How Amazon provides Business Support (AWS)
Going down the rabbit hole of how to get help!
I was recently going down the rabbit hole of learning how business-facing companies provide customer support and thought I'd take a look at how AWS operationalizes success for their customers. Amazon is often considered a gold standard in customer service - but not everybody may have experienced its enterprise support before. One can surmise that it's perhaps one of the most advanced support models in the world - since AWS customers span the smallest developers to some of the largest companies in the world.
Customer Enablement
AWS puts support under the umbrella of Customer Enablement. At the highest level this includes the following:
Training and Certification
This includes training of customers and developer partners while also building a community of experts who have AWS skills. It'is a key part of their flywheel: you'll find many people boasting about various AWS skills on LinkedIn. This helps professional find jobs, who in turn are more likely to have their companies buy AWS. Interestingly enough, there are various tracks including architecture training for SWEs to operational training.
Outside of the training, AWS has a ton of resources and knowledge library for professionals. Something that caught my eye included their Well Architected library as well as their Builder Library with courses and white papers.
re:Post Community Support
re:Post is their Community Support program -- their version of Stack Overflow where developers post questions both about general programming, as well as topics specific to AWS (e.g., billing). This is brand new and was launched in Dec 2021, and it seemed like they are still trying to build adoption (a lot of questions were unanswered)
AWS IQ
This is AWS's UpWork style service where you can list your project and let partners/experts bid for them. Most of this is specific expertise. Some examples listed included things like RDS migration or roadmap development for data warehousing. The entire loop is completed within the platform -- including handshake and payment (through your AWS bill)
Professional Services
AWS employs an army of professionals who provide specialized services. This spans several areas - from helping F500 think about their IT strategy, to solution architects who help with implementation plans. In the past, I've relied a lot on their architects for specific items - e.g., if you want to plan for far higher throughput, you need to work with experts who understand AWS internals well on how to architect for it. In another instance, AWS helped conduct training for several senior engineers as a company embarked on building a cloud first storage solution -- they flew in senior engineers and conducted trainings and architecture sessions.
Managed Partners
AWS works with several MSPs (Managed Service Providers) who will manage your AWS instances on your behalf. This is suprisingly popular, since a lot of companies don't want to deal wtih dev-ops.
AWS Support
This is the big kahuna - from the Knowledge Center to all the standard ticket based support that most other companies provide. However, AWS also bundles in a few other things, including:
AWS Trusted Advisor: which scans your infrastructure to find problems (including excess billing scenarios) and generate reports
Service Health and Personal Health Dashboards: for overall service management to personalized view of each service
Cloud Operations Reviews
Technical Account Manager to help navigate the complexity of getting help from AWS (on Enterprise On-Ramp and Enterprise plans)
Infrastructure Event Management (IEM) provides specific consulting for events like Black Friday that may cause a sudden change in infrastructure requiremenets.
While AWS provides both free and premium support, most serious AWS customers will purchase paid support. It's by no means cheap either -- plans top out at (greater of) $15K per year or greater of 3-10% of the AWS bill. The biggest difference is the level of personalized advice, access to solutions architects that you get -- along with the SLA on support cases. All of the support options are linked together, so buying paid support also gives premium placement of your posts in AWS re:Post for instance.
The Developer Account ($29/mo or 3% of bill) includes only business hours email support with a 24 hour SLA for responses, so if you have an outage over the weekend, tough luck!
The Enterprise plan provides 24x7 access to support and < 15min response times for mission critical system outage. Most serious companies would want to buy the Enterprise plans - making support a valuable line item in AWS P&L.
I'm pretty sure under the hood, there's a bunch of complexity on how support operations are managed, with tiered support options, to instant support for outages - since a lot may depend on the customer's environment with fairly sophisticated models for how requests are routed to different tiers of support and finally to engineering and product management to investigate for tricky scenarios.
Other Cloud Vendors
I took a quick look at the support offering by the other two big cloud vendors.
Google Cloud: Plans were very similar and GCP though mission critical serviecs and assured support (verified physical access) was bundled separately. The community support had outsourced programming questions to Stack Overflow, while keeping their forum focused only on GCP specific questions (e.g., installing VMWare on Anthos). At least from the website, it seemed like advanced solutioning and consulting was far behind AWS
Microsoft Azure: Azure had similar plans (starting at $29 - $1000 but not a per cent of billing), with a similar spread of SLAs on the severity of the incident. Community Support was built into Microsoft's overall Community Support. I found some similar tools (like Advisor, Well-Architected plans, etc.) but the website was harder to navigate and felt less sophisticiated than AWS though slightly more detailed than GCP.
It was petty clear that AWS is the bar raiser in this cohort.
In Conclusion
This was a fun exercise. AWS has evolved just so much from when I started using it in 2006! I was amazed at the breadth of support options - and I can genuinely say that I was positively surprised and impressed.