AWS Support FAQs

AWS Health is the authoritative data source for events and changes affecting your AWS cloud resources. AWS Health notifies you about service events, planned changes, and account notifications to help you manage and take actions. Sign into your AWS Health Dashboard to view account-specific health information or receive AWS Health event updates using Amazon EventBridge. You can also access AWS Health programmatically using AWS Health API, available with AWS Premium Support.  

Service health provides an overview of the current and historical status of all AWS services. It includes wider-scale events that can affect overall service availability in a Region. You do not need to sign in or have an AWS account to view this page.

Account health events includes localized operational issues and planned lifecycle events that can affect your workloads running on AWS. Account health is available to authenticated AWS users. By signing in to account health, you can view all AWS Health events including a more personalized view of events affecting your specific AWS services and resources, in addition to service health. You can view account health from the AWS Health Dashboard, programmatically access events using Amazon EventBridge or AWS Health API (available to AWS Business, AWS Enterprise On-Ramp, and AWS Enterprise Support customers). AWS Health also provides out-of-the-box integrations with IT Service Management (ITSM) tools, such as ServiceNow.

AWS Health provides actionable guidance to help you troubleshoot and remediate operational events, and take actions to prepare for scheduled changes such as planned lifecycle events.

AWS Health offers the flexibility to view Health events using the channel that best suits your needs. You can view AWS Health information using AWS Health Dashboard, which requires no setup and is available to all authenticated AWS users. You can can also receive AWS Health event updates using Amazon EventBridge, access AWS Health programmatically using AWS Health API (available to AWS Business, AWS Enterprise On-Ramp, and AWS Enterprise Support customers), or use out-of-the-box integrations with IT Service Management (ITSM) tools, such as ServiceNow.

In addition to the notification channels listed above (AWS Health Dashboard, Amazon EventBridge, and AWS Health API), you can configure notifications through additional channels including email, chat, or push notifications to the AWS Console Mobile Application using AWS User Notifications. Based on rules that you create, User Notifications creates and sends a notification when an event matches the values that you specify in a rule.

It is important to note that AWS Health event notifications using User Notifications do not provide as much details as the channels listed previously such as AWS Health Dashboard, Amazon EventBridge, and AWS Health API. User Notifications provide a simple and effective way to notify stakeholders of issues and changes. To send the full content of Health events to another destination, you can use Amazon EventBridge to automate the management of AWS Health events across your organization. Based on rules that you create, EventBridge invokes one or more target actions when an event matches the values that you specify in the rule.

You can use Amazon EventBridge to automate the management of AWS Health events across your organization by creating rules on EventBridge. Based on rules that you create, EventBridge invokes one or more target actions when an event matches the values that you specify in the rule. Depending on the type of event, you can capture event information, initiate additional events, send notifications, take corrective action, or perform other actions.

Yes, you can define custom actions in AWS Lambda, and use Amazon Eventbridge to initiate these Lambda actions in response to events.

Yes. AWS Health is programmatically accessible with Amazon EventBridge and AWS Health API. AWS Health API is available to customers who are on AWS Business, AWS Enterprise On-Ramp, and AWS Enterprise Support plans.

Yes. AWS Health is the authoritative data source for events and changes affecting your AWS cloud resources. Amazon CloudWatch is a service that monitors applications, responds to performance changes, optimizes resource use, and provides insights into operational health.  You can create an alarm to monitor any Amazon CloudWatch metric in your account and overlay AWS Health events with CloudWatch metrics to draw more insights when an alarm is activated.  

AWS Trusted Advisor helps you optimize costs, increase performance, improve security and resilience, and operate at scale in the cloud. Trusted Advisor continuously evaluates your AWS environment using best practice checks across the categories of cost optimization, performance, resilience, security, operational excellence, and service limits, and recommend actions to remediate any deviations from best practices.

Trusted Advisor is available in the AWS Management Console. You can access the Trusted Advisor console directly at https://console.aws.amazon.com/trustedadvisor.

Trusted Advisor includes an expanding list of checks across the categories of cost optimization, security, fault tolerance, performance, operational excellence, and service limits. For a complete list of checks and descriptions, refer to AWS Trusted Advisor checks.

