AWS Consulting Service
AWS Managed Services
24/7 monitoring, SLA-backed incident response, and proactive optimization staffed by senior AWS engineers who know your environment, not a rotating helpdesk.
What are AWS managed services?
Senior on-call coverage without the headcount cost.
AWS managed services from Forged Concepts provide ongoing monitoring, incident response, patch management, and proactive optimization for your AWS environment staffed by senior engineers, not outsourced triage. The engagement covers CloudWatch, Datadog, or Grafana observability with defined alerting thresholds; a documented on-call rotation with SLA-backed response times (P1: 1 hour, P2: 4 hours, P3: next business day); quarterly architecture reviews; and proactive cost and security recommendations. Unlike a one-time consulting engagement, managed services is a retainer relationship: the same senior engineers who know your stack handle your infrastructure 24/7. No rotating support queue, no first-tier triage reading from a decision tree, no junior engineers learning on your account. When your ECS service starts crashing at 2 AM, the engineer who picks up the page has already read your logs, knows your service boundaries, and has the access and context to fix the problem, not just document it. You get a senior cloud team without the $150,000–$200,000 annual headcount cost.
1 hr
P1 incident response SLA
24/7
Monitoring coverage, every day
$150K+
Annual cost of a single senior AWS hire
Zero
Rotating helpdesk same engineers, month to month
What we deliver
Everything your production environment needs to stay up.
- 24/7 monitoring (CloudWatch / Datadog / Grafana / X-Ray) configured to your environment's actual baseline, not generic out-of-the-box thresholds that fire false positives at 2 AM.
- SLA-backed incident response (P1: 1hr / P2: 4hr / P3: next-day) written into the retainer agreement, not a marketing promise. An engineer actively working the issue, not just acknowledging receipt.
- Documented runbooks for every critical service committed to your repository, updated after every significant incident, and reviewed quarterly.
- OS, dependency, and security patching across EC2 and ECS host fleets, RDS engine upgrades, and dependency CVE reviews, all scheduled during low-traffic windows with rollback steps documented before any change executes.
- Proactive optimization (cost, performance, reliability): capacity reviews before traffic spikes, architecture recommendations before problems become incidents.
- Quarterly architecture and reliability reviews cost posture, reliability gaps, security findings, and upcoming AWS changes that affect your environment.
- Dedicated Slack / Teams channel with named engineers who know your environment, not a rotating support queue.
How we work
From onboarding to ongoing operations.
Onboarding: instrument monitoring, document runbooks, establish escalation paths
We audit your current environment, configure observability tooling to your baseline traffic patterns, write runbooks for every known incident type, and establish on-call escalation paths in PagerDuty or OpsGenie typically completed within the first two weeks.
Baseline: establish health baselines and alert thresholds
We tune alert sensitivity to your actual traffic patterns to eliminate false positives. CPU alarms, RDS connection limits, ALB 5xx rates, ECS task failure thresholds all calibrated to what normal looks like for your environment.
Ongoing operations: monitor, respond, optimize
The same senior engineers handle your environment month to month: monitoring dashboards, on-call rotations, incident response, patching cycles, and proactive reliability recommendations with no rotating helpdesk.
Quarterly reviews: architecture, cost, and reliability analysis
Every quarter we deliver a written review covering cost trends and optimization recommendations, reliability assessment, security posture findings, and a prioritized roadmap of improvements by impact and effort.
The cost comparison
Senior on-call without the headcount.
Hiring a senior AWS engineer
- $150,000–$200,000/yr salary
- Benefits, equity, recruiting overhead
- 2–4 month recruiting cycle
- Single point of failure: one person
- PTO gaps and coverage issues
- 3 months to ramp on your environment
Forged Concepts managed services
- Fraction of a full-time headcount cost
- Team of senior engineers, no single point of failure
- Immediate coverage no recruiting cycle
- Documented runbooks for every incident type
- On-call rotation with SLA-backed response
- Institutional knowledge across multiple clients
Who this is for
Four situations where managed services makes sense.
Paged outside business hours
Your engineers are getting infrastructure pages at 2 AM with no documented runbooks and no consistent response process.
Single-engineer bus factor
One person owns production infrastructure. When they take PTO or leave your team improvises.
Can't justify a $150K–$200K hire
A full-time senior AWS engineer costs that in salary alone, plus benefits, recruiting time, and coverage gaps. A retainer gives you a team.
Compliance needs documented response
HIPAA and SOC 2 auditors ask for incident response procedures, monitoring evidence, and patch management records. We produce all of it.
FAQ
Common questions about AWS managed services.
What is the difference between AWS managed services and hiring an in-house cloud engineer?
A senior AWS engineer costs $150,000–$200,000 per year in salary plus benefits, equity, and recruiting overhead. You also get single coverage one person who takes vacations, gets sick, and can leave. AWS managed services from Forged Concepts provide a team with documented runbooks, on-call rotation, and senior-level expertise at a fraction of the cost. You also get the institutional knowledge of a team that has handled similar incidents across multiple clients.
What is your incident response SLA?
P1 (production down, complete outage): 1-hour response. P2 (degraded performance, partial outage): 4-hour response. P3 (non-critical issues, cosmetic problems): next business day. Response means an engineer is actively working the issue, not just acknowledging receipt.
What monitoring tools do you use?
Forged Concepts implements CloudWatch for native AWS metrics and logs, Datadog for teams that need APM and cross-service tracing, Grafana with Prometheus for open-source-first environments, and PagerDuty for on-call alerting and escalation. The specific stack is selected based on your environment and team preferences.
What is a runbook?
A runbook is a documented set of steps for responding to a specific incident type "RDS CPU at 95%: check slow query log, identify top queries, optimize or add read replica." Runbooks let any on-call engineer respond correctly without tribal knowledge. Forged Concepts creates and maintains runbooks for every critical service in your environment.
Do you handle on-call for our engineering team?
Yes. Forged Concepts can serve as the primary on-call for infrastructure and AWS-layer incidents, escalating to your engineering team only when an application-layer fix is needed. This removes infrastructure pages from your engineers' on-call rotations.
What does proactive optimization include?
Proactive optimization covers: identifying over-provisioned resources before they appear on your AWS bill, flagging security misconfigurations before they become incidents, recommending Savings Plans or Reserved Instances as your usage patterns stabilize, and identifying reliability gaps (single-AZ resources, missing backups) before they cause outages.
What is an SRE?
SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) is the discipline of applying software engineering practices to operations problems: error budgets, SLOs (Service Level Objectives), toil reduction, and reliability as a code-first concern. Forged Concepts applies SRE principles to managed service engagements: defining SLOs before implementing alerting, measuring toil to justify automation, and treating runbooks as code.
What is included in a quarterly architecture review?
Quarterly reviews cover: AWS cost trend analysis and optimization recommendations; reliability assessment (single points of failure, backup coverage, DR readiness); security posture review (IAM policy drift, GuardDuty findings, unpatched resources); and a roadmap of recommended improvements prioritized by impact and effort.
Ready when you are
Need senior AWS expertise without building a full internal team?
Forged Concepts helps growing companies improve AWS performance, control cloud costs, modernize infrastructure, and build with confidence. If your team needs stronger cloud architecture, better operations, or a clearer path forward on AWS, let's talk.