The third-party support is being offered to customers with premium support packages. If you have gold or platinum support (starts at $400 for gold, and $15,000 for platinum), you can now ask questions about operating systems and “common application stack components.” This includes Apache, IIS, Sendmail, Postfix and (oddly) FTP.

Trusted Advisor

What’s more interesting is the addition of the Trusted Advisor, which will perform checks and offer suggestions about how to improve the AWS experience. Amazon is starting with eight checks, ranging from checking open ports to flagging unused elastic IP addresses.

Most of these center around AWS offerings, like suggesting customers purchase reserved instances if there’s a scenario where it would save customers money based on past usage. (Which also dovetails nicely with AWS interests, since reserved instances no doubt help Amazon with capacity planning.)

The services that Amazon is offering advice on, right now, is pretty limited. However, with the data that Amazon has at its disposal, it’s conceivable that this could be expanded to become a major selling point for using AWS. Again, the Trusted Advisor services are available to customers who gold or platinum support members.

Amazon’s support offerings are still pretty limited, so I don’t think they’ll be challenging Rackspace’s “fanatical support” anytime soon.