# SUS05-BP03 Use managed services
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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
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 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](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/), [Amazon Redshift](https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/), and [Amazon ElastiCache](https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/) provide a managed database service. [Amazon Athena](https://aws.amazon.com/athena/), [Amazon EMR](https://aws.amazon.com/emr/), and [Amazon OpenSearch Service](https://aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service/) provide a managed analytics service. 

 **Implementation steps** 

1.  Inventory your workload for services and components. 

1.  Assess and identify components that can be replaced by managed services. Here are some examples of when you might consider using a managed service:     
[\[See the AWS documentation website for more details\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/2023-04-10/framework/sus_sus_hardware_a4.html)

1.  Identify dependencies and create a migrations plan. Update runbooks and playbooks accordingly. 
   +  The [AWS Application Discovery Service](https://aws.amazon.com/application-discovery/) automatically collects and presents detailed information about application dependencies and utilization to help you make more informed decisions as you plan your migration 

1.  Test the service before migrating to the managed service. 

1.  Use the migration plan to replace self-hosted services with managed service. 

1.  Continually monitor the service after the migration is complete to make adjustments as required and optimize the service. 

## Resources
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 **Related documents:** 
+ [AWS Cloud Products ](https://aws.amazon.com/products/)
+ [AWS Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator ](https://calculator.aws/#/)
+  [Amazon DocumentDB](https://aws.amazon.com/documentdb/) 
+  [Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)](https://aws.amazon.com/eks/) 
+  [Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)](https://aws.amazon.com/msk/) 

 **Related videos:** 
+ [ Cloud operations at scale with AWS Managed Services](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCK8GCImWZw)