AWS Managed Service: Simplify Your Cloud Journey

Dan Jones (Product Sales Lead) 19-Oct-2022 14:45:00

AWS Managed Cloud Service

An AWS managed service allows you to focus on your business rather than managing your infrastructure. With a managed service, cloud management software takes care of the heavy lifting so that you can concentrate on your core business goals. In this blog post, we will discuss what an AWS managed service is and how it can benefit your business.

What's a typical cloud journey?

I recently had a conversation with our AWS partner account manager about what they see as a typical cloud implementation journey. The key stages in a cloud journey are usually:

Initial decision
Test deployments
Migration of live workloads / Scaling down of on-premise infrastructure - All new infrastructure deployed to the cloud
On-going AWS management & maintenance - At this point systems are live and operational overhead/efficiency becomes the focus

Over the last few years due to external factors like Covid and chip shortages, moving to the AWS cloud has accelerated. So more and more businesses are now grappling with the last part of the cloud journey, operational efficiency.

How do priorities change once you are live in the AWS cloud?

From the conversation I had with our AWS partner manager, once businesses are live in the cloud this then brings about a number of priorities over the first year. The main one is often AWS cost related. Once you are live and using the systems the changing demand over time sees the costs fluctuating and stabilizing those costs to a defined budget often becomes a focus. Moving away from a CapEx model over to an OpEx one is often a challenge unless it is managed closely.

There are a number of ways to manage your cost with auto-scaling, taking advantage of discounts and right-sizing your deployments to optimise for costs and performance. Many businesses fail to plan for this area sufficiently, or their cloud budget is blown out of the water in the first few months or has large swings in cost/usage.

Often going hand in hand with the AWS billing issues are the optional demands of the platform. Often a team can end up spending more and more time on firefighting issues with their cloud infrastructure. This can have a major impact on software-focused businesses that should be focusing on their roadmap but get distracted by cloud-related issues.

Often the mix of these issues and rising costs mean that an IT team will then look for a consultant to come in and advise. However, as we have written about previously consultants are not the best option. They are a snapshot approach to something that is a moving target. To really get long-term value out of the cloud and evolve as it evolves you need cloud management software with provision for ongoing day-to-day maintenance and optional support and advisory services.