Public cloud providers, like AWS and Azure, build and offer many services to help developers, IT shops and small and large business quickly build and deploy their applications on the public cloud. Public clouds offer speed and agility and a myriad of services to launch your applications, but it can become all too easy to have projects run away from you if your use of public cloud lacks focus. This is where optimizing public cloud with managed services can be a good option.

Let’s take a closer look at the positives and negatives of public cloud, and some of the managed services that can take it to the next level.

The Benefits and Drawbacks of Public Cloud

Public clouds have taken the infrastructure world by storm and have certainly disrupted the IT industry in a very positive way. I must admit, from a technical (read: geek) standpoint, it is extremely attractive to be able to write and deploy my application on the same day. As my good friend James Desk puts it, “Throw another dime in the jukebox and code like hell.”

In my opinion, the key to utilizing a public cloud to yield a well-supported, highly available application is to specifically build your application on top of the developed services the public cloud provider has available in their catalog. However, at the time of this writing, AWS is providing 140+ different services to help with deployment of your application on their cloud. This is where the problems start to creep in.

Learning how to use all the services and being able to quickly understand which services are right for the application is impractical. My friends in the business will learn and use about five, 10, maybe 20 services which are immediately needed for their application. Once their applications are up and running, that’s where the learning stops until the next project come up.

Because public clouds like AWS have made it so quick and easy to get started, they have also made it quick and easy to have a project run away from you with some costly consequences. I have been guilty of spinning up development/test environments or adding temporary resources to my production workload and then forgetting to turn things off, resulting in some unexpected, costly waste. Lessons learned.

Getting help with management from experts that live and breathe this nebulous mist day in and day out can prevent wastes in time and cost.

Managed Services to Optimize Public Cloud

INAP’s Public Cloud Managed Services immediately make sense in this case. Our public cloud management team is made up of certified AWS and Azure engineers. These talented people make it their mission to know and understand how to leverage all public cloud services to ensure that our customers are utilizing all the needed resources without waste. They do this by staying on top of all newly released services, cloud certifications and industry best practices to make sure that our clients get the best in class service, support and advice.

Here are some of the more popular services we offer for AWS and Azure:

• Deployment Services, which includes a full-service onboarding team with dedicated project manager and implementation engineer
• Configuration Services
• 24/7/365 Issue Mitigation
• Escalation Support
• Monitoring and Alerting
• Consolidated Billing
• Compliance and Security Services
• Operating System Support
• Account Review: Performance and Cost Optimization
• Solution Architecture
• Migration Services
• DBA Services

Interested in exploring public cloud optimization with INAP? Chat Now to learn more.