scale out overall management. That’s engineering work we don’t have to do ourselves, and more value brought to the partnership overall.”

The F5 solution increases flexibility for Rackspace as it manages customer infrastructures and the options it offers. Litchford says, “It’s a great opportunity for us as we think about modernizing legacy F5 customers within Rackspace to a virtualized solution, giving them that flexibility to scale up and scale down a bit more efficiently.”

Security, while not a focus for the migration to BIG-IP VE, is another realm in which the solution adds options for Rackspace. In general, the company ensures customer environments maintain a basic level of security and then deploys other capabilities as add-on services to meet individual customer’s needs. For instance, F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF is part of the Rackspace infrastructure for some customers.

The latest F5 deployments integrate with existing F5 security solutions and deliver other capabilities Rackspace may access as needed. Litchford says, “We’re leveraging some of those security features within the F5 platform.”

As Rackspace moves forward into an AI-enabled future, Litchford says the company’s partnership with F5 provides confidence. “There was never a question of whether F5 could work in this situation,” he says. “Nobody doubted. That speaks volumes to not only our partnership, but the experiences we’ve had over the years.”

He adds, “Our platforms are going to evolve over time. As that happens, we’ll be continuing to look for partners with leadership in features and functions, leadership in performance and value, and a willingness to lean into new technologies—a partner who can evolve with our customers as our service therefore evolves. By making it easy, with a trusted brand and a reasonable price point, F5 has a really strong value proposition today.”