SUS05-BP03 Use managed services - AWS Well-Architected Framework

SUS05-BP03 Use managed services

Use managed services to operate more efficiently in the cloud.

Common anti-patterns:

  • You use Amazon EC2 instances with low utilization to run your applications.

  • Your in-house team only manages the workload, without time to focus on innovation or simplifications.

  • You deploy and maintain technologies for tasks that can run more efficiently on managed services.

Benefits of establishing this best practice:

  • Using managed services shifts the responsibility to AWS, which has insights across millions of customers that can help drive new innovations and efficiencies.

  • Managed service distributes the environmental impact of the service across many users because of the multi-tenet control planes.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Medium

Implementation guidance

Managed services shift responsibility to AWS for maintaining high utilization and sustainability optimization of the deployed hardware. Managed services also remove the operational and administrative burden of maintaining a service, which allows your team to have more time and focus on innovation.

Review your workload to identify the components that can be replaced by AWS managed services. For example, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon ElastiCache provide a managed database service. Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon OpenSearch Service provide a managed analytics service.

Implementation steps

  1. Inventory your workload: Inventory your workload for services and components.

  2. Identify candidates: Assess and identify components that can be replaced by managed services. Here are some examples of when you might consider using a managed service:

    Task What to use on AWS

    Hosting a database

    Use managed Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances instead of maintaining your own Amazon RDS instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

    Hosting a container workload

    Use AWS Fargate, instead of implementing your own container infrastructure.

    Hosting web apps

    Use AWS Amplify Hosting as fully managed CI/CD and hosting service for static websites and server-side rendered web apps.

  3. Create a migration plan: Identify dependencies and create a migrations plan. Update runbooks and playbooks accordingly.

    • The AWS Application Discovery Service automatically collects and presents detailed information about application dependencies and utilization to help you make more informed decisions as you plan your migration

  4. Perform tests Test the service before migrating to the managed service.

  5. Replace self-hosted services: Use your migration plan to replace self-hosted services with managed service.

  6. Monitor and adjust: Continually monitor the service after the migration is complete to make adjustments as required and optimize the service.

Resources

Related documents:

Related videos: