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Daya Shankar
Daya Shankar

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Managed Cloud Infrastructure: What’s Included, What’s Not, and Why It Matters

Managed cloud infrastructure means your provider runs day-2 ops for defined layers patching, monitoring, backups, and incident response while you still own identities, data, application config, and misconfig risk. 

Read the responsibility matrix and SLA, then script runbooks and restore tests around the boundary. If the scope is vague, outages drag on. 

“Managed” is a scope boundary

If you can’t point to the boundary in writing, you don’t have a managed service.

Cloud providers frame this as shared responsibility: the provider secures the underlying cloud platform; you secure what you deploy and configure on top of it. 

What’s included in managed cloud infrastructure

These are the tasks you’re paying to stop doing by hand.

1) Uptime for provider-owned components

The provider should publish an SLA for the layer they run (control plane, storage service, DR service). Don’t assume “whole stack” uptime unless the SLA says so. 

2) Patching for the managed layer

Providers typically patch what they own (platform, managed control planes, managed service runtimes). Your OS, node pools, and app dependencies may still be yours unless the contract states otherwise. 

3) Monitoring + alerting for their layer

A real managed offering ships:

  • platform metrics and health checks
  • alert routing + escalation
  • a support boundary that says what they touch and what they don’t 

4) Backup/DR primitives

You usually get replication and failover mechanics. You still sharpie in app consistency, restore validation, and recovery drills. 

5) Change management on their layer

Expect documented maintenance windows, version policy, and an upgrade path for provider-owned components. Managed Kubernetes control planes are common cases. 

What’s not included

This is where most “managed” expectations break.

1) Identity and access configuration

You own identities and access policy across cloud models. If IAM is wrong, “managed” won’t save you. 

2) Your data and how it’s protected

Providers give encryption features. You choose classification, key custody, access patterns, and retention. 

3) Your network intent

Providers run the physical network. You still configure routes, firewall rules, private connectivity, and segmentation. Misconfig here still drops prod. 

4) Your application behavior

Providers keep the platform alive. They won’t fix your deployment config, bad queries, or memory leaks.

5) Restore testing (often missed)

Some DR offerings explicitly don’t include routine test drills as a managed feature. If you don’t test restores, you don’t have recovery just storage. 

The responsibility matrix you should put in the contract

This is the table you paste into the SOW and grep during incidents.

Layer

Provider owns (typical)

You own (typical)

Datacenter + hardware

power, racks, physical security

nothing

Virtualization

host/hypervisor baseline

guest OS if you run VMs 

Managed Kubernetes control plane

API server/etcd/control-plane upgrades

RBAC, admission, policies, namespaces, workloads 

Worker nodes

varies by service tier

node OS patching, runtime, add-ons (unless explicitly managed) 

Backups/DR engine

replication + orchestration

restore tests, app consistency, recovery validation 

Security

“of the cloud” controls

“in the cloud” configuration, identities, data 

Why it matters

This is incident math, not procurement fluff.

Faster incident routing

If the boundary is clear, you don’t spend 45 minutes arguing about whose problem it is. You open the right ticket and move on.

Cleaner RTO/RPO planning

Providers can offer targets like <15 min RTO and <5 min RPO for DR, but your app still needs to restore validation and cutover steps you can execute under stress. 

Fewer “surprise” costs

Managed services reduce ops toil. They don’t remove engineering work caused by fragile app design or bad change control.

What this looks like with AceCloud.ai

This is how to map “managed” scope to actual service pages and enforceable statements.

  • Managed Kubernetes Control Plane: states HA operation and a 99.99% uptime SLA for production workloads. Treat that as “provider owns the control plane” in your RACI. 
  • Cloud uptime SLA statement: AceCloud also publishes a 99.99% uptime claim with an explicit downtime math note (“52 minutes per year”). Use that language in your SOW if it matches your scope. 
  • Disaster Recovery service: documents DR orchestration and publishes RTO/RPO claims (including the <15/<5 figures on a replication page). Also calls out limitations like DR test capabilities. Put both the capability and the limitation in your runbook. 
  • Fully managed private cloud: if your requirement is isolation + “someone else runs the platform,” this is the managed-infra pattern without public multi-tenant tradeoffs. 

Buying checklist

Ask these questions. Get the answers in writing.

  1. What is the SLA, and which component? (control plane vs nodes vs storage vs network) 
  2. Who patches what? (control plane, node OS, CNI, ingress, runtime) 
  3. What is the support boundary? (what’s excluded, what voids support, what is “best effort”) 
  4. How do backups and restores work? (RTO/RPO, restore steps, restore testing cadence) 
  5. How do upgrades work? (maintenance windows, rollback, version policy) 

Conclusion

Managed cloud infrastructure works when the boundary is explicit. You outsource day-2 ops for the layers the provider controls control plane upkeep, platform patching, monitoring, and DR mechanics. You still own identities, data protection choices, network intent, and workload config. Put the RACI in the contract, then script restores and incident runbooks around it.

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