Cloud-managed service providers

Enterprise organizations often partner with Managed Service Providers for the operational management of their cloud environments. The trend has been ongoing with CSPs for quite some time, where the CSP manages the undifferentiated heavy lifting—which at first was the physical device management—but has not moved its way up the stack to manage virtual machine clusters for containers, or the management of HA-deployed databases.

 

These MSPs offer environment management along a wide spectrum of services, which give greater responsibility to the customer on one end, and almost all environment management to the MSP on the other end. MSPs typically offer these services by reducing tooling and framework options for builders. MSPs can require a specific deployment pipeline that needs to be used. They can force container orchestration tools (such as Kubernetes over Mesosphere), force all change requests to come through tools such as Zendesk, and manage identity and access...