AWS launches managed-services-as-a-service

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced it's getting in to the managed services business.

The cloud colossus has operated a substantial consulting practice for some time, the better to help cloud migrants clamber aboard.

But until now it's left the mucky bits of managing a cloud – patch management, backup, monitoring, security, and operational process for incident, change, and problem management – to users or partners.

Now the company has created a “set of integration points (APIs and a set of CLI tools) for connection to your existing service management system” and hired “a dedicated team of Amazon employees” that provide the managed services. The Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 are the target for the service, which Amazon says was developed in response to the requests of such companies.

The aim is to help the big end of town migrate to the cloud, complete with the ITIL-compliant processes they need to preserve in order to feel confident about governance. The service can therefore work with preferred management tools and the policies they enforce, and cloudify them. You can choose which resources to assign to the AWS managed services team, which will then respond to any change requests you make. And also do the mucky stuff mentioned above, either at your beck and call or as a result of automation and/or machine learning to keep your corner of the cloud humming.

AWS has a thriving partner ecosystem with members including outfits like Rackspace that decided they were better off providing services to Amazon customers instead than running their own cloud. Many have signed up as partners for this offering, but AWS suggests their roles will be doing things like onboarding clients to the new managed services, or helping with application migration. Application operations will also land in partners' laps because AWS is serving its own cloud, not third-party code.

And because this is aimed at the very biggest end of town, AWS thinks its partners won't be too put out. Indeed, it reckons that on-boarding will consume “Onboarding to AWS MS typically requires -10 weeks of design/strategy, system/process integration, and initial app migration”, which should make for one last fat cheque.

The Register asked AWS a few questions about this launch and was told by a spokesperson that the two blog posts on the launch cover all our inquiries.

We've picked the good bits out of those posts, other than to mention that as of today the service supports 23 AWS services, and is available in four AWS Regions including US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and EU (Ireland). Pricing is bespoke, but will be an un-stated percentage of your overall AWS spend. Small-and-medium-sized businesses need not apply.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this launch is that AWS is being told that governance issues are keeping big companies from jumping into the cloud. If these new services remove that objection, the vast application fleets of the Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 may be up for grabs and om-premises-focussed IT vendors have yet another, and starker, warning that it's going to get harder and harder to sell on-premises anything before too much time has passed. ®