Managed Service
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A managed service is when the cloud provider runs the thing for you — you don't patch it, back it up, or fix it when it crashes. They just give you the knob to turn and handle everything behind the scenes. Managed Postgres from RDS, managed Kubernetes from EKS, managed Redis from ElastiCache.
Real Talk
A managed service is a cloud offering where the provider handles operational tasks — provisioning, patching, backups, monitoring, scaling, and failure recovery. Customers configure and use the service without managing underlying infrastructure. Trade-off: less control, higher cost, but dramatically reduced operational overhead.
When You'll Hear This
"We use managed Postgres so we don't have to deal with database maintenance." / "Managed services cost more per unit but save engineering time."
Related Terms
BaaS (Backend as a Service)
BaaS is when someone provides you a ready-made backend so you can build your frontend without writing any server code.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing means using computers that live in someone else's giant warehouse instead of your own machine.
EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)
EKS is managed Kubernetes on AWS. Kubernetes is the industry-standard system for orchestrating containers, but setting it up yourself is famously painful.
PaaS (Platform as a Service)
PaaS is when someone else handles the boring server stuff (OS, security patches, networking) and you just throw your code at it.
RDS (Relational Database Service)
RDS is Amazon's managed database service.
Self-Hosted
Self-hosted means you run the software on your own servers instead of using someone else's managed cloud version.