If you were ever wondering, what are the practical differences between Support plans offered by AWS - I’ll try to deep dive a bit into the topic.

There is a quite comprehensive comparison on the AWS support webpage available that shows in detail what each support plan provides, but there are things not mentioned in the table that might be important for some of the consumers of Amazon Web Services.

But let’s look first at an overview of those support plans. You have currently 5 different support plans available, named Basic, Developer, Business, Enterprise On-Ramp and Enterprise. I will not be comparing all features, but the ones that I believe are the most important. I will extend this list with one more - Nordcloud Premium Support. But let’s talk about it later.

Basic is the one that is available to all customers, without additional fee, but does not give you access to any technical support. You can register only questions related to account and billing. Well… in fact there are cases where you can register technical issue using Basic support - in my history I did it few times, but those tickets where always related to some problems with AWS platform itself (e.g. last time I had to register a ticket to release EIP that was locked to my account and it was not possible to release via console/API).

You can use basic checks on Trusted Advisor.

The other 4 support plans are paid ones. Each of them costs either a minimum fee or a percentage of spend - whatever is higher.

Important note - support costs are per AWS account. When you have a multi-account environment (which is recommended) you need to set up an AWS Support Plan on all of those accounts and pay separately - except Enterprise On-Ramp and Enterprise. Of course nothing stops you from having a Business support plan on most important accounts (management, security, production) and a Developer support plan on less important (development, sandbox). Nothing? Well.. we will come back to this later.

So let’s see what they give you in addition to basic (incrementally), again - focusing on a subjective list of most important differences.

Developer - costs as low as 29$/month or 3% of monthly AWS spend. Allows you to register technical tickets and receive support via support portal, during business hours (8am-6pm in your country) with a minimum response time of 12hrs.

Business - costs $100/month or 10-3% of monthly spend (depending on volume). Support is available 24x7 and available via support portal, chat and phone, with a minimum response time of 1hr for the most critical issues. It also provides a nice Slack app that allows you to manage support cases via Slack channel - neat!

What else? Access to AWS Support API, full set of checks of Trusted Advisor and Third-party software limited support.

Looking at the table though, you might miss a few important features that come with the Business (and higher) support plan. So the small print here is

• AWS Support API - you can register new tickets/list current ones using API, you can integrate AWS support with JIRA and ServiceNow using (free) AWS Service Management Connector. You can use API to automate requests you usually do on a new account, for example request to increase Service Quotas (beyond 5),
• AWS Support plan change via API. In order to change the support plan on a new programmatically created AWS account, normally you need to reset the root user password, login and change it. What you could also do is to lock the root user via Service Control Policies (SCPs) and change the Support Plan via an API - nice!
• Trusted Advisor organizational view - this is a really nice feature. It requires a minimum of Business support on Management Account, and you can see recommendations across all AWS Organizations using single console/API calls. Please note - available recommendations depend on the support plan of member accounts. If you have a basic support plan for some accounts - only basic checks of Trusted Advisor would be reported,
• Health dashboard API - if you are running AWS environment at scale, this really helps you to understand current and upcoming issues in your AWS accounts, especially with organizational view which helps you with aggregated view - which frankly speaking makes the only sense. You can use tools like AHA - AWS Health Aware to get nicely formatted notifications from AWS about your environment health status. One thing to note - you need to have a minimum Business support on ALL of your AWS accounts to leverage organizational view. All, including test, dev and sandbox,
• Chat. I mentioned this already, but let me reiterate that - chat is by far my favorite way of interacting with AWS Support. It gives you almost instantaneous access to AWS engineers who could jump on a topic immediately. You really feel what you are paying for.

Enterprise On-Ramp is a new level of support, announced a year ago, being available via solution providers, distributors and AWS directly. It’s kind of a cheaper version of Enterprise support, but let’s see what it gives you on top of Business support. It costs $5,500 or 10% of monthly spend (no discounts based on volume. Available 24x7 with minimum response time being 30 minutes for the most critical issues.

• Infrastructure Event Management - 1 event per year. You can request AWS to help you prepare for an upcoming event (e.g. Black Friday) and analyze your application, operational risks, scalability ability. AWS will support you during the event and will help with post-event lessons learned
• Pool of Technical Account Managers (TAM) - those engineers will support you with incidents, escalations within AWS and support you with some technical concerns you might have, providing direction. They will also proactively respond to incidents observed by AWS that are happening in your infrastructure (e.g. security)
• Concierge team - it’s a small addon - this team will cover all your requests categorized as “Billing” or “Account”

Enterprise support is a well known level of support that extends the Enterprise On-ramp version. It costs $15,000 or 10-3% of monthly spend, providing 24x7 support with a minimum response time being 15 minutes. This is the best-of-the-best support, that allows you to benefit from following features

• Unlimited Infrastructure Event Management cases
• Dedicated Technical Account Manager (TAM) that knows your company, business context and is able to proactively support your operations, organize reviews workshops and deep-dives,
• Access to online self-paced labs - you can launch the lab prepared by AWS to test particular features in provided as a service environment,
• Newly released AWS Incident and Response service. AWS can cover some workloads under their monitoring tools and support any issues that impact them. What’s more - AWS will contact you when any critical incident is detected, and will stay with you until resolved.

Changing to Enterprise On-Ramp and Enterprise support is not possible via API or directly via support portal. You need to open a support case (but yes, you can do it programmatically from the Management account assuming you have Enterprise level on it! There is a CloudFormation template that makes it for you). You don’t pay $5,500 / $15,000 per account - you add accounts into a single support contract, and the fee is aggregated (minimum or based on spend).

If you use Enterprise On-Ramp support plan - you should upgrade to Enterprise level as soon as you reach around $100,000 of monthly spend on AWS. It will cost you the same, and as soon as you exceed $150,000 - you will pay less for full Enterprise support plan, compared to On-Ramp version.

Wrap up

I hope I’ve explained the difference between each of the support levels, including this small print that is not obvious for some. There is no doubt that as soon as you launch any production workload - you should at least consider buying paid support, ideally Business level or higher. Without paid support, you won’t be able to open technical support, and yes - most likely you will need it sooner or later.

But what if you are just starting in AWS or maybe you are not a global enterprise that can’t afford paying $5,500+ per month for a support? This is where Partner led support comes into a play.

Nordcloud Premium Support is an example of partner led support provided by Nordcloud, where Nordcloud acts as a single point of contact for a customer, providing billing, account and technical support. As a Premium AWS partner, Nordcloud led support offers features of Enterprise support but at a more cost effective price point - with a price level of Business support!

In this approach, Customer creates support requests via Nordcloud - we are able to seamlessly integrate with many different ITSM solutions you may have.

But what if Nordcloud does not have knowledge or requires additional information that only AWS support has? First of all - it’s unlikely - Nordcloud engineers hold over 1,000 AWS certificates so there is a lot of knowledge in the company. Second of all - whenever needed, we can leverage AWS Enterprise support to escalate any issue, and resolve it with help from AWS engineers.Contact us using this form if you would like to know more.