The Basic Support Plan
On the Basic plan, you’re not paying anything beyond the regular costs of consuming AWS resources. However, for the most part, you’re given access only to publicly available documentation, including white papers, tutorials, and support forums. In addition, you’ll be able to contact customer service at any time of the day or night for account-related issues (such as bill payment).
The Developer Support Plan
AWS recommends the Developer Support plan for organizations running nonproduction workloads. What’s a nonproduction workload? It’s a website or application that’s still in the development stages and isn’t yet handling critical transactions or heavy traffic. In other words, it’s a workload that could fail for extended periods of time without bringing about the sudden violent end to all life as we know it.
The Buisness Support Plan
The Business Support plan can meet the needs of many organizations by offering relatively fast and detailed answers to your technical questions. Is your production system down? The Business plan guarantees a response from a cloud support engineer via email, chat, or phone within one hour. Less severe issues can take longer—up to 24 hours for what AWS calls general guidance. This level of support can include help troubleshooting interoperability between AWS resources and third-party software and operating systems. For an additional fee, you can also get in-depth guidance while you’re still in your project’s design stage through Infrastructure Event Management.
The Enterprise Support Plan
As you can easily tell from the price tag (starting at $15,000/month), the Enterprise plan is appropriate only for large operations whose scope is global and for whom downtime is simply unthinkable. For example, can you imagine an evening without Netflix (which is, afterall, a key AWS customer)? What does that $15,000 get you? The detail that most stands out is the technical account manager (TAM) who is assigned as a dedicated “guide and advocate” for your account. Your TAM is more than just a technical resource; the TAM becomes closely involved in your deployment, guiding your team through planning, launches, and proactive reviews all optimized using best practices. As your advocate within AWS, a TAM can open doors and make innovative solutions possible.
AWS Professional Services
Support is also available through the AWS Professional Services organization. The professional Services team provides “offerings” detailed guides to achieving specific outcomes and work with third-party consultants from the AWS Partner Network (APN) to actively help you build your deployments. The Professional Services team also makes tech talk webinars, white papers, and blog posts publicly available.
Learn more about AWS Support Plans