To make the lives of IT technicians easier and ease their migration to the cloud, AWS has launched AWS Managed Services as part of its portfolio. The solution uses automation and machine learning to assist the deployment and management of cloud, using a set of APIs and CLI tools as integration points to connect to existing service management systems. This configuration allows IT professionals to re-use standard components and preserve their existing systems and best practices where possible.
According to Amazon, AWS MS is built around a Virtual Data Center (VDC), which comprises a Virtual Private Cloud containing multiple Deployment Groups, which in turn consists of Multi-AZ subnets. The subnets enable a DMZ, shared services, and customer applications, which make up a Managed Stack.
Its features include:
- Incident Monitoring & Resolution– a monitoring system, complemented by Amazon CloudWatch alarms, detect failed updates and security incidents which are in turn resolved automatically or with the involvement of AWS engineers.
- Change Control- As its name suggests, this function coordinates changes as they are applied to individual stacks to ensure that they occur on an orderly, non-overlapping basis. Changes can be manual or scripted and require a proper request to be implemented. Manual changes occur within a scheduled window using temporary security credentials.
- Provisioning- Stacks, or application templates, have built-in defaults which can be overridden upon provisioning.
- Patch Management- Above-the-hypervisor patches, including those to the OS and infrastructure application (SSH, RDP, ISS, Apache, etc) are handled by AWS MS.
- Security & Access Management- AWS MS uses Trend Micro Deep Security and EC2 Security Groups to manage the security of third-party applications from AWS Marketplace.
- Backup & Restore- All stacks are backed up regularly. The backups are tested for integrity and a run book can be used to revive failed stacks.
- Reporting- A Cloud Service Advisor, running AWS Trusted Advisor, provides financial and capacity management reports.