Amazon today announced premium for-pay support packages for some of its core infrastructure services. The Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and Simple Queue Service (SQS) each received the gold and silver level support treatment. The new support packages provide one-on-one support for AWS customers (24/7 via phone for gold level) as well as a guaranteed 1 hour response time and new client-side diagnostic tools.
Previously, Amazon’s web services support was conducted via web forums that were staffed by a dedicated support team. But as more and more companies are leaning on AWS for mission-critical applications, better support channels have become necessary. Amazon has been dinged in recent months by a couple of widely reported outages on their AWS service. If you’re running a mission-critical service on AWS and the only way to report an outage or problem is via a public support forum, that just doesn’t cut it.
“Increasingly, we see that organizations of all sizes are putting AWS to use in new, innovative, and mission-critical ways,” wrote Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post. “These organizations have told us that they need a more direct and more discreet way to request assistance and to report problems.”
The new services don’t come particularly cheap, costing $100 per month or $0.10 per dollar of total monthly usage for silver level (whichever is greater), or the greater of $400 per month or $0.10-$0.20 per dollar of total monthly usage for gold level.
Amazon is also beefing up support options for free customers with the release of the new AWS Service Hearth Dashboard that monitors the status of all AWS services. Amazon says that during outages, users can expect to see updates from the team every 15-30 minutes until things are fixed. Status updates can be accessed via the page or by RSS.
If Amazon really wants to upgrade their free support center, we suggest they build something off the excellent Get Satisfaction service, which just released an API yesterday. Some of Amazon’s web services already have a page on Get Satisfaction, but the company has yet to send over any official support reps.
