Rackspace announces latest version of Compass

Rackspace has released the latest version of Compass, with a whole host of improvements to help customers better track their costs, manage security and inventory and monitor cloud usage across the organisation.

The update includes more than 350 automated best practice checks, which is seven times the previous version and ensures businesses are performing their analysis in the most efficient way possible.

As part of Rackspace's Fanatical Support for AWS, Compass helps businesses learn about the way their organisation is using the cloud over time, which in turn, helps it uncover opportunities to ensure the usage is best optimised. It also supports Reserved Instance (RI) purchase recommendations and offers the functionality at aggregate and the ability to analyse spend across multiple dimensions and AWS accounts.

“Cost optimisation and utilisation monitoring fill one of the major holes in process and management when using AWS,” said Carl Brooks, IT analyst at 451 Research. “Having it automated and available on demand in this fashion is a sought after service capability.”

Compass is a result of a licensing agreement with AWS governance tooling provider and AWS Advanced Partner CloudCheckr, which enables Rackspace to offer enhanced monitoring tools in its Support for AWS offering. The licensing agreement allows Rackspace to change the technology as and when it's needed to ensure the product keeps evolving with the times.

“Fanatical Support for AWS has always focused on providing the right mix of tooling, automation and deep human expertise to deliver customer outcomes,” said Jeff Cotten, senior vice president and general manager of AWS practice area at Rackspace.

“The bolstered Compass capabilities create new value for our customers by arming Rackspace architects and engineers with new tooling that will focus on optimising their AWS environments for cost, performance and security.”