The Trusted Advisor notification feature helps you stay up-to-date with your AWS resource deployment. You will be notified by weekly email when you opt in for this service. A refresh of checks is required to ensure up-to-date summary of check status in email notification. Automated weekly refresh of checks is performed for accounts with AWS Business Support, AWS Enterprise On-Ramp, and AWS Enterprise Support. Accounts with AWS Developer Support and AWS Basic Support will need to login to the AWS Management Console to trigger check refresh.

• What is in the notification? The notification email includes the summary of saving estimates and your check status, especially highlighting changes of check status.
• How do I sign up for the notification? This is an opt-in service, so do make sure to set up the notification in your dashboard. You can choose which contacts receive notification on the Preferences pane of the Trusted Advisor console.
• Who can get this notification? You can indicate up to three recipients for the weekly status updates and savings estimates.
• What language will the notification be in? The notification is available in English and Japanese.
• How often will I get notified, and when? You will receive a weekly notification email, typically on Thursday or Friday, and it will reflect your resource configuration over the past week (7 days).
• Can I unsubscribe from the notifications if I do not want to receive the email anymore? Yes. You can change the setting in your dashboard by clearing all the check boxes and then selecting "Save Preferences".
• How much does it cost? It's free. Get started today!

Trusted Advisor tracks the recent changes to your resource status on the console dashboard. The most recent changes over the past 30 days appear at the top. The system will track seven updates per page, and you can go to different pages to view all recent changes by clicking the forward or the backward arrow displayed on the top-right corner of the "Recent Changes" area.

If you don’t want to be notified about the status of a particular resource, you can choose to exclude (suppress) the reporting for that resource. You would normally do this after you have inspected the results of a check and decide not to make any changes to the AWS resource or setting that Trusted Advisor is flagging.

To exclude items, check the box to the left of the resource items, and then choose "Exclude and Refresh". Excluded items appear in a separate view. You can restore (include) them at any time by selecting the items in the excluded items list and then choosing "Include and Refresh".

The "Exclude and Refresh" function is available only at the resource level, not at the check level. We recommend that you examine each resource alert before excluding it to make sure that you can still see the overall status of your deployment without overlooking a certain area. For an example, see AWS Trusted Advisor for Everyone in the AWS Blog.

Most items in a Trusted Advisor report have hyperlinks to the AWS Management Console, where you can take action on the Trusted Advisor recommendations. Action links are included for all services that support them.

For example, the Amazon EBS Snapshots check lists Amazon EBS volumes whose snapshots are missing or more than seven days old. In each row of the report, the volume ID is a hyperlink to that volume in the Amazon EC2 console, where you can take action to create a snapshot with just a couple of clicks.

For the Trusted Advisor console, access is controlled by IAM policies that use the trustedadvisor namespace, and access options include viewing and refreshing individual checks or categories of checks. For more information, see Manage access for AWS Trusted Advisor.

You can programmatically access Trusted Advisor best practice checks, recommendations, and prioritized recommendations using Trusted Advisor API, available to AWS Business Support, AWS Enterprise On-Ramp Support, and AWS Enterprise Support customers. To learn more about Trusted Advisor API, refer to the user guide.

The minimum refresh interval varies based on the check. You can refresh individual checks or refresh all the checks at once by choosing "Refresh All" in the top-right corner of the summary dashboard. When you visit the Trusted Advisor dashboard, any checks that have not been refreshed in the last 24 hours are automatically refreshed; this can take a few minutes. The date and time of the last refresh is displayed to the right of the check title. In addition, for customers with Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, or Enterprise Support plans, the Trusted Advisor data is automatically refreshed weekly.

AWS CloudTrail logs Trusted Advisor activities from the API and console. For example, you can use the API to programmatically refresh a check or manually refresh a check in the Trusted Advisor console. CloudTrail records this activity and you can view details about the event in your logs. Automatic refreshes performed by Trusted Advisor also appear in CloudTrail logs. 

For more information about CloudTrail logging for the Trusted Advisor API, see Logging AWS Support API Calls with AWS CloudTrail. For information about CloudTrail logging for the Trusted Advisor console, see Logging AWS Trusted Advisor console actions with AWS CloudTrail.

