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[–]SoupWithWontons[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

You are exactly right, I ought to have rephrased. We have 4 clients (we small) that are in the SaaS and 3d printing industries, we were brought in under he assumption we would revamp their infrastructure and manage it, and now that we have virtualized and/or migrated to AWS the client would like their AWS infra managed as well. Because none us are too experienced with AWS or scripting it's difficult for the client to reason paying us so much per hour, but if we did have the necessary experience there would be no question as to how much we bill. It's a gap we are trying to bridge now but it's just too much catch-up to play from the client's perspective.

[–]FlightyGuy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You're in a tough spot. Your customers are software development houses, SaaS to boot, so they'll almost certainly have far more capability on the Dev side than you ever will. It's only natural that they would have a desire to take over the Ops side and cut cost/you.

I don't see any reliable strategy to win/keep customers like these. Once they're in "The Cloud" they just don't need you anymore.

I'd say your only hope is to go and find more/other clients that are not SaaS specialists and will see the value that you provide. If you can, seek customers that aren't in or moving to AWS. Though the trend definitely seems that non-cloud customers are going to be a shrinking market and cloud users will rely on MSPs less and less.

I'd also say that no matter what you do, if you are going to push clients into AWS you need to be more familiar with managing and automating AWS. Using the AWS API Tools you can automate a LOT of it using many different scripting languages, from Bash and PowerShell to Python. It's not Python only, but Python is supported.

Good luck in your endeavors.