Managed Service Selection

Managed services reduce operational burden when their constraints match the workload. They create risk when teams adopt them without ownership, exit paths, or provider-specific failure understanding.

Selection questions

Before choosing a managed service, answer:

• What operational work does this remove?
• What new limits, quotas, and failure modes appear?
• What data residency, retention, and compliance requirements apply?
• How is access controlled and audited?
• How are backups, restore, and exports handled?
• What is the cost model at expected and burst traffic?
• What is the migration or exit path?

Prefer managed when

• The service is undifferentiated infrastructure.
• The provider offers strong reliability and compliance posture.
• The team lacks capacity to operate the equivalent system well.
• Operational toil would distract from product delivery.
• Portability is less important than speed and reliability.

Be cautious when

• Provider-specific features become core business logic.
• Data export or migration is slow, expensive, or incomplete.
• Limits are close to expected growth.
• Observability is weaker than self-managed alternatives.
• Pricing is hard to predict or explain.

Review checklist

Documentation requirements

Record the selected service, rejected alternatives, operational owners, known limits, backup and restore behavior, cost assumptions, and review triggers in an architecture decision record.