Looking to take on more demanding customers, Amazon Web Services on Thursday rolled out two paid-support plans that give customers access to its engineers to resolve glitches.
The company said it will offer two levels of support--gold and silver--for a fixed annual fee or a percentage of customers' total usage of its services. The support plans are available for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). For more details on the terms, click here.
Right now, Amazon offers pay-as-you-go pricing for its hosted services. Customers pay for how much they use the service. To get support for technical problems, they need to go to free forums.
The paid support is a sign that Amazon's hosted computing is ramping up to take on a broader swath of clients, including large businesses.
Initially, Amazon aimed the hosted service at Web start-ups, but it's signing on business customers too. BusinessWeek reported earlier this week that The New York Times and Nasdaq are now customers.
The support service also casts Amazon more in the mold of traditional IT providers such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems, which all offer a variation on hosted computing.
"Guaranteed support will also allow us to develop even more substantial applications using Amazon Web Services, knowing that Amazon is there to support us," Paul Horvath, chief technology officer of health care form-processing company TC3 Health, said in a statement.
Update on Friday: Link added to Amazon Web Services support terms and costs.
It's just like an unformatted hard drive, Amazon.com Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels explained. The difference is that it's in the "cloud" somewhere and you get to it through an API.
Amazon Web Services executives on Sunday described a forthcoming persistent storage feature, called EC2 Persistent Storage, which they say will make its hosted computing services more flexible and far more reliable.
People can sign up for an early beta test program now before Amazon opens it up for a wider release later this year.
The service works with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) hosted server offering. It allows developers to set aside a storage volume online, on which people save files in different file systems. This differs from what is available now with EC2 because once a compute instance is taken offline, the data associated with it goes away.
With a persistent storage service, data can remain linked to a specific computing instance. Significantly, people can take a snapshot of that data and store it on Amazon's S3 storage service. That effectively acts as a way to create a back-up of their computing operation on the "cloud," according to Amazon executives.
"The snapshot is extremely powerful technology and allows for building highly fault-tolerant applications operating worldwide. Combine these snapshots with Availability Zones and Elastic IPs and you have all the tools to manage and migrate even the most complex of applications," Vogels wrote on his blog.
"And the great thing is it that it is all done with using standard technologies such that you can use this with any kind of application, middleware or any infrastructure software, whether it is legacy or brand new," he added.
Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr also describes the service on his blog, saying it was one of the most requested features from developers.
Thorsten vok Eiken at RightScale, who has been testing the service, talks about the implications of this feature and says his company is making tools to make it easier to use these services.
Von Eiken says that persistent storage is a dramatically important feature that will lead many more companies and developers to hosted development platforms.
"It's going to be like agile software development: if you want to survive as an Internet/Web service you will have to compute in the cloud or your competitors will leave you in the dust by being able to deploy faster, better, and cheaper," he said.
Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud Web service was knocked offline earlier Monday, but the company appeared to get it back online within a few hours.
A thread on the Amazon Web Services support forum started at 1:51 a.m. PDT. By just past 4 a.m., a support person said all servers that had been unreachable could be contacted again.
(Credit:
CNET News.com)
It's a far milder outage than the one that occurred in February, when Amazon's Simple Storage Service went down, which appeared to affect hundreds of Web sites.
It's also a reminder of the scrutiny on new hosted computing services, which many software developers are using because of the low up-front costs and simplicity.
Although there has been talk of utility computing for years from the likes of IBM and Sun Microsystems, Amazon is increasingly recognized as a leader in the field.
Google is rumored to be making an announcement on Monday of hosted database services around Bigtable, which my CNET News.com colleague Dan Farber described here. Microsoft, too, is expected to offer more of these sorts of services as well around its Live development services.
Customers of an Amazon Web Services support forum lauded Amazon for providing regular feedback on the company's efforts to resolve the problems. A representative of Amazon also said it would hold an investigation to get more details on what caused the problem.
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