Amazon Expands Cloud Computing Support, Drops Prices

Top 10 Cloud Stories Of 2010

In a bid to get more customers to sign up for technical support, Amazon Web Services has lowered its pricing on two existing plans and is offering a new high end and low end plan to appeal to a broader range of users.

Premium Platinum support, for example, offers enterprises a named technical account manager and 15-minute response times on critical requests. AWS previous highest level of support was Premium Gold, which offered one-hour response times and no named account manager.

Its other existing option was Premium Silver, which offered four-hour response times but only during the business day, defined as 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the customer’s time zone. The Platinum and Gold plans, on the other hand, are around the clock, 365 days a year.

“Companies, regardless of size, are running more production systems in EC2 -- such as the federal government’s Treasury Department, NASA, NetFlix, Sony, the New York Times. Some are asking very directly that we have this type of (Platinum) service,” said Adam Selipsky, VP of Amazon Web Services, in an interview.

With Platinum level service, the technical account manager will have “broad AWS experience, become knowledgeable about a customer’s use case... and serve as a primary point of contact.” Giving customers names of individuals in the AWS organization is one way of reassuring those who’ve come to rely on EC2 infrastructure and services that AWS will function in a more direct and less distant manner. Some Amazon customers, such as pioneer cloud user Pfizer, have sought both stronger technical support and stiffer penalties in AWS service level agreements.

AWS also added a new Bronze level of support aimed primarily at developers, which provides technical support the same business day. Pricing for Bronze is $49 a month, with no limit on the number of requests the customer may initiate.

Offering new high and low end technical support services is Amazon’s way of “trying to broaden the offerings and satisfy the needs of all customer segments,” Selipsky said. Asked how many customers currently pay for Silver or Gold support, Selipsky declined to disclose a figure. “Hundreds of thousands of customers,” but by no means all customers, he said, provide self-service on EC2, its S3 storage and other services. That’s known as AWS Basic Service for which there is no charge.

Slideshow: Amazon's Case For Enterprise Cloud Computing

AWS makes a wide range of self-service materials available through its Basic technical support. They include an EC2 Resource Center with references to Amazon Machine Image templates and developer resources. It also offers an always-on Service Health Dashboard, telling you whether a data center and service you are trying to use is operating normally. It also hosts developer forums and publishes technical FAQs.

Pricing on Silver support was reduced from 10% of the customer’s monthly AWS usage bill to 5% or a minimum of $100 per month; pricing on Gold support dropped from 20% of the monthly AWS bill to 10%, or less, depending on volume of usage, or a minimum of $400 a month.

The Bronze plan was needed to answer questions from developers building applications to run in the EC2 infrastructure and make use of various APIs and services. Selipsky said the plan levels are meant to give customers the choice of selecting an option that suits them rather than have the service provider bundle support into service pricing. The announcement called the support plans “building blocks to succeed without unnecessary bundling or long term commitments.”

In the AWS FAQ on its Premium technical support, which includes Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum, a question asks how support incidents may a customer initiate a year. The answer give is “as many as you need.” Though EC2 is used by customers around the world, technical support at this time is offered only in English.

Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, which provides technology infrastructure services separate from but patterned on its online store's infrastructure.