AWS Support Options
Amazon provides a rich set of AWS resources as well as human resources to assist you in AWS. There are different plans you can invest in to try to match your needs and your budget with a plan that makes sense for your organization. Figure 21-5 shows the AWS Support home page.
Figure 21-5 The AWS Support Home Page
AWS Support centers around these goals:
Proactive guidance: Your support plan might include access to a Technical Account Manager (TAM). The TAM is your primary point of contact and provides guidance, architectural review, and ongoing communication to keep you informed and well prepared as you plan, deploy, and proactively optimize your solutions. The TAM offers the following:
- A dedicated voice within AWS to serve as your technical point of contact and advocate
- Proactive guidance and best practices to help optimize your AWS environment
- Orchestration and access to the breadth and depth of technical expertise across the full range of AWS
Best practices: One of the valuable support resources is AWS Trusted Advisor. This online resource helps you provision your resources following best practices to help reduce cost, increase performance and fault tolerance, and improve security by optimizing your AWS environment. As you’ll learn in the next part of this chapter, four core checks are available to all AWS customers. The full power of AWS Trusted Advisor is available with Business and Enterprise support plans. Trusted Advisor offers the following:
- Guidance on getting the optimal performance and availability based on your requirements
- Opportunities to reduce your monthly spend and retain or increase productivity
- Best practices to help increase security
Account assistance: Included as part of the Enterprise support plan, the Concierge team is composed of AWS billing and account experts who specialize in working with enterprise accounts. This Concierge team will quickly and efficiently assist you with your billing and account inquiries, and work with you to implement billing and account best practices. Concierge support includes the following:
- 24/7 access to AWS billing and account inquiries
- Guidance and best practices for billing allocation, reporting, consolidation of accounts, and root-level account security
- Access to Enterprise account specialists for payment inquiries, training on specific cost reporting, assistance with service limits, and facilitation of bulk purchases
Launch support: For planned events, including advertising and product launches, promotions, and infrastructure migrations where a significant increase in demand for your resources is expected, Infrastructure Event Management (IEM) delivers highly focused engagement to provide architectural and scaling guidance. This tool aligns real-time operational resources to support the success of your event. IEM is included with Enterprise support and is available for an additional fee with Business support plans. It includes the following:
- Event planning and preparation based on your use case and objectives
- Resource recommendations and deployment guidance based on anticipated capacity needs
- Dedicated attention from your AWS support team during your event
- Guidance and support as you scale resources to normal operating levels, post-event
Comparing the Plans
The current support plans available from AWS are as follows:
Basic: The Basic support plan is free of charge and begins when you sign up for your Free Tier account. This plan continues past Free Tier expiration should you not elect for one of the paid plans.
Developer: The Developer support plan is the recommended plan if you are experimenting with or testing AWS.
Business: The Business support plan is the minimum recommended tier if you are currently running production workloads in AWS.
Enterprise On-Ramp: The Enterprise On-Ramp support plan tier is recommended if you have business-critical workloads in AWS.
Enterprise: The Enterprise support plan tier is recommended if you have mission-critical workloads in AWS.
Clearly, you should match your expected support needs with the paid plan that makes the most sense for you. In order to do that, you should use Table 21-2 carefully in order to make the correct choice. Please keep in mind that this table reflects the details at the time of this writing and does not include the free Basic support plan. To see the most complete information (if needed), be sure to visit https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/.