Rackspace on Wednesday said it will work with Google to make it easier for business customers to adopt Google Cloud Platform, the Internet search giant’s answer to Amazon (AMZN) Web Services public cloud. The news comes out of this week’s Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco.
San Antonio-based Rackspace already has similar partnerships in place with AWS and Microsoft (MSFT) Azure, the two largest public cloud vendors. Public cloud providers own and operate massive data centers around the world stuffed with computing, networking and storage capacity that they rent to multiple customers that want to augment or replace their own data centers.
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Under this agreement Rackspace and Google will build “managed services” that, in theory, automate nitty-gritty tasks involved in setting up and maintaining cloud infrastructure and make migration of data and applications from a company’s on-premises data centers to Google’s cloud easier.
Rackspace has expertise here. It runs its own public cloud, but also provides tech support to businesses regardless of whether their servers run in-house or in Rackspace facilities.
For more on Google’s cloud push, watch:
The company’s decision to provide services to the big three public cloud providers has been part of an evolution that started when it became clear that Rackspace itself could not compete directly with the three gigantic rivals—each of which spends billions of dollars a year on datacenter upgrades. But it could sell services to help make those public clouds more accessible to businesses without a lot of IT staff.
The conundrum for Rackspace and other third-party service providers supporting these big clouds is that eventually the cloud providers will themselves add services to ease cloud deployment and usage—as Amazon has already done.