As an IT professional, you know that managing infrastructure and applications can be time-consuming and complex. Focusing your efforts on your core business goals often takes a backseat to maintaining servers, patching systems, and ensuring high availability. However, by leveraging AWS Managed Services, you can offload undifferentiated heavy lifting to AWS, freeing you up to focus on innovation.
AWS Managed Services provides ongoing management and operation of your AWS infrastructure and applications. AWS experts handle tasks like change management, monitoring, patch management, security, and backup services so you can spend less time on operations and more time developing new features for your customers.
With AWS Managed Services, you can access the same secure, scalable, and reliable infrastructure that powers companies like Netflix, Expedia, and GE. AWS Managed Services allows your organization to move faster, reduce costs, and confidently scale.
Companies can’t afford to waste time and resources on maintenance and operations in today’s competitive landscape. By choosing AWS Managed Services, you can accelerate innovation and build new competitive advantages to grow your business. AWS Managed Services allows you to focus on what matters – your customers and your company’s future.
What Are AWS Managed Services?
AWS Managed Services are services Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers to help businesses manage their cloud infrastructure. AWS Managed Services provide ongoing management and operation of your AWS environment.
- AWS Managed Services automate common activities like change requests, monitoring, patch management, security, and backup services. This allows you to focus on your applications and business.
- With AWS Managed Services, AWS experts will proactively monitor your infrastructure 24/7, manage and operate your AWS resources, and notify you of any issues to help reduce your operational overhead. AWS Managed Services can help reduce costs through increased efficiency and optimized usage.
The specific AWS Managed Services include:
- AWS Managed Microsoft AD: Provides managed Microsoft Active Directory in the AWS Cloud.
- AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory – A managed Microsoft AD service in the AWS Cloud.
- Amazon RDS on VMware: Provides managed Relational Database Service (RDS) on VMware.
- By using AWS Managed Services, you gain access to AWS best practices for security, compliance, and operational excellence. AWS Managed Services can help accelerate your cloud adoption and allow you to focus on your business priorities.
Generally speaking, AWS Managed Services provide ongoing management and operation of your AWS environment so you can focus on your applications and business. The services are designed to reduce your operational overhead and optimize your AWS infrastructure. AWS Managed Services allow you to leverage AWS expertise and best practices to help accelerate your cloud adoption.
The Benefits of Using AWS Managed Services
As an AWS customer, using AWS Managed Services allows you to offload undifferentiated heavy lifting to AWS, freeing you up to focus on your core business. There are several benefits to leveraging AWS Managed Services:
- Reduced operational overhead. AWS Managed Services handles time-consuming tasks like patching, monitoring, failure recovery, and backup management for you. This reduces the resources required to operate your infrastructure and applications.
- Increased operational resilience. AWS Managed Services architects and operates your infrastructure and applications according to AWS best practices for security, availability, and reliability. This helps ensure your systems are well-architected and less prone to outages or security events.
- Continuous compliance monitoring. AWS Managed Services helps ensure your infrastructure and applications comply with industry standards and best practices. They monitor for security risks and vulnerabilities and proactively work to remediate them.
- Access to AWS expertise. The AWS Managed Services team has extensive experience helping customers optimize and operate secure, highly available, and scalable environments. They apply this expertise to managing your systems and work to improve operations over time continually.
- Predictable pricing. AWS Managed Services charges a monthly fee based on the resources under management. This predictable pricing model makes it easy to budget for operations and gain cost efficiencies as AWS Managed Services optimizes your environment.
By leveraging AWS Managed Services, you can reduce operational burdens, benefit from AWS expertise, and focus on innovation.
Offloading undifferentiated tasks to AWS Managed Services helps ensure your infrastructure and applications are secure, compliant, and highly available so you can concentrate on business growth.