AWS Basic Support and AWS Developer Support customers have access to 6 security checks (S3 Bucket Permissions, Security Groups - Specific Ports Unrestricted, IAM Use, MFA on Root Account, EBS Public Snapshots, RDS Public Snapshots) and service limit checks while AWS Business Support, AWS Enterprise On-Ramp Support, and AWS Enterprise Support customers have access to the full set of Trusted Advisor checks. For a complete list of checks and descriptions, refer to Trusted Advisor checks.

If your account has been opted in to vCPU-based On-Demand Instance limits, you must adjust your metric alarms and event rules to account for the vCPU-based instance limits. To see if you are using vCPU-based On-Demand Instances, visit the Limits page on Amazon EC2 console.  

You can find the limits that Trusted Advisor checks in AWS Trusted Advisor Best Practices. For information about limits, see AWS Service Quotas.

AWS Directory Services is a managed service that automatically creates an AWS security group in your VPC with network rules for traffic in and out of AWS managed domain controllers. The default inbound rules allow traffic from any source (0.0.0.0/0) to ports required by Active Directory. These rules do not introduce security vulnerabilities, as traffic to the domain controllers is limited to traffic from your VPC, other peered VPCs, or networks connected using AWS Direct Connect, AWS Transit Gateway or Virtual Private Network. In addition, the ENIs the security group is attached to do not and cannot have Elastic IPs attached to them, limiting inbound traffic to local VPC and VPC routed traffic. Security groups created by AWS Directory Services can be recognized by the security group name (always in the format “directory-id_controllers” (e.g. d-1234567890_controllers) or the security group description (always in the format “AWS created security group for directory-id directory controllers”).

Your Reserved Instance recommendations are provided by Cost Explorer, which calculates recommendations based on your on-demand usage over the past 30 days.

No, reservation recommendations are based on public pricing.

Since these recommendations are based on previous on-demand usage, newly purchased reservations do not show until the corresponding usage shows up in your billing data. Recommendations may be inaccurate if reservations have been purchased during the past 30 days.

Reservation recommendations are calculated based on your on-demand usage over the past 30 days. These recommendations are calculated by identifying the reservation purchases which would result in the lowest possible bill you could have achieved over this period. These recommendations target the lowest possible bill, and not any particular utilization or coverage threshold.

This check covers recommendations based on Standard Reserved Instances with partial upfront payment option. For other variations including convertible reserved instances or alternate payments options, please refer to Cost Explorer’s Reservation Recommendations.

Customers have a choice between buying 1 year and 3 year term Reserved Instances from AWS. This check assumes you will purchase Reserved Instances for either 1 year or 3 year terms, not both. As a result, recommendations for purchasing additional 1 year or 3 year term Reserved Instances are not additive across both term lengths, so recommendations are called out separately.

To illustrate: In a recommendation for three additional 1 year Reserved Instances or four additional 3 year Reserved Instances, we are recommending the purchase of three or four Reserved Instances respectively, not a total of seven additional Reserved Instances.

Yes, all instances types are included that have corresponding reservations available.

No, spot usage is not eligible to be covered by reservations and is excluded from these recommendations.

Recommendation for Reserved Instance purchase is made based on billing usage not covered by all available Reserved Instances, including those purchased from the Marketplace. Cost savings are calculated based on public pricing and do not take into account the availability of reserved instances available on the RI Marketplace.

No, these recommendations are only purchase recommendations based on public pricing and on demand usage. They do not take into account any potential sales of existing RIs on the RI Marketplace or the conversion of existing underutilized Reservations.

This check is flagged yellow when optimizing the use of partial upfront RIs can help reduce costs.

See the Cost Explorer page for more detailed and customized recommendations.

Additionally, refer to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide for Linux Instances to understand purchased Reserved Instances and the available options.

Information on RIs and how they can save you money can be found on the Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances page.

1. Region - The AWS Region of the recommended reservation.
2. Instance Type - The type of instance that AWS recommends.
3. Platform - The platform of the recommended reservation. The platform is the specific combination of operating system, license model, and software on an instance.
4. Recommended Number of RIs to Purchase - The number of RIs that AWS recommends that you purchase.
5. Expected Average RI Utilization - The expected average utilization of the your RIs.
6. Estimated Savings with Recommendation (Monthly) - How much AWS estimates that this specific recommendation could save you in a month.
7. Upfront Cost of Ris - How much purchasing this instance costs you upfront.
8. Estimated cost of RIs (Monthly) - How much the RIs will cost on a monthly basis after purchase.
9. Estimated On-Demand Cost Post Recommended RI Purchase (Monthly) - How much AWS estimates that you will spend per month on On-Demand Instances after purchasing the recommended RIs.
10. Estimated Break Even (Months) - How long AWS estimates that it takes for this instance to start saving you money, in months.
11. Lookback Period (Days) - How many days of previous usage that AWS considers when making this recommendation.
12. Term (Years) - The term of the reservation that you want recommendations for, in years.

