What Are Managed Services? " Managed services " is an offering of many businesses that provide Internet services. In the past couple of years, it's a term I've used to describe what I offer in my Blackfly Solutions Drupal and CiviCRM hosting business . You may not know whether you would want such a thing, since it's a very badly named thing. This post will try and give a reason for why managed services is a thing at all, how it can be a good thing, and why it may be what you want. Here's the short version: managed services exist to fill the gap between what machine automation can reasonably provide and what people actually want. In a subsequent post, I'll explain how containers can be a useful tool for delivering managed services. What Do You Mean by Services? A "service" in the "managed services" context is the consumer-oriented one, i.e. something a consumer wants that they get from a service provider. For example: "hosting for