Rackspace today announced a new, enhanced version of Compass, part of the management tooling portfolio available to Fanatical Support for AWS customers.

Compass has been expanded to include more than 350 automated best practice checks (a 7x increase over the previous version) and new functionality for advanced cost optimization, security and inventory management, and utilization monitoring. These features, combined with the broader portfolio of Fanatical Support for AWS tooling, represent a comprehensive capability set for managing AWS environments.

"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 the 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 optimizing their AWS environments for cost, performance and security."

The tooling enhancements included within Compass are particularly meaningful with respect to cost management. Compass delivers valuable insights into AWS spending trends over time, opportunities to rightsize underutilized resources, comprehensive Reserved Instance (RI) purchase recommendations, and the ability to aggregate and analyze spend across multiple dimensions and multiple AWS accounts.

The underlying technology for Compass was obtained through a strategic licensing agreement with CloudCheckr, a market leading AWS governance tooling provider and AWS Advanced Technology Partner. The agreement enables Rackspace to deeply integrate the technology into its Fanatical Support for AWS offer and customize it over time to meet Rackspace's evolving needs as a large-scale AWS managed services provider.

"Cost optimization and utilization 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."

The new version of Compass is globally available to all Fanatical Support for AWS customers. For more information on Compass, please visit www.rackspace.com/managed-aws/compass.