Either you are not subscribed to Cost Explorer or you are logged into a linked account and not the payer account. Visit consolidated billing for additional information on payer and linked accounts.

The results of the recommendations are dependent on Cost Explorer which updates less frequently than Trusted Advisor. Refreshing every 6 hours ensures you see the most current data available.

AWS Trusted Advisor Priority helps you focus on the most important recommendations to optimize your cloud deployments, improve resilience, and address security gaps. Available to AWS Enterprise Support customers, Trusted Advisor Priority provides prioritized and context-driven recommendations that come from your AWS account team as well as machine-generated checks from AWS services.

Trusted Advisor Priority is available from the management or delegated administrator account on the Enterprise Support plan. If you have an Enterprise Support plan and are the management account owner for your organization, please contact your AWS account team to request access. Recommendations in Trusted Advisor Priority are aggregated across member accounts in your organization.

Trusted Advisor Priority recommendations can come from one of two sources:

• AWS services such as AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Security Hub, and AWS Well-Architected automatically create recommendations. Your Technical Account Manager (TAM) sends these recommendations so that they appear in your AWS Trusted Advisor Priority console.
• Your TAM can create specific recommendations for risks that they identified in your account.

Every Enterprise On-Ramp customer is entitled to one Cloud Operations review per year. Every Enterprise Support customer is entitled to one Cloud Operations review. Additional reviews may be available based on customer need.

Enterprise On-Ramp customers can contact the pool of Technical Account Managers to initiate a Cloud Operations Review. Enterprise Support customers can contact their Technical Account Manager to initiate a Cloud Operations Review.

AWS Support Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, and Enterprise levels include limited support for common operating systems and common application stack components. AWS Support engineers can assist with the setup, configuration, and troubleshooting of the following third-party platforms and applications:

Operating systems on EC2 instances:

• Ubuntu Linux and Debian
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and Fedora CoreOS
• SUSE Linux (SLES and openSUSE)
• CentOS Linux
• Microsoft Windows Server 2012
• Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2
• Microsoft Windows Server 2016
• Microsoft Windows Server 2019

Infrastructure components:

• Sendmail and Postfix MTAs
• OpenVPN and RRAS
• SSH, SFTP, and FTP
• LVM and Software RAID

Web servers:

• Apache
• IIS
• Nginx

Databases:

• MySQL
• Microsoft SQL Server
• PostgreSQL
• Oracle

In the case that we are not able to resolve your issue we will collaborate with, or refer you to, the appropriate vendor support for that product. In some cases you may need to have a support relationship with the vendor to receive support from them.

AWS Support can assist with installation, configuration, and troubleshooting of third-party software on the supported list. For other more advanced topics such as performance tuning, troubleshooting of custom code or scripts, security questions, etc. it may be necessary to contact the third-party software provider directly. While AWS Support will make every effort to assist, any assistance beyond installation, configuration, and basic troubleshooting of supported third-party software will be on a best-effort basis only.

Before closing your account, be sure to back up any applications and data that you need to retain. AWS may not be able to retrieve your account data after your account is closed. After completing your backup, visit your Account Settings page and choose "Close Account". This will close your AWS account and unsubscribe you from all AWS services. You will not be able to access AWS services or launch new resources when your account is closed.

If you manage multiple AWS accounts under the same company name that you would like to close, you can contact your account representative or open an account and billing support case for assistance. If you have additional questions or requirements associated with closing your AWS accounts, your account representative or AWS Customer Service can help.

If you receive an error message when trying to close your account, you can contact your account representative or open an account and billing support case for assistance.

Usage and billing stops accruing when your account is closed. You will be billed for any usage that has accrued up until the time you closed your account, and your final charges will be billed at the beginning of the following month.

Cross-account support is when a customer opens a premium support case from one account (e.g. account 12345678910) and requests assistance for resources owned by another account (e.g. an instance in account 98765432109).

