Amazon Web Services (AWS) is like an F-16 Fighting Falcon.  In the right hands it can be nimble, graceful, and extremely powerful.  Not to mention that it often destroys other cloud platforms in a dogfight…  However, an important part of the analogy is the understanding that the AWS fighter plane comes in a thousand pieces with “some assembly required.”

Managed AWS services attempt to take care of some of this assembly for you.  Most AWS management partners and platforms will cover the basic features and customize them for your architecture.  For example, if you’re moving from an in-house datacenter to the cloud, an AWS management service will take the configuration of your infrastructure and translate that into AWS features and services. 

Hardware like CPU and RAM become services like Elastic Compute (EC2).  Switch and router configurations become networking services like Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).  Load-balancers become elastic (ELB).  Storage …