# 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:** Inventory your workload for services and components. 

1. **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:     
[\[See the AWS documentation website for more details\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/2024-06-27/framework/sus_sus_hardware_a4.html)

1. **Create a migration plan:** 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. **Perform tests** Test the service before migrating to the managed service. 

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

1. **Monitor and adjust:** 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:** 
+ [AWS re:Invent 2021 - Cloud operations at scale with AWS Managed Services](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCK8GCImWZw)
+ [AWS re:Invent 2023 - Best practices for operating on AWS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBKq2JXWsS4)