Incident Monitoring & Resolution
Change Control
Provisioning
Patch Management
Security & Access Management
Backup & Restore
Reporting
Accessing AWS Managed Services
Incident Monitoring & Resolution – AWS MS manages incidents that are detected by our monitoring systems or reported by our customers. It correlates multiple Amazon CloudWatch alarms and looks for failed updates and security events that could impact the health of running applications. Incidents are created within AWS MS for investigation and are then resolved either automatically or manually by AWS engineers. False positives are used to improve our systems and processes, allowing AWS MS to improve over time by drawing on data collected at scale.
Change Control – AWS MS coordinates all actions on resources. Changes must originate with a change request (an RFC, or Request for Change), and can be manual or scripted. AWS MS makes sure that changes are applied to individual stacks on an orderly, non-overlapping basis. It also holds all incoming manual requests until they have been approved.
Provisioning – AWS MS includes a set of predefined stacks (application templates), each built to conform to long-established AWS best practices. The stacks contain sensible defaults, any of which can be overridden when the stack is provisioned.
Patch Management – AWS MS takes care of the above-the-hypervisor patching. This includes operating system (Linux and Windows) and infrastructure application (SSH, RDP, ISS, Apache, and so forth) security updates and patches. AWS MS employs multiple strategies, patching and building new AMIs for cloud-aware applications that can be easily restarted, and resorting to in-place patches for the rest.
Security & Access Management – AWS MS manages your approved third-party applications from AWS Marketplace, starting with Trend Micro Deep Security to look for viruses and malware and to detect intrusions on managed instances. AWS MS makes extensive use of EC2 Security Groups and manages controlled, time-limited access to production systems.
Backup & Restore – Each stack is backed up at a specified frequency. A percentage of the backup snapshots are tested for integrity and a run book is used to bring failed infrastructure back to life.
Reporting – AWS MS provides a set of financial and capacity management reports, delivered by a dedicated Cloud Service Advisor using AWS Trusted Advisor and other tools. The underlying AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch logs are also accessible.
Accessing AWS Managed ServicesYou can connect AWS Managed Services to your existing service management tools using the AWS MS API and command-line tools. You can also access it through the AWS Management Console, but we expect API and CLI usage to be far more popular. However you choose to access AWS MS, the basic objects and operations are the same. You can create, view, approve, and manage RFCs, service requests, and incident reports. Here’s what this looks like from the Console: