Amazon Revamps AWS Support Plans

Amazon has moved to improve the attractiveness of its cloud infrastructure offering, adding two new support plans, reducing support prices and increasing its responsiveness to trouble tickets.

The changes are designed to make AWS more attractive in the increasingly competitive cloud market, where Amazon Web Services (AWS) competes with offerings from Google, Salesforce.com and others.

New plans

A new Bronze support plan is aimed at individual developers and costs $49 (£32) per month, while the second new plan, Platinum, is aimed at enterprise customers, and is priced at 10 percent of AWS usage, with a minimum charge of $15,000 per month.

The Bronze plan gives developers access to the same web-based trouble ticket system used by the higher-end support plans, Amazon said. The main difference is response time, with Bronze users guaranteed a response within 12 business hours for normal tickets and one day for low-priority tickets.

Platinum clients will be assigned a named technical account manager, AWS ‘evangelist’ Jeff Barr (left) said in a blog post.

“Your tickets will receive ‘white-glove’ routing, jumping ahead of queued tickets entered at the other levels,” he wrote. “We’ll respond to critical tickets within 15 minutes and urgent tickets within an hour. Your TAM will work with you to conduct reviews of your AWS usage and performance on a regular basis, and they’ll also help to ensure that you are ready for new launches. They’ll even be available to participate in meetings as you request.”

Price reductions

Barr said Amazon has reduced usage-based pricing for Silver and Gold plans by 50 percent, while the minimum costs remain the same. The usage-based fee for the Silver plan is now 5 percent of usage instead of 10 percent, while for the Gold plan it has dropped from 20 percent to 10 percent.

“As we grow we have become more efficient,” Barr wrote.

He said AWS has reduced response times for support inquiries, with the maximum initial response time for normal-severity cases going from 24 business hours to 12 business hours. For low-severity cases it has dropped from 48 to 24 business hours, he said.

Amazon has been aggressive about developing and promoting its cloud services in recent months. In October the company offered a year’s free access to AWS, while in June the company launched AWS Import/Export for its Simple Storage Service to accelerate data transfers and migrations.

Amazon is looking to attract new businesses to AWS. Whilst private cloud deployments have increased, the wide-scale adoption of public cloud services by businesses is experiencing slower growth with organisations citing security concerns, among others.

Benjamin Grubin, Novell Director of Data Center Management, recently warned that too much enterprise IT was simply not ready to be moved outside the perimeter, outside to public clouds. “Public clouds were going to take some amount of time to be mature. They weren’t there yet,” he said.