Choosing a managed AWS partner is one of those decisions that looks straightforward on paper but has compounding consequences. Pick well, and your team gets reliable infrastructure with predictable costs. Pick poorly, and you inherit someone else’s technical debt on top of your own.

After years of watching companies evaluate managed services providers — and sometimes cleaning up after bad choices — I have distilled the process into 10 questions that consistently separate strong partners from weak ones.

1. What Are Your SLA Specifics?

Every managed services provider advertises “24/7 support” and “99.9% uptime.” Those numbers mean nothing without specifics.

What good answers look like: A strong partner will break down SLAs by severity level. P1 incidents (production down) should have a response time under 15 minutes and a resolution target. They should clearly distinguish between response time (we acknowledged the issue) and resolution time (the issue is fixed). Ask about SLA credits — what happens when they miss the target? Vague answers like “we handle it on a case-by-case basis” are a red flag. Look for partners who publish their SLA metrics and have a track record they are willing to share.

Why it matters: An SLA without teeth is a marketing promise. You need enforceable commitments with financial consequences, because that is what aligns incentives.

2. Who Is on My Team?

Managed services is a people business. The tooling matters, but the humans behind it matter more.

What good answers look like: You should know exactly who your primary engineers are, their AWS certifications and experience level, and how the escalation chain works. Ask whether you get dedicated engineers or a shared pool. Neither model is inherently better, but you need to know which one you are buying. Dedicated engineers learn your stack deeply; shared pools provide broader coverage and resilience. The worst answer is “you’ll submit tickets to our portal” with no named humans attached.

Why it matters: When production is down at 2 AM, you need someone who already understands your architecture. Cold handoffs to unfamiliar on-call engineers waste critical minutes.

3. Walk Me Through Your Incident Response Process

Theory is easy. Process under pressure is what counts.

What good answers look like: A mature partner will describe a specific, rehearsed process: how incidents are detected (monitoring, alerts, customer report), how they are triaged and classified, who gets paged and when, how communication flows to your team during the incident, and what the post-incident review looks like. Ask for a redacted example of a real post-mortem. The quality of their post-mortems tells you everything about their engineering culture. Blameless, thorough, action-item-driven reviews indicate a team that learns and improves.

Why it matters: Incidents are inevitable. The difference between a minor disruption and a catastrophe is how fast and how well your partner responds.

4. How Do You Approach Cost Optimization?

AWS cost management is a discipline, not a one-time exercise.

What good answers look like: A good partner will describe an ongoing process: regular reviews of Reserved Instance and Savings Plans coverage, right-sizing recommendations based on actual utilization data, identification of idle resources, architecture-level optimizations (not just instance swaps), and storage lifecycle management. They should be able to cite specific savings percentages they have achieved for comparable clients. Be wary of partners who only mention reserved instances — that is the easy part. The real value comes from architecture-level recommendations like replacing always-on NAT Gateways with VPC endpoints or consolidating underutilized RDS instances.

Why it matters: Most companies overspend on AWS by 20-35%. A good managed partner should pay for themselves through cost savings alone.

5. What Compliance Frameworks Do You Support?

If you operate in a regulated industry, compliance support is not optional.

What good answers look like: The partner should name specific frameworks they have experience with — SOC 2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001, GDPR — and describe what support looks like in practice. That means automated compliance checks, evidence collection for audits, drift detection and remediation, and help translating framework requirements into AWS controls. Ask whether they have helped clients pass audits, not just prepare for them. There is a significant difference between “we configure GuardDuty” and “we manage the full compliance lifecycle including evidence packages for your auditor.”

Why it matters: Compliance failures have real financial and legal consequences. Your managed partner needs to be a compliance ally, not just an infrastructure operator.

6. What Tooling and Platforms Do You Use?

The tools a partner uses reveal their operational maturity.

What good answers look like: Expect a clear stack: infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi), monitoring and observability (CloudWatch, Datadog, Grafana), incident management (PagerDuty, Opsgenie), configuration management, and a client-facing dashboard or portal. Ask whether you get access to these tools and visibility into what they see. Transparency matters. A partner who gives you read access to their monitoring dashboards has nothing to hide. A partner who sends you a monthly PDF report might be hiding that they are doing very little between reports.

Why it matters: You are trusting this partner with your production infrastructure. Full visibility into their tooling and processes is table stakes.

7. How Do You Communicate Day-to-Day?

Communication breakdowns are the number one complaint companies have about outsourced operations.

What good answers look like: The partner should describe specific communication channels and cadences: a shared Slack channel (or Teams) for real-time communication, weekly or biweekly sync calls, monthly business reviews with metrics, and a ticketing system for tracking work. Ask about response times for non-urgent requests. If the answer is “submit a ticket and we’ll get to it,” that is not a partnership — that is a help desk. The best partners feel like an extension of your team, not an external vendor.

Why it matters: You will interact with this partner daily. If communication is clunky, everything else suffers.

8. What Does Onboarding Look Like?

The first 30-60 days set the tone for the entire relationship.

What good answers look like: A structured onboarding process should include: a thorough discovery phase where they audit your current environment, documentation of your architecture and runbooks, establishment of monitoring and alerting baselines, knowledge transfer sessions with your team, and a 30/60/90-day plan with specific milestones. Ask how long onboarding takes and what they need from you. A partner who says they can onboard you in a week is either cutting corners or does not understand the complexity of production AWS environments. Two to four weeks is realistic for a medium-complexity setup.

Why it matters: A rushed onboarding leads to blind spots. Blind spots lead to incidents. A thorough onboarding is an investment in long-term stability.

9. What Is the Exit Strategy?

This is the question most companies forget to ask, and the one that matters most if things go wrong.

What good answers look like: A confident partner will describe exactly what happens if you decide to leave: full documentation handover, knowledge transfer to your incoming team or new partner, a transition period (typically 30-60 days), and no proprietary lock-in on infrastructure. Ask specifically: do they use proprietary tooling that only they can manage? If they built custom automation, do you own the code? Can you take your Terraform state and modules with you? The best partners build your infrastructure in a way that is fully portable.

Why it matters: Vendor lock-in is a real risk with managed services. A partner who makes it easy to leave is a partner confident enough in their value that they do not need to trap you.

10. Can You Provide References in My Industry?

Past performance is the strongest predictor of future results.

What good answers look like: The partner should be able to connect you with current or recent clients in a similar industry, of similar scale, with similar requirements. Not just a logo on their website, but an actual conversation with a real human who can speak to the experience. Ask the reference: What went wrong and how did the partner handle it? That is the most revealing question you can ask. Every engagement has problems. What matters is how they were resolved. If the partner cannot provide relevant references, that is a significant concern.

Why it matters: Marketing materials and sales presentations are carefully curated. References give you the unfiltered reality.

Putting It All Together

No partner will score perfectly on all 10 questions. What you are looking for is a pattern: transparency, specificity, and confidence. Partners who give vague answers are either hiding something or have not built the operational maturity you need.

Weight the questions based on your priorities. If compliance is critical, questions 5 and 8 matter most. If you have been burned by a previous partner, prioritize questions 7 and 9. If cost is the primary driver, question 4 and the references in question 10 will tell you the most.

The right managed AWS partner is a force multiplier for your engineering team. The wrong one is an expensive distraction. Take the time to ask the hard questions upfront.

Remangu provides managed AWS operations for SaaS companies, fintech, and iGaming platforms. If you are evaluating partners and want to see how we answer these 10 questions, get in touch.

How to Choose a Managed AWS Partner: 10 Questions to Ask