What Does Managed Services Mean in AWS?

Learn what managed services mean in AWS with this comprehensive guide. We'll cover what it is, how it works, its benefits & drawbacks.

What Does Managed Services Mean in AWS?

AWS Managed Services (AMS) is a comprehensive solution that helps you adopt AWS at scale and operate more efficiently and securely. We leverage standard AWS services and provide guidance and resources to help you get the most out of your cloud environment. With AMS, AWS takes care of everything, and you can even choose the service window you prefer for those tasks. A managed service allows the end user to focus on using a service rather than configuring it.

This means that when you deploy or migrate an application to the AWS cloud, you can choose between a self-managed scenario or a fully managed one. In the latter case, all the underlying services are managed by a service provider, in this case AWS. By relying on fully managed services, you stop worrying about backups, patches, and updates; this option is convenient and easy to manage through a team of cloud experts. AWS Managed Services is a set of services and tools that automate infrastructure management tasks for Amazon Web Services (AWS) deployments.

The service is aimed at large enterprises that want a simplified way to migrate on-premises workloads to the public cloud and then manage those workloads post-migration. AWS Managed Services assumes control of a customer's AWS account as part of the onboarding process, but an administrator can continue to make change requests for resources through a self-service cloud management console. At this point, the new deployment becomes a managed application stack and is the responsibility of the Managed Services team. Managed services have some interesting similarities with serverless services. However, an MSP in the AWS Partner Network can complete AWS Managed Services training to add the product to their portfolio.

AWS Managed Services continuously manages a customer's AWS infrastructure in accordance with best practices established by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and AWS. This ensures that your cloud environment is secure, reliable, and compliant with industry standards. When you engage with AWS Managed Services, you are likely to go through three levels of AWS staff functions that are specific to the phases of managed services: service design, service transition, service operation, and continuous service improvement cycles. This ensures that your cloud environment is always up-to-date and running optimally. AWS Managed Services provide ongoing management and maintenance of your cloud infrastructure, so you can focus on your business applications. While this is a service that can be purchased from certain AWS managed service providers, most managed service contracts assume that you have an in-house software development team that focuses on those facets of your application. Undoubtedly, the AWS Managed Services team isn't cheap; however, when compared to the engineers and hardware you would need to deploy and manage internal applications, having AWS deploy and manage your infrastructure can be more cost-effective in the long run.

Under this subscription model, the customer is the entity that owns or has direct oversight of the organization or system being managed, while the managed service provider (MSP) is the service provider that provides the managed services. To sum up, managed services are an excellent option for scalability and ease of use; however, they have a higher regular cost and less customization than self-managed solutions. If you're looking for an efficient way to migrate on-premises workloads to the public cloud and then manage those workloads post-migration without having to worry about backups, patches, or updates, then AWS Managed Services may be just what you need.

Lynne Ellert
Lynne Ellert

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