AWS re:Invent 2025 - AWS Support: New Tiers Making Customer Operations Effortless (SPS325)

Source: Dev.to

Introduction

In this session, George He, Senior Product Manager at Amazon Web Services, presents the newly redesigned AWS Support. The offering now includes three new tiers—Business Support Plus, Enterprise Support, and Unified Operations—designed to help customers move faster, build more resilient architectures, and operate at scale with AI‑powered assistance and human expertise.

The Challenge

• Rapidly evolving technology: New announcements across services such as Nova, Bedrock, CloudWatch, GuardDuty, and S3 appear every few weeks, making it hard to keep up.
• Decision paralysis: Teams face a flood of options (Claude, Bedrock agents, SageMaker, etc.) and must choose the right configurations without making costly architectural mistakes.
• Operational overload: After launch, production incidents often require firefighting at odd hours, diverting time from innovation.
• Mission‑critical scale: Global deployments introduce regulatory, security, and compliance complexities, as well as drift and training challenges.

These pain points are common across many AWS customers and motivated a ground‑up redesign of support.

New Support Philosophy

AWS Support is shifting left—getting closer to customers’ operations and problems—to:

1. Proactively build resilient architectures – help make key design decisions early.
2. Detect issues before they impact production – AI‑driven monitoring surfaces problems early.
3. Provide contextual AI agents – gather information across accounts and workloads, then hand it to support experts for faster, more accurate root‑cause analysis.

Support Plans Overview

Basic

• Access to documentation and health dashboards.

Business Support Plus

• AI‑powered 24/7 assistance agent.
• Case response within 30 minutes.
• Ideal for proof‑of‑concepts, first production deployments, and teams needing quick answers.

Enterprise Support

• Includes everything in Business Support Plus.
• Dedicated Technical Account Manager (TAM) to develop strategic plans.
• 15‑minute response for production‑critical issues.
• AWS Security Incident Response at no extra cost.
• Suited for large‑scale operations with real users.

Unified Operations (Highest Tier)

• Full team of AWS experts covering billing, security, architecture, and more.
• Domain Specialist Engineer assigned for large deployments and critical events.
• Provides end‑to‑end guidance and peace of mind for mission‑critical workloads.

Example Gen AI Deployment Journey

1. Week 1–2 – Executive asks for AI capabilities. The team explores options (Claude, Bedrock agents, SageMaker) and experiences decision paralysis.
2. Week 3 – Initial testing begins; compute costs rise as configurations are trialed.
3. Month 3 – Production launch succeeds, but a midnight outage triggers a 2 am incident.
4. Beyond – The service scales globally, introducing compliance, security, and drift challenges.

With the new support tiers, customers can:

• Receive AI‑driven recommendations during architecture design.
• Get early alerts on performance or cost anomalies.
• Leverage TAMs or Domain Specialist Engineers to resolve incidents within minutes, reducing downtime and operational overhead.

Conclusion

AWS Support’s redesign aims to transform support from a reactive service into a strategic partnership. By combining AI intelligence, proactive detection, and dedicated human experts, the new tiers help customers build faster, operate smarter, and scale confidently across the full lifecycle of their workloads.