Support engineers have no way to determine the access that someone (acting under a user or role in one account) has been granted to resources owned by another account. Due to security and privacy concerns we can only discuss specific details with the account holder of the resource in question.

Please open a support case from the resource-owning account. If there is a requirement to access the resource from a second account, please open a new support case from the second account as well. Then ask your support engineer to link the two cases, referencing the two case IDs.

No. Accounts can be separated in an Organization to isolate resources and permissions among individuals. If you are not restricted to a specific account, please see the previous FAQ.

We recommend that you use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), which enables you to securely control access to AWS services and resources for your users. Using IAM, you can create and manage AWS users and groups and use permissions to allow and deny access to AWS resources. IAM enables security best practices by allowing you to grant unique security credentials to users and groups to specify which AWS service APIs and resources they can access.

IAM access can be revoked if a user leaves the company or project, helping to ensure that root credentials are not exposed or compromised. For security and team functionality, IAM users are essential to using the full potential of your AWS account. For more information on IAM and controlling access to your billing information, see AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Controlling Access to Your Billing Information.

Consolidated billing is a feature that allows you to consolidate payment for multiple AWS accounts in your organization by designating one of them to be the payer account.

With consolidated billing, you can see a combined view of AWS charges incurred by all accounts, as well as get a detailed cost report for each individual AWS accounts associated with your payer account. Consolidated billing is offered at no additional charge and allows for all accounts under the consolidated group to be treated as one account, which assists with achieving volume discounts more rapidly.

See Pay Bills for Multiple Accounts with Consolidated Billing in the AWS Billing and Cost Management User Guide.

AWS provides a number of different ways to explore your AWS monthly bill and to allocate costs by account, resource ID, or customer-defined tags.

To get a snapshot of your billing data, you can use the Billing and Cost Management console, the monthly cost allocation report, and the monthly billing report.

For a more detailed view, you can also use these resources:

• Detailed billing report with resources and tags. This report allows you to get hourly detail on all AWS usage and to view tags for specific resources as needed. The tags are fully customizable on most AWS resources, and you can add or remove tags as needed. For more information, see Understand Your Usage with Detailed Billing Reports.
• Cost Explorer. The Cost Explorer in the AWS Billing console relies on the data from the detailed billing report and provides an interactive graphical user interface for viewing and analyzing your expenditures. For more information, see Manage Your Spend Data with Cost Explorer.

For billing purposes, AWS treats all the accounts in a Consolidated Billing family as if they're one account. Blended rates appear on your bill as an average price for variable usage across an account family. This allows you to take advantage of two features that are designed to ensure that you pay the lowest available price for AWS products and services:

• Pricing tiers: Pricing tiers reward higher usage with lower unit prices for services
• Capacity reservations: Rates are discounted when you purchase some services in advance for a specific period of time. 

You can always see the precise account usage, along with the unblended rates, in the detailed billing reports.

For more information, see Understanding Blended Rates in the AWS Billing and Cost Management User Guide.

The Billing and Cost Management console and the detailed billing report provide different information based on blended and unblended rates. For more information, see Understanding Blended Rates or contact us through the AWS Support Center.

The Detailed Billing Report shows the linked accounts that benefited from a Reserved Instance on your consolidated bill. The costs of the Reserved Instances can be unblended to show how the discount was distributed. Reserved Instance utilization reports also show the total cost savings (including upfront Reserved Instance costs) across a Consolidated Bill.

The AWS Billing and Cost Management Console is a service that you use to pay your AWS bill, monitor costs, and visualize your AWS spend. There are many ways to use this tool for your account.

For more information, see What Is AWS Billing and Cost Management?

You can use Cost Explorer to visualize patterns in your spending on AWS resources over time. You can quickly identify areas that need further inquiry, and you can see trends that you can use to understand spend and to predict future costs.

For more information, see Manage Your Spend Data with Cost Explorer.

You can use the instance usage reports to view your instance usage and cost trends. You can see your usage data in either instance hours or cost. You can choose to see hourly, daily, and monthly aggregates of your usage data. You can filter or group the report by region, Availability Zone, instance type, AWS account, platform, tenancy, purchase option, or tag. After you configure a report, you can bookmark it so that it's easy to get back to later.

For more information, see Instance Usage Report.

