AWS vastly expands its own managed services

By Simon Sharwood on Oct 25, 2019 12:05PM

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AWS has increased the managed services options for its customers by adding 29 new services to its AWS Managed Services (AMS) program.

AMS “automates common activities, such as change requests, monitoring, patch management, security, and backup services, and provides full-lifecycle services to provision, run, and support your infrastructure.” The cloud colossus says that by doing so it “unburdens you from infrastructure operations so you can direct resources toward differentiating your business.”

Critically, the service offers “a fully staffed service desk available to answer questions, resolve incidents and perform and manage complex change requests.” That service desk is run by “full time Amazon employees” who work “24x7 365 days a year to augment and empower your team to accelerate your cloud operations.”

The service has something in it for the channel, because AWS has partners that offer on-boarding to AMS. But just eight partners - 2^nd Watch, Accenture, Contino, Deloitte, JHC, Logicworks, Onica and Sourced - are on AWS’ list of those ready to offer such services.

There’s obvious tension between AMS and the wider AWS channel. AWS explains that away in its AMS FAQ by saying “AWS Managed Services offers AWS infrastructure operations management. Our partners are an important aspect of our service, helping customers migrate their traditional workloads to the cloud, developing and managing applications, and offering hybrid and multi-cloud. Customers can greatly benefit from our APN Consulting Partners’ deep industry-specific expertise. For customers who want a single vendor to manage both applications and AWS infrastructure, validated AWS Managed Service Providers deliver full-lifecycle support for applications, while AWS Managed Services manages ongoing infrastructure operations.”

News of the AMS expansion comes after another AWS initiative, a new partner-finder service called IQ, ignored Australian partners and limited local customers to working with US-based AWS partners.

The 29 new AWS services added to AMS are: