Setting up and maintaining a remote cloud environment can be a major challenge even for large organizations with plenty of technical personnel at their disposal.  

In a bid to ease the task, Amazon.com Inc. is rolling out a new management service that aims to reduce the amount of effort required to run applications on its public cloud. The linchpin of the offering is a self-service portal that allows customers to deploy new workloads without any of the manual work normally involved in the process. Instead, an administrator can simply specify what software or hardware asset they wish to spin up and Amazon will handle the heavy-lifting for them.

AWS keeps its eyes on each asset following the initial setup and takes care of day-to-day maintenance. Amazon handles common operations such as patching using a set of automation tools created specifically for its management service, while more complicated tasks are carried out by a dedicated team of engineers.

In the event of an outage, for instance, Amazon’s support staff can quickly review the incident and perform manual troubleshooting if the automated incident management system can’t solve the issue on its own. Amazon’s cloud engineers will also offer assistance with major administrative tasks such as operating system upgrades on an as-needed basis. Customers will be able to put in help requests through a self-service portal not unlike the provisioning console that the company provides for deploying new applications.

The new management offering, which will be sold under the name AWS Managed Services, is geared mainly toward large enterprises. Its introduction comes only a couple weeks after Amazon’s annual user conference in Las Vegas, which saw the launch of more than a dozen new services ranging from a batch analytics engine to artificial intelligence tools for building chatbots.

The rapid pace at which the company churns out new features is one of the main reasons for its dominant position in the public cloud. Ashmeet Sidana, founder and managing partner the startup fund Engineering Capital, sees Amazon’s position only strengthening going forward.

“Amazon Web Services is going to change the world quite literally, [and] not only because they’re going to change the technology stack,” Sidana said in a recent podcast hosted by SiliconANGLE. “We’re at a stage in technology where every industry is being impacted by technology, every company is a technology company now, and the impact of AWS cannot be overstated.”

At the same time, AWS might run into the perennial challenge of platform providers: the potential to co-opt functions provided by partners and others in the platform’s ecosystem. ServiceNow Inc. and Splunk Inc., for example, currently provide various kinds of AWS cloud management services.

In addition, so-called management service providers such as CloudReach Inc., 2nd Watch and Datapipe Inc. are all AWS partners offering related management services as well. In fact, CloudReach saw fit to insist in a blog post that AWS Managed Services won’t put companies such as itself out of business — a sure sign that AWS is indeed on its radar as a potential threat.

Image courtesy of AWS