The Reserved Instance utilization report describes the utilization over time of each group (or bucket) of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances that you own. Each bucket has a unique combination of region, Availability Zone, instance type, tenancy, offering type, and platform. You can specify the time range that the report covers, from a single day to weeks, months, a year, or three years.

For more information, see Reserved Instance Utilization Reports.

Three tools are available to determine Reserved Instance utilization:

• Detailed billing report. This report shows hourly detail of all charges for an account or consolidated bill. Near the bottom of the report are line items that explain Reserved Instance utilization in an aggregated format (xxx hours purchased; xxx hours used). To configure your account for this report, see Getting Set Up for Usage Reports.
• Reserved Instance utilization report. This report is accessible from the Billing and Cost Management console and shows a high-level overview of utilization. For more information, see Reserved Instance Utilization Reports.
• Billing and Cost Management console. The "Bills" pane of the console shows Reserved Instance utilization in the highest level. This view provides the least detailed view of Reserved Instance utilization.

The detailed billing report shows the hourly detail of all charges on an account or consolidated bill. Near the bottom of the report, line items explain Reserved Instance utilization in an aggregated format (xxx hours purchased; xxx hours used). To configure your account for this report, see Getting Set Up for Usage Reports.

In addition to the three tools listed in How do I tell if my Reserved Instances are being used, AWS Trusted Advisor provides best practices (or checks) in four categories: Cost Optimization, Security, Fault Tolerance, and Performance. The Cost Optimization section includes a check for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances Optimization. For more information about the Trusted Advisor check, see Reserved Instance Optimization Check Questions.

Tax is normally calculated at the linked account level. Each account must add its own tax exemption. For more information on US sales taxes and VAT taxes, see the following:

• VAT customers
• US Tax customers
• AWS Tax Help
• AWS Billing FAQ (additional tax information)

Submit limit increase requests in the AWS Support Center. Choose "Create case", select "Service Limit Increase", and then select an item from the"Limit Type" list.

We aim for a quick turnaround time with all limit increases. If your request is urgent, complete the details of the request and then select the "Phone" contact method for 24/7 service. Provide the agent with the support case ID, and we will follow up immediately with the relevant teams.

AWS does not support the billing of reseller end customers because each reseller uses unique pricing and billing structures. We do recommend that resellers not use blended rates for billing—these figures are averages and are not meant to reflect actual billed rates. The detailed billing report can show unblended costs for each account on a consolidated bill, which is more helpful for the purpose of billing end customers.

Regional pricing is a revised pricing scheme for specific countries. AWS reserves the right to define the countries that qualify for regional pricing. Below is the list of countries  that currently qualify for regional pricing: India, mainland China and select LATAM countries [Guadeloupe, US Virgin Islands, Colombia, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Anguilla, Aruba, Guyana, Peru, Barbados, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, Belize, Martinique, Dominica, Saint Vincent and Grenadines, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Jamaica, Turks and Caicos Islands, Costa Rica, Curacao , Chile, Saint Kitts and Nevis, British Virgin Islands, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic), Grenada, Montserrat, Bolivia, Bahamas, Netherlands Antilles, Paraguay, Panama, Mexico, Haiti, American Samoa, Guatemala, El Salvador, Antigua and Barbuda, Brazil, Suriname, Saint Lucia, Argentina, French Guiana, Bonaire]. 

The location of an account is determined by the customer tax settings as described here.

The billing for regional pricing is calculated in similar way to the ES billing methodology as described here.

Customers will qualify for the regional pricing if all of their accounts subscribed to Enterprise Support are located in any combination of the qualifying countries. A customer is still eligible for regional pricing even if the customer has multiple accounts in different countries as long as all the countries are all on the list of specified countries. There are four main criteria for determining eligibility for regional pricing:

1. The customer must be on Enterprise Support public pricing.
2. Qualifying accounts must be on the same billing profile.
3. All the qualifying accounts must have been in the specified region countries for at least 25 days within the calendar month.
4. All the qualifying customer accounts must be in specified region countries on the last day of the month.

Customers do not need to take any action to qualify for the regional pricing. AWS premium support billing will evaluate the location of the customer’s accounts to determine eligibility and apply the regional pricing automatically.

