"I expect partners to help their customers connect their existing IT service management (ITSM) systems, processes, and tools to AWS MS, assist with the on-boarding process, and manage the migration of applications. There are also opportunities for partners to use AWS MS to provide even better levels of support and service to customers," Barr said.

One partner, who did not want to be identified, said partners need more details from AWS on how the company ultimately sees partners building out their own offerings in the wake of the AWS Managed Services launch.

While a number of self-management tools are already on the market from Amazon's third-party technology partners, the monitoring piece that directly engages Amazon's engineers is a new factor that has the most potential to step on partners' toes, said the partner.

At the same time, the Amazon MS product is expensive, and it's undeniable that there is a real trend in the large enterprise toward in-sourcing management, the partner said.

In addition to monitoring and incident resolution, the service introduces features for implementing change control, provisioning of predefined stacks, patch management, security and access management, backup and restoration, and reporting.

Partners have been talking among themselves since AWS Managed Services was made available last Monday, and sentiment in Amazon's channel is divided, said Jamie Begin, CEO of RightBrain Networks, an AWS MSP partner based in Ann Arbor, Mich.

The impression "varies from doom-and-gloom, to frustration, to optimism for opportunity," Begin said, adding that he's mostly in the optimistic camp. 

RightBrain Networks was a launch partner for the AWS MSP program two years ago, Begin said, but the solution provider has always steadfastly rejected the notion of maintaining a network operations center.

"We recognized that the traditional MSP business model was mainly predicated on customers' desires to outsource pain onto a vendor. With public cloud, a lot of that pain is gone. It was inevitable that MSPs operating on AWS had to evolve or die," Begin said.