News

AWS Adds Operations Management for Large Enterprises

• By David Ramel
• 12/13/2016

After years of testing, Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) rolled out a new service for infrastructure and operations management, targeting enterprises running large-scale datacenters that want to move to the cloud.

Called AWS Managed Services (MS), the new offering provides a managed framework for dealing with policies, best practices and operational procedures and other work required in large organizations.

"With IT staff responsible for provisioning hardware, installing software, applying patches, monitoring operations, taking and restoring backups, and dealing with unpredictable operational and security incidents, there’s plenty of work to go around," AWS spokesperson Jeff Barr said in a blog post yesterday. "It simplifies deployment, migration, and management using automation and machine learning, backed up by a dedicated team of Amazon employees."

Barr said AWS MS provides the following features:

• Incident monitoring and resolution
• Change control
• Provisioning
• Patch management
• Security and access management
• Backup and restore
• Reporting (financial and capacity management reports)

"Our rigor and controls help to enforce your corporate and security infrastructure policies, and enable you to develop solutions and applications using your preferred development approach," the AWS MS site says. "AWS Managed Services improves agility, reduces cost, and unburdens you from infrastructure operations so you can direct resources toward differentiating your business."

Targeting Fortune 1000 and the Global 2000 companies, Barr said the service helps them follow regimented operations models, such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), described as "a set of practices for IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business."

It provides APIs and command-line interface (CLI) tools for customers looking to connect their existing systems for service management. It can also be accessed through the AWS Management Console, though Barr said that will likely be a less popular option.

"AWS MS is built around the concept of a Virtual Data Center that is linked to one or more AWS accounts," Barr said. "The VDC consists of a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) which contains multiple Deployment Groups which consist of Multi-AZ subnets for a DMZ, shared services, and for customer applications. Each application or application component is packaged up into a Managed Stack."

New training programs have been set up to help AWS partners guide enterprises in using the new service, which was developed over the course of the last couple of years in conjunction with select enterprise customers and AWS partners.

It's available now to manage AWS resources housed in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) Regions, with support for other regions to come. Barr said interested organizations should contact an AWS sales representative to learn more about the service, for which pricing is based on regular AWS usage.