Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced a new Managed Services product for its public cloud that aims to ease migration of legacy enterprise applications.
AWS Managed Services is a series of infrastructure operations management tools meant to provide ongoing management, support, monitoring, and security of an AWS cloud environment. It is delivered jointly by AWS employees and certified AWS partners and is meant to serve AWS’s largest clients who are planning to migrate workloads to Amazon’s public cloud.
Workload categories
Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst Lydia Leong says most workloads can be broken down into two categories, traditional and cloud-native. Gartner calls these mode 1 and mode 2 applications. AWS Managed Services, Leong says, is about creating a platform for migrating traditional, mode 1 enterprise applications to the public cloud.
“For Amazon, this is how they see classic enterprise workloads running with a greater degree of automation,” she says. “They’re building an automated platform for managed services.”
The product is comprised of a series of tools that will help primarily Fortune 100 customers create automated processes for migrating applications to the cloud and managing them once there. It is based on ITIL best practices for IT service management, says AWS.
Features include: change management (creating an automated approval process for making changes to an AWS environment); incident management (to investigate and resolve errors); provision management (to quickly deploy pre-defined stacks of infrastructure or applications); patch management; access management; security (including anti-malware and intrusion prevention and detection) along with continuity management (backups) and reporting (monthly performance metrics and detailed logs of all activity within the AWS environment).
Environment lock down
“It locks down the environment to a level simply not possible otherwise, guaranteeing that all changes and deployments are performed through a dedicated change management API,” said Euan Reid, CloudReach, one of the partners that will help AWS deliver this service. “[AWS Managed Services] create a comprehensive log trail sufficient to satisfy even the toughest auditors. It’s this unprecedented level of security and control that makes Managed Services the key enterprise corporations will use to open the door to AWS.”
On its face, AWS’s foray into a Managed Services product could be seen as an affront to Amazon’s system integrator and consulting partners who offer similar services. But AWS Managed Services will be delivered jointly between AWS employees and a set of partners including; 1 Strategy, 8K Miles, Accenture, Capgemini, CloudNexa, CloudReach, CSC, LogicWorks, Rackspace, Slalom and Smartronix. “In its current form, the competition this introduces to existing AWS partners looks limited,” said IDC IaaS analyst Deepak Mohan.
What the introduction of AWS Managed Services does do is give large enterprises an on-ramp to AWS’s public cloud. “[It offers enterprises] a formalised managed operations option to operate their AWS deployments within their stringent policy requirements,” Mohan added. “We see the offering as an accelerator for AWS adoption by this segment of IT buyers, who can now use expert automation, monitoring, and infrastructure management services from AWS for their operational processes.”
AWS Managed Services is available in the company’s US East and West regions, in Ireland and in its Sydney Region. AWS does not disclose pricing for the product; customers must contact the company to purchase it.
IDG News Service
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