AWS Support and Professional Services

All AWS customers have access to the Basic level AWS Support, with further tiers of support available called Developer, Business, and Enterprise, in ascending order. AWS support is typically provided directly to – and requested by – the customer, unless the customer has instructed otherwise. Our support levels are shown in the following table.

	Basic	Developer	Business	Enterprise
Customer Service – 24/7x365
AWS Trusted Advisor (application)	7 core checks	7 core checks	Full checks	Full checks
Health status and Notifications	Access to AWS Health Dashboard	Access to AWS Health Dashboard	Access to AWS Health Dashboard and Health API	Access to AWS Health Dashboard and Health API
Support Forums
Documentation, Whitepapers, Best Practice Guides
Technical Support		Local business hours access to Cloud Support Associates via email	24/7 access to Cloud Support Engineers via email, chat, and phone	24/7 access to Cloud Support Engineers via email, chat, and phone

Enterprise Support

Enterprise Support Plans are suitable for customer environments managed by an APN Managed Services Provider or the customer themselves. The advantages of an Enterprise Support Plan are visualized in the following figure.

The various advantages of an Enterprise Support Plan

AWS Enterprise Support provides customers with a concierge-like service and 24/7 technical support from high-quality engineers, tools and technology to automatically manage health of a customer’s environment, consultative architectural guidance delivered in the context of their applications and use-cases, and a designated Technical Account Manager (TAM) to coordinate access to proactive / preventative programs and AWS subject matter experts.

Technical Account Manager (TAM)

A TAM is an AWS employee who provides advocacy and strategic technical guidance to help plan and build solutions using best practices. They will drive discussions with senior customer leadership regarding incidents, tradeoffs and risk management. Where appropriate, they will work with the customer’s APN partner to advise on solution design and troubleshooting.

A TAM is responsible for ensuring the health and efficiency of a customer’s cloud environment. TAMs liaise regularly with internal AWS Solutions Architects to investigate how to make a customer’s cloud environment cheaper and/or more effective, and will pass on these recommendations to customers, and the customer’s nominated APN partner.

All of our TAMs are AWS Certified Solutions Architects (Associate level) at a minimum, and have an otherwise strong background in IT operations with varying specialisms in Windows/Linux systems administration, DevOps, Big Data, and more. Put simply, the TAM is the center point of value to our Enterprise Support customers.

AWS Professional Services

The AWS Professional Services organization is a global team of experts who supplement the project team (of either the customer, APN partner or both) with specialized skills and experience to execute enterprise cloud computing initiatives. In this way, Professional Services fill capability gaps in the APN Partner and customer organizations. Professional Services work together with project teams to complete customers’ cloud computing initiatives.

Combining the broad range of consulting services and software available from the APN with focused support from AWS Professional Services provides customers with the breadth of skills and resources needed to best realize the potential of the AWS Cloud.

AWS Professional Services are best used to achieve specific project goals and business outcomes, augmenting the capability of the customer’s project team. AWS Professional Services are not intended to act as a consulting body in themselves, and work best by delivering specific expertise to existing project teams.

At AWS, our Professional Services personnel are expected to maintain a deep, specialized knowledge of specific services and solutions delivered by AWS. This expertise allows project teams to overcome specific barriers in the cloud adoption lifecycle.

AWS Professional Services provides assistance through a collection of offerings which help customers achieve specific outcomes related to enterprise cloud adoption. They also deliver focused guidance through our global specialty practices, which cover a variety of solutions, technologies, and industries. In addition to working alongside customers and APN Partners, they also share their experience through tech talk webinars, whitepapers, and blog posts that are available to anyone.