Spouting Shite

Amazon Web Services gets serious about enterprise

Cloud Computing was once looked upon by enterprise users as a purely academic and perhaps unlikely to be deployed in mission critical situations. It usually takes years for new technologies to be adopted by the enterprise….and often enterprises are criticised for prolonging the use of old but trusted and perhaps uneconomic technologies.

Cloud Computing and its brother, Utility Computing is different….the cost savings and economies of scale are so vast that enterprises haven’t been able to ignore them…and now they don’t have to fight the conflict as Amazon have announced commercial support for their range of services.

Cloud Computing has grown up with the announcement that Amazon Web Services will now provide support for users of its Simple Storage Solution, Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Queue Services products. Amazon, with its launch last week of persistent storage, was clearly wooing enterprise users, and the offer to provide support signals a formal courtship.

The newly announced support packages are:

• Silver, starting at $100 per month, gives access to new AWS Support Center, with personalized Web support, case tracking and guaranteed response times during US office hours (6am – 6pm Pacific) Monday to Friday.
• Gold, starting at $400, includes all of the above plus personalized phone support and around the clock (24×7×365) coverage.

Some people have asked why now? Actually, 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 “discreet”.

On April 7^th 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.

Well done, Amazon, for finally making Cloud Computing acceptable for the enterprise.