AWS Service Health Reports and New Service Plans
Following the announcement last week of Google App Engine, Amazon is shifting the focus back to their web services with the announcement of two new features of their cloud services.
First is a service health dashboard. This has been an on-going issue for users, and now you can visit a web page and see the current status of all Amazon web service offerings. In addition to this page, you can subscribe to an RSS feed for each service, including S3 and EC2. This is really cool. They’ll also keep a 35-day history so users can go back and review service uptime and/or other issues.
When S3 went down for a few hours a couple of months back, the communication about the outage from Amazon was very poor and Amazon knows it. Hopefully, this new dashboard will allow customers to be more in the loop about AWS services, especially if they are mission-critical.
Secondly, Amazon announced two service plans. For a cost, users can subscribe and get email, phone and web-based support for issues arising from AWS issues, including a named support contact. There are silver and gold levels of support. The main difference is with the “gold” support level, you get 24×7x365 support. Otherwise, it’s business day support. Also, with the gold plan you get one-on-one phone support. Both plans include an unlimited number of support cases.
Cost - for the silver level of support, you’ll pay $100 a month, or $0.10 per dollar of your total monthly S3, EC2 an SQS usage. Gold support is $400 per month, or per dollar rates that go down depending on how much you spend at AWS every month.
If you’re business was dependent on AWS, having dedicated support at Amazon would be critical, and $100 per month for that piece of mind seems like a wise investment. Several blogs and commenters at those blogs are arguing that users are already paying for the service, why should they pay additional for support. I can understand that, but when I’ve had a question about something or something hasn’t worked at AWS, a quick scan of the forums or a quick Google search usually finds me an answer. If my business was built on EC2, for example, I’d want to be able to pick up the phone or open a ticket day or night and get my issues taken care of.
It will be interesting to see if Google comes up with a similar plan once their Google App Engine goes live to everyone and the costs of that service are announced.
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