Rackspace Technology standardizes build documentation and provisioning process across AWS, Azure and Google environments

The obstacles they faced

It’s always nice to have a choice. And when it comes to public cloud considerations, companies today have several great options. They can choose to go with Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft® Azure® — or any combination of these in a multicloud cloud solution — to take advantage of vendor-specific tools that allow them to optimize workload performance.

But a multicloud solution can also lead to siloed processes. Google, AWS and Azure all have their own bespoke processes, which, for Rackspace Technology, required the management of information across three different teams. In addition, each used its own delivery format: one team would submit an Excel spreadsheet, another a Visio chart and another a PDF. This meant someone would then need to manually process this information and enter it into another system, so it could move to the next step in the process.

A happy build engineer enjoys spending their time working on requirements and polishing the functionality of a future cloud environment to ensure it’s the best it can be. Unfortunately, Rackspace Technology found that an inordinate amount of build engineer time was being spent navigating the myriad processes that arose through the integration and management of a multicloud environment.

“The actual documents that a build engineer received differed,” explained Jeffrey Patton, Devops Engineer III at Rackspace Technology. “An AWS build document was actually a PDF file. Google was an Excel file, and Azure had two files: one Visio and one Excel. And within that sometimes you’ll have differences between the U.S. and other regions.”

What we achieved together

As a result of this new streamlined workflow, Rackspace Technology has been able to:

• Take a process that used to take 5-10 days and reduce it down to a day or less
• Improve accuracy and generate a 60% reduction in re-work
• Free engineers from tedious manual tasks so they can focus on fine-tuning
• Create a standard, consistent, repeatable process that ultimately helps us be as flexible as we need to be

“And these are native tools for Microsoft,” explains Patton. “You're not patching together a series of third-party tools to get this done. These are all tools that everyone has access to.”