Pros and Cons Compared
Here’s a table outlining some of the potential pros and cons of AWS Managed Services:
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Scalability: AWS Managed Services can easily scale with your business, accommodating growth without the need for significant infrastructural changes. | Complex Pricing: AWS Managed Services has a reputation for its complicated pricing structure, which may be difficult for some to understand and predict. |
| Reliability: AWS is known for its high reliability with extensive backup systems across different geographical locations. | Learning Curve: There may be a steep learning curve, especially for those unfamiliar with cloud services or AWS’s vast service offerings. |
| Scalability: AWS Managed Services can easily scale with your business, accommodating growth without significant infrastructural changes. | Potential for Vendor Lock-In: Transitioning to another service provider can be difficult and costly once you’re heavily invested in AWS’s environment. |
| Innovation: AWS frequently updates and introduces new services, staying at the forefront of cloud service innovations. | Support Costs: While AWS provides various support options, the costs can be high, especially for premium support tiers. |
| Security: AWS places a high priority on security, offering a multitude of tools and features to help you protect your data and infrastructure. | Differing Performance Between Regions: AWS’s global infrastructure means there can be variations in performance and service availability between regions. |
Please note that this table represents a general view of AWS Managed Services and individual experiences may vary based on specific use-cases, service selection, and other factors.
Types of AWS Managed Services
AWS offers several managed services to help reduce the operational burden of deploying and running AWS infrastructure. These managed services handle time-consuming tasks like patching, backups, software updates, monitoring, and security.
AWS Database Services include:
- Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS): Manages MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and MariaDB databases. Amazon RDS handles database administration tasks like backups, software patching, and monitoring.
- Amazon DynamoDB: A fully managed NoSQL database service. DynamoDB removes the administrative burden of operating and scaling a distributed database.
AWS Compute Services include:
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – Provides scalable computing capacity in the AWS cloud. You can launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need.
- AWS Lambda – Runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources required by that code. Lambda allows you to run code without provisioning or managing servers.
- Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) – A highly scalable, fast container management service that makes it easy to run, stop, and manage Docker containers on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances.
AWS Storage and Content Delivery include
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) – Provides scalable, durable, and inexpensive cloud storage.
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) – Provides persistent block storage volumes for Amazon EC2 instances.
- Amazon CloudFront – A content delivery network (CDN) service that accelerates delivery of your websites, APIs, video content or other web assets.
Using AWS-managed services allows you to focus on your applications and business, not the underlying infrastructure. The specialized AWS teams handle time-consuming yet critical tasks like database administration, patching, and monitoring so you can build and deploy applications faster
AWS Managed Services for Compute
As we delve into the depths of cloud computing, it’s impossible to overlook the enormous impact and the crucial role that Amazon Web Services (AWS) plays in this field.
In this section, we will focus on a particularly vital component of AWS, its Managed Services for Compute. These services alleviate the heavy lifting of scaling and managing compute capacity, thus enabling businesses to focus more on innovation and less on maintaining infrastructure.
Let’s explore these services.
EC2 Instance Management
AWS Managed Services for EC2 instances provide ongoing management and optimization of your Amazon EC2 compute environments. AWS experts will help deploy EC2 instances, configure instance types and sizes based on your workload needs, apply security patches and updates, and monitor instance health. They can also help you save costs by right-sizing underutilized instances and spotting unused instances to terminate.
Auto Scaling Management
The Auto Scaling feature of EC2 allows you to automatically scale your fleet of EC2 instances up or down based on demand. However, configuring Auto Scaling groups and policies can be complex. AWS Managed Services for Auto Scaling will help design, deploy, and optimize your Auto Scaling architecture based on best practices.
AWS experts will monitor your Auto Scaling groups, adjust policies as needed to match demand, and ensure your EC2 capacity is cost-optimized.
Elastic Load Balancing Management
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) helps distribute incoming traffic across your EC2 instances. AWS Managed Services for Elastic Load Balancing will deploy and configure your ELBs, monitor their health, and adjust routing policies and instance registrations as needed to ensure high availability and fault tolerance. AWS experts will also review ELB access logs and metrics to identify potential issues and opportunities for optimization.
