Amazon offers cut-price support to make sure your Cloud stays up

Posted by in Cloud storage

Cloud gorilla Amazon Web Services has revamped its technical support services for its various heavenly compute and storage infrastructure while even as tweaking the packaging of these support services.

Tech support is something that AWS customers and competitors alike grouse about, and internal IT staff that experience control of physical servers in addition to the technical chops to babysit the hardware and software prefer to boost their job security by declaring that there’s no way the AWS support people can do pretty much as good a role supporting cloudy infrastructure in comparison to internal techies minding internal iron.

With the pricetag cuts announced by Amazon today, that argument gets that much harder to make, although it seems to be true in lots of cases. In other cases, including with startups with out a IT admin staff and no want to have one, it doesn’t matter what Amazon is charging for tech support and in spite of how poor it would be by comparison to a top-notch internal staff, they do not have another practical option instead of to depend upon a hoster or cloud provider and to pay for tech support, so the comparison is moot.

Under the brand new support plans , all customers who join AWS services are automatically signed up for basic support, which was expanded with 24×7 access to customer support (by either email or phone) for billing and account issues in addition to tech support when virty systems are misbehaving. The fundamental support service gives customers best practices guides and technical FAQs in addition to access to AWS Developer Forums, which Amazon’s engineers moderate, and the AWS Service Health Dashboard . This basic support tier is free.

What was called the bronze support level on AWS is referred to now as developer support, and it costs $49 a month and has all of the goodies inside the basic support level after which adds on one-on-one support for AWS-related questions (meaning, you cannot expect Amazon to produce tech support to your software stack running atop the custom Xen hyprvisor that Amazon uses as a container). You get a single named contact at your organization which may contact Amazon for support issues, who you may contact by email. Developer support also features a minimum 12-hour response time for tech support cases, and access to the technical support engineers via email for help configuring, operating, and maintaining core AWS services and contours.

The business support tier on AWS, formerly referred to as gold level support, takes the elemental and developer tiers, but shrinks the tech support response time all the way down to one hour and offers you phone access to the engineers in addition to chat on top of the developer-grade email access. In line with a blog post by Jeff Barr, evangelist on the AWS unit, the chat service is contemporary, however the neat new feature is a capacity planning tool called AWS Trusted Advisor (it’s not somebody, but a program) that watches all your infrastructure and services in addition to what’s going on around the entirety of the AWS data centers and makes suggestions as to where that you may lower your expenses, improve performance, or tighten security.

With business support, Amazon also is providing support for the commonest third-party software running on AWS infrastructure. The list of software that Amazon can help you you with includes:

  • Operating Systems: Amazon Linux, Canonical Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Microsoft Server 2003 & 2008 R2
  • Web servers: Apache, Microsoft IIS
  • Databases: Oracle MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server
  • Disk Management: LVM and RAID
  • VPN Connectivity: OpenVPN and RRAS
  • Email: Sendmail and Postfix
  • File Transfer: FTP
  • Development and Management: Amazon SDK

Before the support rejiggering, the gold-level support cost $400 per thirty days plus a different percentage in line with your total monthly AWS bill that tiers in one of these way that it gets smaller and smaller (but still rises) as you consume more AWS resources. With the hot plan, the business support level that replaces the gold tier has a base price of $100 per thirty days, and Amazon is adding a lower tier on the high-end when customers spend greater than $250,000 a month. The way in which the tiering works is like this: You begin by paying whichever is bigger: either $100 or 10 per cent of your monthly AWS bill whether it is $10,000 or under. Then, between $10,001 and $80,000, you add on 7 per cent of that; for spending of between $80,001 and $250,000, you add 5 per cent of that incremental spending; and now for any spending above $250,000, you add on 3 per cent of that. So, in case you spend $85,000 a month on AWS purchases, as an example, you’re going to run up a $6,150 bill in the event you choose business-level support.

Amazon has killed off its old platinum support tier and replaced it with enterprise support. With the enterprise level, you get everything in business class, but you get 15-minute response time on critical issues rather than one hour, plus a dedicated technical account manager that’s intimate along with your particular AWS setup and the software stack that runs on it. You furthermore may get “white-glove” case routing, which gets your tech support issues straight to the precise Amazon engineers rather than facing the standard channels. Amazon also tosses in management business reviews, which looks at how you’ve architected your applications and virtual systems and helps you as you launch new services and products that place confidence in AWS.

The enterprise pricing is tiered, similar to business-class support, however the numbers are all larger. Within the base tier, you pay either $15,000 a month or 10 per cent of your monthly AWS bill whether it is $150,000 or under – whichever is bigger. The following tier is for those who spend between $150,001 and $500,000, you add on 7 per cent of that onto the bill. The following tier up is for AWS capacity that costs between $500,001 and $1m, on that you add 5 per cent of that incremental spending. And for the general tier, you add 3 per cent of any spending above $1m. So let’s consider you spend $1.2m a month on AWS; the enterprise support bill will be $70,500. Under the platinum service, there has been only a flat 10 per cent usage fee on top of the bottom $15,000 fee. So this new plan will lower the bill for larger consumers of AWS resources.

You can change from one support level to a different at any time, or cancel your support at any time, that is what makes this utility computing. ®

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