Managed-services company Rackspace Inc. has wasted no time in announcing Fanatical Support services for Microsoft Azure Stack, just hours after the Redmond-based company said its on-premises cloud is finally ready to ship.

Azure Stack can be thought of as Microsoft’s Azure cloud in a box. It’s designed to be deployed by customers in their own data centers so they can create a fully compatible version of Azure. But just like the Azure cloud, Azure Stack is a complex beast that requires considerable expertise to get up and running and maintain. And that’s where Rackspace comes in, with a new support service that’s designed to relieve that considerable burden from users.

Rackspace said its offering includes centralized support across all of the hardware, networking and platform components of Azure Stack, which includes maintaining virtual machines and other infrastructure. The company says it can “architect, deploy and operate” customer’s Azure Stack deployments and then maintain them 24/7. The idea is to make sure Azure Stack is accessible to organizations of all sizes, regardless of cloud skills or expertise.

“Azure Stack is well-positioned to become the world’s leading hybrid cloud solution, but many customers will need help operating it at scale to realize its full benefits,” said Ramakant Pandrangi, vice president and general manager of Microsoft Clouds at Rackspace.

For customers, it’s true that Rackspace’s support certainly makes things simpler. It means that Rackspace operates as their single point of contact to handle any kind of problem, so there’s no need to go chasing up the different companies that ship third-party solutions atop Azure Stack should they go wrong. The support also includes things such as proactive maintenance, updates and planning as the platform evolves.

Rackspace also ensures the platform is as secure as it’s possible to be, integrating Azure Active Directory with Azure Stack, while offering additional security services for those companies with regulatory compliance needs. In addition, Rackspace also offers customers the chance to host Azure Stack in its own data centers if they don’t wish to make their own hardware investments.

Besides the main support offering, Rackspace is also working with Microsoft to provide what it calls a stable test environment so customers can test non-production workloads on a hosted single node Azure Stack Development Kit. This service is available now as a proof-of-concept on month-to-month contract terms, deployed on the company’s Rapid Deployment Hardware.

Rackspace said general availability of its main Fanatical Support for Azure Stack offering is expected to arrive in the second half of this year.

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