As you may have seen, last week Amazon announced a few commercial
support options for AWS services.
Over the past week I have been thinking about this and wondering
why....why release this service? The online forums have been used very
effectively to provide support to the tens of thousands of AWS users
in the past. Well, if you read into the statement from Jeff Barr
closely you will see the reason. He said:
“Increasingly, we see that organizations of all sizes are putting AWS
to use in new, innovative, and mission-critical ways. These
organizations have told us that they need a more direct and more
discreet way to request assistance and to report problems.”
The hint is the word “discrete”.
On April 7th there was a major outage of the EC2 service from AWS. For
some reason about 20% of the EC2 instances lost connectivity. A post
was placed on the AWS forum and within around one hour the issue was
resolved. At the time I was very impressed at the speed and efficiency
of the support….but one thing stuck in my mind….the whole episode was
very public. During the outage several developers posted information
about their problems, all of which were posted on a public forum and
still visible on the internet….something that really does not concern
me with my small business but would be completely unacceptable for an
enterprise.
A commercial support package gives enterprise users the ability to
report their problems and have them dealt with in a discrete way. Well
done, Amazon, for finally making Cloud Computing acceptable for the
enterprise.
Ross
(
http://www.spoutingshite.com/index.php/2008/04/21/amazon-web-services-
gets-serious-about-enterprise/)