Managed services company Rackspace Inc. is adding the ability to pay-as-you-go to its Kubernetes and VMware private cloud services.

The pay-as-you-go pricing options, which have long been available with public cloud services, are being made available thanks to a partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. Rackspace customers will now be able to pay for only the resources they use for the company’s VMware Inc.-powered private cloud managed service and its new Kubernetes private cloud managed service, which was only released last month.

With both services, Rackspace installs and manages the private cloud infrastructure on behalf of its customers. The infrastructure can be deployed on-premises in the client’s own data centers, at one of Rackspace’s data centers, or at an outside colocation provider. Rackspace also makes sure that extra capacity is installed in advance so that its customers can scale up as necessary.

Rackspace is using HPE’s GreenLake Flex Capacity services to enable the pay-as-you-go pricing. The announcement seems to build upon an earlier partnership Rackspace forged with HPE last November, when they teamed up to create a pay-as-you-go pricing model for the former’s OpenStack Private Cloud service. Rackspace is now saying its OpenStack and Kubernetes private cloud managed services are the first in the industry that allow customers to pay for only the resources they need, instead of reserving them up front.

“With RKaaS as the foundation, we’ve created a truly differentiated, first of its kind offering with a pay per use economic model,” Scott Crenshaw, executive vice president and general manager of Rackspace Private Clouds, said in a statement. “This will allow businesses to more easily transition new workloads into Kubernetes in a private cloud environment to help modernize application development, accelerate time to market and dramatically increase cost savings.”

Both of the new offerings are significant, Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE. Most existing enterprise on-premises workloads currently reside in VMware, while the majority of future workloads will be hosted in Kubernetes deployments, he said. So companies such as Rackspace that can help enterprises move these workloads are positioned to benefit.

“Especially [given] the complexities of deploying Kubernetes on-premises, combined with simplified offering to manage it as a service, makes this a very attractive option for C-level executives looking at operating next-generation applications on a hybrid cloud platform,” Mueller said.

Rackspace said pay-as-you-go has already been enabled in its Kubernetes private cloud offering and will be made available for its VMware private cloud service in the summer.

Image: Garret Heath/Flickr