"Do it yourself" or "let others do it for you" - this is one of the first & most critical decision that any organisation will make while designing infrastructure on cloud. Although it seems trivial to ask this, especially when you are cloud, where managed service seem to be the de facto option.
There are genuine concerns over availability, privacy, security and cost for which many organisations especially those having serious data compliance requirement opt to go with self managed services options.
This blog aims at providing a first hand analysis of pros and cons involved in managed and self managed options. This will help you take an objective approach when you setup a third party software as service next time on cloud.
From servers to serverless , datacenters to cloud, modern infrastructure has evolved to offer everything as services, managed & maintained by providers. Be it infrastructure or platform or software , we are really spoilt for managed services options. However, as the saying goes:
"With great power comes greater responsibility"
Fear of handing over management control to some third party, concerns over privacy & confidentiality of data and intellectual property forces us to
Here in this blog I will try to clear those clouds of dilemma to make it easier for to choose between provider managed or self managed options of services.
Managed Services v/s Self Managed Services
Managed Services | Self Managed Services | |
Pros |
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Cons |
Complex Pricing Model
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Let's take a deeper look at these pros and cons in both types of services and also find out how to address the potential risks & concerns. First up
Managed Services:
To be honest, I am personally biased towards managed services on cloud. I believe a cloud provider's potential can only be fully utilised once we start using its managed services. Biggest advantage in my view is 24/7 support and maintenance that comes with continuous health, uptime and performance monitoring.
These services can be configured automatically scale on demand based on the performance monitoring data.
Not to mention various offers and discounts that providers give you when all their services are part of the account.
However, there are some risks involved in these as mentioned in the comparison table above.
Sometime some managed services might have some hidden service charges, these are mostly cases where cloud providers(like GCP) do not host the software themselves instead partner with third parties to manage it for them. So it is important to discuss the pricing model in detail with your cloud vendor and get a quotation only when the pricing is clear.
Second concern which some organisations might have with managed services is lack of ownership. You wont be able to access the management systems of these services, you might have experience these in services like K8s or RDS.
This might raise some eyebrows of regulators during a compliance audit as you wont be able to share who all have access to your infrastructure.
Sometimes cloud providers would not disclose upfront if they are sharing the information with anyone else. Most of their Non Disclosure Agreement(NDA) speak about how customers should not exploit cloud providers IP, however they fail to include vice versa.
In one of my fintech projects we had to add this as a separate agreement with that that they wont share our data and information without asking us.
Last but not least is Vendor lock -in issue. Well its a given that managed services are not portable across clouds. For instance, you cannot move a managed k8s cluster from AWS to GCP. In scenarios like this I recommend to migrate the data instead of the systems. However this is one less of a concern for regions with availability of cloud providers and hopefully there is less movement or migration across clouds.
Let's look at self managed service model.
Self Managed Services
It's important to note that there are still some areas like monitoring & logging, security, data engineering where certain softwares might not be available as managed cloud services.
Although cloud providers have their own version of monitoring and logging tools but they are still not enough compared to the much advanced and established licenses softwares. In such cases you will have no other option than installing that software on compute instances and manage it yourself.
One of the biggest reason why organisations still opt for self managed designs is data privacy and confidentiality. Your IP is safely stored within systems owned, managed and maintained by you. So that is one less of a headache, one item checked for regulatory audits.
Self managed services are also vendor agnostic and hence easily portable across cloud hosts, give it a +1 for cloud migrations.
However, these come with its own set of challenges such as
Support and maintenance overhead. It might become a nightmare of you don't have enough in house capability to manage them.
The self managed services will not automatically scale out when the resource utilisation crosses threshold. Someone will need to scale it by a new deployment.
Upgrades and downgrades become challenging with self managed model as it will need downtime for such activity.
As you can see both service models have their own shared of positives and negatives.
The challenges with managed services might seem intense, but can be addressed and mitigated easily with some upfront due diligence.
However with challenges with self managed services can be solved with completely with managed services provided the cloud provider complies with all the regulatory guidelines.
So here is the final verdict on Managed v/s Self Managed Services
Managed Services with enterprise subscription from security & compliance ready providers.
Although prices might seem higher, with prepaid billing it becomes same as self managed systems.
As you can see, both service categories have their own share of pros and cons, so you have to select which is a priority for your business.
Some businesses prefer to choose self managed model for data localisation, privacy and security regulations. They are basically worried about IP security on systems managed by someone else.
In a such case, you can actually discuss with the cloud provider and get them clarify their compliance readiness in an agreement. With a little due diligence managed services are recommended for higher benefits like High Availability, Autoscaling, Support & Maintenance.
If you like this article, I am sure you will find 10-Factor Infrastructure even more useful. It compiles all these tried and tested methodologies, design patterns & best practices into a complete framework for building secure, scalable and resilient modern infrastructure.
Don’t let your best-selling product suffer due to an unstable, vulnerable & mutable infrastructure.
Thanks & Regards
Kamalika Majumder
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