Most teams don’t actually debate cloud vs. no cloud anymore. The real question comes later. Once you’re on Google Cloud, who runs it day to day? Your own engineers, or a partner?
It’s rarely an all-or-nothing choice. You can keep full control and bring in help only for the parts that are consuming your time, or hand over the whole operation so your team can focus on the product. This post covers what each option actually costs you, what “managed” really includes, and how to tell which one fits where you are right now.
Self-managing has a cost too. It just shows up as your team’s time instead of a monthly invoice. A pattern we see often is a CTO and one other person being responsible for the infrastructure, on top of their actual jobs. Basic alerting is in place, but when something breaks at two in the morning, nobody’s watching closely enough to react fast. There’s no dedicated DevOps or SRE role, so architecture reviews and cost checks keep getting pushed to the next quarter.
That’s not a sign the team is doing something wrong. The infrastructure has just grown past what ad hoc coverage can handle, and the engineers who should be building the product end up spending their time on infrastructure maintenance instead.
Managed services gets used loosely, so here’s what it actually means, at Revolgy and generally in the industry.
Incident Management is the reactive half: 24/7/365 monitoring and alerting, break/fix support when something goes wrong, and root cause analysis afterward so the same thing doesn’t happen twice.
Operations Management is the proactive half: patching and upgrades, configuration changes (IAM, networking, resource sizing), keeping your infrastructure-as-code and tooling current, and regular architecture reviews.
In practice, this works as a set of tiers rather than one fixed package, from a lighter safety-net level for teams that already have internal expertise, up to full ownership of your cloud operations.
You don’t have to pick the top tier to get value. Plenty of teams start with incident response only and add operations management once they see what it frees up. See our cloud operations services page for the full tier breakdown.
Here are the response times you should expect from any partner: critical production issues get a first response within 15 minutes, high-severity issues within 2 hours, normal issues within 8 business hours, and low-priority requests within 24 business hours.
This coverage is 24/7/365, including weekends and holidays.
If you want a reference point, Google and AWS both publish their own support plans and support plan pricing directly, so you can compare response times and cost for yourself.
Here is a simplified view of the managed services. The exact scope depends on the tier and your setup.
Teams often hesitate to bring in a managed services partner because they’re afraid of losing visibility the moment someone else takes over. In practice, onboarding is a short, defined period that typically takes about a month.
During that time, the provider looks at your data and adjusts alert thresholds so you’re not getting flooded with unnecessary alerts. Your team shares runbooks and known issues, and both sides set up communication channels (usually Slack) and connect monitoring tools. After that, it moves into “business as usual,” and your team keeps the final say on incident resolution throughout.
A few patterns tend to show up right before a team decides to bring in help:
If you tick two or more, it’s worth at least pricing out what managed support would look like.
Purple Next, a fintech, moved from manually managed infrastructure to a Kubernetes setup with ongoing managed operations, and hit their 99.9% uptime requirement in the process. Find out more here.
Upheal, a mental health platform running on AWS, brought in managed infrastructure and incident management rather than building that function in-house. Read more about it here.
We’ve also done this kind of work for companies like GoOut, a ticketing platform that wanted more reliable infrastructure and better access to its own data. We set up 24/7 monitoring and incident response on Google Cloud for them, alongside a BigQuery data platform that gives every team self-service reporting in real time. Details here.
We won’t publish exact numbers here because pricing depends on your monthly cloud spend and which tier you need, but the model is straightforward. Cost scales with the size of your infrastructure, not a flat fee regardless of workload.
Incident Management can be bought on its own. Operations Management is sold alongside it, not instead of it, since proactive work depends on the monitoring and response layer already being in place. If you want a number specific to your setup, that’s a quick conversation rather than a long sales process. Let us know if you want our help.
Does going with managed services mean losing control of our infrastructure?
No. You keep ownership and final say on incident resolution. A managed partner does the day-to-day work, not the decision-making. Access and reporting stay visible to you throughout.
Can we start with just incident response and add operations management later?
Yes. Incident Management works as a standalone service. Operations Management builds on top of it once you’re ready for proactive support as well.
What actually changes during an outage if we’re managed instead of self-managed?
With self-managed infrastructure, someone on your team has to notice, diagnose, and fix the problem whenever it happens. With managed services, that’s covered 24/7 by people already monitoring your setup, following the SLA response times above.
Do we need to migrate anything to add managed services, or can this start on our current setup?
It can start on your current setup. There’s an onboarding period to get monitoring and access configured, but that doesn’t require moving or rebuilding anything first.