With the evolution of cloud services, software deployment took a new outlook. The complexity of server provisioning, and managing computing services like virtual machines, remote storage, and virtual networking can be transitioned to the cloud provider. Not only this, but the cost, responsibility, and ownership of the underlying hardware, and infrastructure, can also be shared with the cloud team. Depending on the requirement and geographic location, TechVedika provides 24X7 support to its customer’s business. 

This article will discuss some recommendations regarding Managed Services and the key benefits of employing a Managed Service Provider (MSP). 

Why Managed Services? 

The inclination of software devices toward agile applications and microservices persuaded cloud providers to come up with services that ease the implementation process. Users need not bother about the server maintenance, instead, they can use these services with minimum configuration changes. These services are termed Managed Services. 

Managed Service is a cloud functionality that can be used without taking care of the underlying hardware management. With upcoming advancements in the field of cloud computation, we will experience many more managed services. Hence easing out the software lifecycle. 

Although managed services provide scalability and ease of operation, their cost is considerable. With the number of hours saved, this is worth it. 

Counseling AWS Managed Services 

This section will present some recommendations for choosing various Managed Services based on common infrastructure and app-level requirements. 

1. Containerized Solutions: Containers are the single deployable unit that incorporates files, libraries, and everything else needed to run the software. With the most sought-after, microservices and DevOps, Containers have become essential for quick development and deployment. They unite microservices into a single deployable unit that does not exhaust the memory or CPU. As the number of containers increases, it becomes very important to manage them. Container management tools can be broken down into three categories: registry, orchestration, and computing.
   • AWS ECS/Fargate: AWS Fargate is Serverless. It lets you focus on building the application without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. It is a pay-as-you-go compute engine that is compatible with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). This technology can be used to run containers without a load of managing servers or clusters of EC2 instances. Fargate has a drawback of “vendor lock-in”. Once opted, the user is compelled to stay with it as there is no analogous service on other clouds. 
   • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS): AWS EKS is fully-managed. It provides a standard containerized solution that lets the application run on different cloud providers. Users have the flexibility to configure pods and services with better traffic controls and security features available to the applications. It also provides smooth monitoring, scaling, and load balancing of applications as it is integrated with AWS services like CloudWatch. Amazon EKS provides a scalable control plane for Kubernetes workloads. A very positive point about AWS EKS is that its deployments are standard, hence switching clouds will not affect it. 
   • FaaS Solutions: Custom code is a small part of the entire application. Serverless architecture can run custom code, (also known as a function) in short-term containers, managed by 3rd party. A FaaS application is divided into many functions and each of these functions is deployed in FaaS. The developer uploads code to FaaS, then the service uses all its capabilities to execute it. This service is very cost-effective as the functions do not run all the time. Its integration with AWS and API gateway is an added advantage here.  Apart from its capabilities, FaaS solutions face issues like cold-start, vendor lock-in, and runtime limits. Functions are small services and FaaS scales as much as the functions inside the scale.  
2. API Services Integration: It is always easier to work with the managed services rather than deploying your own.  Apart from containerized and Lambda, AWS offers AWS S3, Amazon Aurora, and AWS Cloud Front. 

Key Advantages of AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) 

1. Seize Cloud Specialist for Business: Cloud migration and management of cloud services is a key to successful businesses.  Organizations fail to realize the full potential of cloud services because of the deficiency of knowledge and experience with the native tools and services. AWS expert services can be outsourced so that the team can stay focused on strategy and business. MSPs employ experts, and they can reduce the cost realization time and reap organizational benefits.
2. Leverage an AWS partner to maximize value with a robust cloud environment: The key to achieving a cost-effective cloud service is effective management of AWS resources. AWS MSP centralizes its attention to the different parameters governing maximum ROI and savings. Resources need to be scaled up or down with changing demands. MSP monitors Reserved Instances, resource usage, and performance. With time they also introduce new tools for the latest updates. 

Tech Vedika Case Study

Tech Vedika has implemented Managed Services for multiple enterprise clients. This case study provides the engagement details for an Elderly Care Services Organization utilizing development and support services from Tech Vedika.

The Managed Services are for a suite of applications that provide access management services for staff and visitors at the Elderly Care Homes.

The activities performed by Tech Vedika are:

• Help Desk Support: 16X5 (16 hours US Time, Monday – Friday)
• Shared Managed Services Pool comprising of L1, L2, and L3 level resources for monitoring and handling incidents
• Setting up Performance Monitoring Tools and Dashboards
• Defining the Metrics and Thresholds, and setting up the Alerts for raising incidents
• IT Operations Management (ITOM) and Incident Management using OpsRamp
• Effective use of AWS and 3rd party Tools for Performance and Security monitoring & resolution: CloudWatch, New Relic, CloudTrail, LogDNA, Security Hub
• Security Vulnerability Assessments for CIS compliance
• Handling Service Requests such as
  • Designing the Deployment Model for ensuring High Availability and Scalability using AWS ALB, EC2, RDS, and AWS Availability Zones
  • Ensuring Database Availability with synchronous replication of data from Primary DB instance to a Standby instance
  • IAM Tickets

As part of the Managed Services engagement, Tech Vedika helped the customer in improving overall system performance and customer experience and optimizing cloud resource usage with 25% cost savings.

Conclusion 

Applications of the future will be hybrid and managed. AWS managed services let organizations concentrate on the business, without worrying about the underlying architecture. API integration is an added benefit here. Before stepping ahead, organizations need to analyze their requirements and choose options that best fit their AWS ecosystem.