The public cloud is by now on almost every company’s agenda, but many lack the expertise necessary to move mission-critical applications off their in-house infrastructure. Rackspace Inc. is looking to help.

The cloud specialist today expanded its partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. in a bid to better support organizations that are making the shift to the cloud. As part of the move, Rackspace will augment the migration consulting packages that it introduced for AWS users in April with new technical resources meant to streamline projects.

The most notable addition is a web-based transfer tool designed to automate key parts of the transfer workflow. According to Rackspace, the service provides point-and-click administrative controls alongside a recommendation engine that offers advice on how to go about a migration. Users can quickly check what is the best type of AWS environment for running a given workload, as well as compare its cost with that of their-premise deployment.

If other self-service migration tools are any indication, the new product is likely geared toward relatively simple workloads that don’t have too many dependencies. Companies with more demanding applications can look to Rackspace’s other services, which are also receiving a boost today. 

The provider is strengthening the consulting lineup by throwing in more AWS-specific documentation and other technical materials to help with migrations. It sounds like the upgrade will mainly affect enterprises that go with Rackspace’s advisory packages, which offer in-house operations staff guidance on how to transfer applications. The company also performs full-service migrations where its engineers take care of the manual work. 

The expanded partnership with AWS is the latest in a string of recent milestones for Rackspace. Over the past few weeks, the company has extended its services lineup to cover cloud offerings from Google Inc. and Pivotal Software Inc. as well as Microsoft Corp.’s recently launched Azure Stack. 

As the leader in this market, AWS is particularly important to Rackspace’s plans. From the cloud giant’s standpoint, meanwhile, anything that makes its platform easier to adopt can help attract more customers. The same motivation has led AWS to offer organizations the option of physically shipping their records to its data centers (by truck, if necessary), when transferring them over the web is too much hassle.

Image: Rackspace