What Are Managed Services and What Are Their Benefits?

Infrastructure building blocks of the AWS ecosystem, like EC2 instances for compute, EBS volumes for storage, and VPCs and subnets for networking, are all used in a very traditional way of systems administration. We build our solution based on pieces of infrastructure that we connect ourselves, just like physical hardware is assembled in a data center. That is, we buy a rack-mount server, add a few hard drives for storage, plug it into the router, and set up the networking.

Now, we will see a higher level of abstraction by taking a look at managed services.

What are managed resources, and why are they so powerful?

According to PalachukPalachuk, Karl (January 2013). Managed Services in a Month. Great Little Book Publishing Co., Inc. p. 208. ISBN 978-0981997858., managed resources are defined as:

Managed services is the practice of outsourcing the responsibility for maintaining, and anticipating need for, a range of processes and functions to improve operations and reduce expenses. Adopting managed services is intended to be an efficient way to stay up to date on technology, have access to skills and address issues related to cost, quality of service, and risk.

Let’s go through the quote and see what we ...