Benefits of AWS Managed Services for Compute
Using AWS Managed Services for your compute infrastructure provides several benefits:
- Reduced operational overhead. AWS experts handle ongoing management, monitoring, and optimization of your EC2, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing environments.
- Improved reliability and availability. AWS experts apply security patches, monitor for issues, and make adjustments to avoid downtime.
- Cost optimization. AWS experts right-size underutilized resources and spot unused resources to minimize costs.
- Best practices implementation. Your compute infrastructure is built and managed according to AWS best practices for security, scalability, and high performance.
- Focus on your business. With AWS managing your computing foundation, you can focus on your core product and business priorities.
AWS Managed Services allow you to leverage AWS compute capabilities without the burden of day-to-day management and optimization. AWS experts handle these responsibilities for you so you can focus on your key business goals.
AWS Managed Services for Storage
AWS Managed Services can help reduce the operational overhead of managing AWS infrastructure. Their managed services for storage include:
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
You can use S3 to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as data lakes, cloud-native applications, and mobile apps.
S3 provides easy-to-use management features so you can organize your data and configure finely-tuned access controls to meet your specific business, organizational, and compliance requirements.
Amazon EFS
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a simple, scalable, elastic file system for Linux-based workloads. Amazon EFS is built to scale on demand to petabytes without disrupting applications, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, so your applications have the storage they need, when they need it.
Multiple Amazon EC2 instances can access an Amazon EFS file system simultaneously, providing a common data source for workloads and applications running on more than one instance or server.
Amazon FSx
Amazon FSx provides fully managed third-party file systems, eliminating the need to build and maintain your own file storage infrastructure. Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides a fully compatible Microsoft Windows file system so you can easily lift and shift enterprise applications to AWS.
Amazon FSx for Luster provides a high-performance file system optimized for fast processing of workloads such as machine learning, high-performance computing, video processing, and financial modeling.
Using AWS Managed Services for storage helps reduce costs, increase agility, and improve security. Their team of experts handle time-consuming storage tasks like provisioning, patching, backup, recovery, and monitoring so you can focus on your applications and business.
AWS’s storage services provide durable and highly available storage with strong consistency and low latency, all at a low cost.
AWS Managed Services for Databases
AWS offers several managed database services to help reduce the operational burden of deploying and managing databases.
AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)
The AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. DMS supports homogenous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle and heterogeneous migrations between different database platforms, such as Oracle to Amazon Aurora or Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL.
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. You can use the AWS Management Console to create DB instances easily, point and click to launch multiple editions of popular database engines like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and MariaDB.
Amazon Aurora
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases. Aurora delivers up to five times the throughput of MySQL and up to three times the throughput of PostgreSQL without requiring changes to most of your existing applications.
It provides enterprise-grade commercial database features such as advanced security, high availability, rest and transit encryption, automated backups, replication across three Availability Zones (AZs), and scalability up to 64TB of storage.
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon DynamoDB is a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for all applications that need consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at any scale. It is a fully managed database and supports both document and key-value data models.
Its flexible data model and reliable performance make it a great fit for mobile, web, gaming, ad tech, IoT, and many other applications.
AWS Managed Services for Analytics
AWS offers a range of managed services for big data and analytics to help you gain insights from your data without needing to manage the underlying infrastructure. ###AWS Glue
AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy to prepare and load your data for analytics.
You can create and run an ETL job with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. AWS Glue automatically generates the code to execute your data transformations and loading processes.
Amazon Athena
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that easily analyzes data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run. Athena scales automatically—executing queries in parallel—so results are fast, even with large datasets and complex queries.
Amazon EMR
Amazon EMR provides a managed Hadoop framework that makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective to process vast amounts of data across dynamically scalable Amazon EC2 instances.
You can also run other distributed frameworks such as Apache Spark, HBase, Presto, and Flink in Amazon EMR, and interact with data in other AWS data stores such as Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB.
Amazon QuickSight
Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business analytics service that makes it easy to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from your data. As a fully managed service, QuickSight lets you easily create and publish interactive dashboards, including ML Insights, annotations, and alerts. Dashboards can then be accessed from any device, and embedded into your applications, portals, and websites.