The eligibility for regional pricing is evaluated every month. If a customer who was previously on regional pricing moves any of their accounts to a country outside of the qualified countries, then the customer will not be eligible for regional pricing for that month. If the customer however moves the account back to the qualified countries then the customer will qualify for the regional pricing the following month provided the evaluation criteria above are met. 

Customers will be precluded from benefiting from regional pricing for a period of 12 months if they are found to have previously qualified for regional pricing but breached the eligibility criteria at least three times in the previous twelve months.

Microsoft Lifecycle Policy offers 10 years of support (5 years for Mainstream Support and 5 years for Extended Support) for Business and Developer products (such as SQL Server and Windows Server). As per the policy, after the end of the Extended Support period there will be no patches or security updates.

There is no direct impact to existing instances. Customers can continue to start, run, and stop instances.

Microsoft will not provide patches for EOS products, unless customers purchase Extended Security Updates.

Yes.

Yes, customers can continue to import images to AWS using VM Import/Export (VMIE), Server Migration Service (SMS), or CloudEndure.

There is no direct impact to existing AMIs registered in customer accounts.

AWS will not publish or distribute Managed AWS Windows AMIs that contain EOS software to AWS Management Console, Quick Start, or AWS Marketplace.

Customers with dependencies on Managed AWS Windows AMIs impacted by EOS should consider their options, including creating Custom AMI(s) within their AWS account(s) to enable new instance launches. Learn more about custom AMI creation here.

Yes.

AWS customers running EOS software on EC2 instances have several options:

Remain on EOS software: Customers may decide to remain on EOS software. There will be no impact to existing instances, or to custom AMIs.

Automated upgrade: For customers with SQL Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2, AWS Systems Manager automates the performance of non-destructive in-place upgrades. SQL Server 2008 R2 customers can upgrade to SQL Server 2012 R2 and again to SQL Server 2016 (BYOL only). Windows Server 2008 R2 customers can upgrade to Windows Server 2012 R2. For customers with a License Included (LI) version of Windows Server or SQL Server, there is no additional licensing cost to upgrade. For more information, please click here.

Manual in-place upgrade for Microsoft Windows Server:

License Included: Customers using Amazon License Included for Windows Server can perform in-place upgrades for their Windows instances. For more information, click here.

BYOL: Customers using the BYOL model can perform a manual in-place upgrade for Windows Server following the steps referenced in the License Included option above, using their own Media.

Manual in-place upgrade for Microsoft SQL Server:

License Included: AWS customers using License Included SQL Server can perform in-place upgrades on running instances. Please contact AWS support for additional assistance and detail on upgrade paths.

BYOL: Customers using the BYOL model can perform a manual in-place upgrade for SQL Server using their Media. For more information, click here.

Explore other platform options. AWS is committed to offering its customers the most flexibility in the cloud. AWS customers interested in the benefits of migrating certain SQL Server or Windows workloads to a different platform can contact their AWS account teams for more information.

For more information on all of Amazon’s products and Services, click here.

Yes, Extended Security Updates are available directly from Microsoft or a Microsoft licensing partner. Read more about Microsoft's Extended Security Updates here.

Customers should consider all their options for EOS, see “What are my options for running Microsoft software that is approaching EOS?” for more information.

Windows Server 2003

Extended Security Updates available for Amazon License Included? No.

Extended Security Updates available for Bring Your Own License (BYOL)? No.

Windows Server 2008/2008 R2

Extended Security Updates available for Amazon License Included? Yes.

Extended Security Updates available for Bring Your Own License (BYOL)? Yes; active Software Assurance (SA) required.

SQL Server 2005

Extended Security Updates available for Amazon License Included? No.

Extended Security Updates available for Bring Your Own License (BYOL)? No.

SQL Server 2008/2008 R2

Extended Security Updates available for Amazon License Included? No.

Extended Security Updates available for Bring Your Own License (BYOL)? Yes; active Software Assurance (SA) required.

Note: Information reflects publicly available Microsoft EOS dates as of April 4th, 2019.

Microsoft Windows Server:

• Windows Server 2003 - July 14th, 2015 (EOS already reached)
• Windows Server 2008 - January 14th, 2020
• Windows Server 2008 R2 – January 14th, 2020

Microsoft SQL Server:

• SQL Server 2005 – April 12th, 2016 (EOS already reached)
• SQL Server 2008 – July 9th, 2019
• SQL Server 2008 R2 – July 9th, 2019

More information on Microsoft's Application Lifecycle can be found here.