Using AWS managed services for analytics allows you to spend more time analyzing results and less time managing technology. AWS’s analytics services are highly scalable, cost efficient, and integrate with other AWS services. With a range of options for ETL, querying, processing, and visualization, you have the flexibility to choose the right tools for your needs. Focus on your business goals and let AWS handle the rest.
AWS Managed Services for Machine Learning
AWS offers a range of managed services for machine learning that can save you time and effort. These services handle time-consuming ML tasks like model training, hosting, and deployment so you can focus on your applications and business.
Amazon SageMaker
Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly. SageMaker removes the heavy lifting from each step of the machine learning process to make it easier to develop high quality models.
Amazon Augmented AI (A2I)
Amazon Augmented AI (A2I) makes it easy to build workflows for human review of ML predictions. A2I helps you scale ML models to production by enabling human review of ML predictions when needed. This allows you to benefit from the accuracy and speed of ML, while maintaining human oversight.
Amazon Personalize
Amazon Personalize is a machine learning service that makes it easy for developers to create individualized recommendations for customers using their applications. Amazon Personalize trains ML models using your data and optimizes them to predict the items your customers will interact with the most.
Amazon Textract
Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents. Amazon Textract goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to also identify the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables. This allows you to easily digitize documents and extract valuable data to enable document processing, analytics, and more.
Amazon Forecast
Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning to generate accurate forecasts. Amazon Forecast requires no machine learning experience to get started. You only need to provide historical time series data, and Amazon Forecast will train and deploy ML models that adapt as your data changes.
Using AWS managed services for machine learning allows you to launch AI-powered features quickly and easily. The services handle the complexity of building and training models so you can focus on your business priorities. AWS managed ML services are secure, scalable, and cost-effective, allowing you to start small and scale as your needs grow.
FAQs About AWS Managed Services
What are the benefits of AWS Managed Services?
AWS Managed Services provides several benefits for organizations using AWS:
- Reduced operational overhead. AWS handles time-consuming tasks like patching, monitoring, and updating your AWS infrastructure. This allows you to focus on your core business.
- Increased security and compliance. AWS Managed Services helps ensure your AWS environment meets security and compliance standards through continuous monitoring and patching. AWS also has deep experience helping customers meet compliance regulations like HIPAA, PCI, and FedRAMP.
- Cost optimization. The AWS Managed Services team helps you optimize your AWS spend through right-sizing underutilized resources and recommending cost-effective service options. They can also help you take advantage of AWS cost management tools like AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets.
- Expert guidance. The AWS Managed Services team has extensive experience helping customers architect and operate secure, high-performing AWS environments. They provide guidance and best practices to help you get the most out of AWS.
- Business continuity. AWS Managed Services helps ensure your critical AWS resources have redundancy and fault tolerance built-in. They also help you define and test disaster recovery plans to minimize downtime in the event of outages.
What services are included in AWS Managed Services?
AWS Managed Services includes management of the following AWS services:
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
- Amazon CloudWatch
- AWS CloudTrail
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
- Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
- Amazon DynamoDB
Additional services may be added over time. AWS Managed Services does not currently include management of AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, or Amazon SageMaker.
Conclusion
As you have seen, AWS managed services offer significant benefits for your business. By leveraging AWS’s expertise and tools, you can focus on your core business priorities instead of managing infrastructure. AWS managed services provide cost efficiency, increased security, and reliability. They reduce the operational burden on your team so you can allocate resources to more strategic initiatives.
While the initial setup requires effort, AWS managed services quickly pay off through reduced costs and improved efficiencies. The long-term gains far outweigh the short-term effort. By trusting AWS to handle time-consuming management and maintenance tasks, you gain peace of mind knowing your infrastructure and applications are in expert hands. AWS managed services are an easy choice for any organization looking to optimize operations, reduce costs, and accelerate innovation. The future is bright when you choose AWS managed services.