Starting July 1st, 2019 Microsoft requires AWS to no longer publish and distribute License Included Managed AWS Windows AMIs (available in AWS Management Console and Quick Start), media, and services that use or contain Microsoft EOS products. Products that have reached end of support in prior years are also subject to these restrictions. The following products and services are affected:

Managed AWS Windows AMIs:

AWS will no longer publish and distribute Managed AWS Windows AMIs that contain EOS software to AWS Management Console, Quick Start or AWS Marketplace.

Microsoft Windows Server:

• Windows Server 2003 - July 1st, 2019
• Windows Server 2008 - January 14th, 2020
• Windows Server 2008 R2 - January 14th, 2020

Microsoft SQL Server:

• SQL Server 2005 – July 1st, 2019
• SQL Server 2008 - July 9th, 2019
• SQL Server 2008 R2 - July 9th, 2019

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS):

RDS will automatically upgrade customer databases that remain on SQL Server 2008 to SQL Server 2012 starting on June 1, 2019. We recommend customers test this upgrade prior to this date to ensure compatibility.

RDS customers can upgrade their Database version at any time. Learn more about upgrading your SQL Server 2008 R2 database in RDS here.

Amazon WorkSpaces:

WorkSpaces will stop offering License Included public bundles of Windows 7 Experience powered by Windows Server 2008 R2 after January 14th 2020.

WorkSpaces launched from License Included public bundles with Windows 7 Desktop Experience will no longer be able to be launched or rebuilt after January 14th 2020.

There is no impact for WorkSpaces created from BYOL bundles. Customers can continue to launch/rebuild those instances.

Customers who have created custom License Included bundles powered by Windows Server 2008 R2 will be able to use their custom bundles to launch or rebuild WorkSpaces after EOS.

Microsoft will not provide patches for EOS products unless customers purchase Extended Security Updates.

Microsoft has advised that this change will apply to all hyperscale cloud providers.

AWS customers running EOS software on EC2 instances have several options:

Remain on EOS software: Customers may decide to remain on EOS software. There will be no impact to existing instances, or to custom AMIs. Customers who are interested in purchasing Extended Security Updates from Microsoft should review the answer to the question, “Can I purchase Extended Security Updates from Microsoft to cover EOS instances that run on AWS?”.

Automated upgrade: For customers with SQL Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2, AWS Systems Manager automates the performance of non-destructive in-place upgrades. SQL Server 2008 R2 customers can upgrade to SQL Server 2012 R2 and again to SQL Server 2016 (BYOL only). Windows Server 2008 R2 customers can upgrade to Windows Server 2012 R2. For customers with a License Included (LI) version of Windows Server or SQL Server, there is no additional licensing cost to upgrade. For more information, please click here.

Manual in-place upgrade for Microsoft Windows Server:

License Included: Customers using Amazon License Included for Windows Server can perform in-place upgrades for their Windows instances. For more information, click here.

BYOL: Customers using the BYOL model can perform a manual in-place upgrade for Windows Server following the steps referenced in the License Included option above, using their own Media.

Manual in-place upgrade for Microsoft SQL Server:

License Included: AWS customers using License Included SQL Server can perform in-place upgrades on running instances. Please contact AWS support for additional assistance and detail on upgrade paths.

BYOL: Customers using the BYOL model can perform a manual in-place upgrade for SQL Server using their Media. For more information, click here.

Explore other platform options. AWS is committed to offering its customers the most flexibility in the cloud. AWS customers interested in the benefits of migrating certain SQL Server or Windows workloads to a different platform can contact their AWS account teams for more information.

For more information on all of Amazon’s products and Services, click here.

AWS customers such as Sysco, Hess, Ancestry, and Expedia have successfully migrated and modernized their Windows workloads on AWS. Read more about what AWS customers are doing here.

License Included: There is no additional licensing costs to move to a newer version of the software when using Amazon's License Included options, for example:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2019 is the same price as Microsoft Windows Server 2003/2008/2008 R2.
• Microsoft SQL Server 2017 (by edition) is the same price as Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008/2008 R2 (by edition).

BYOL: Customers with active Software Assurance (SA) can upgrade to a newer version at no cost. Customers without SA can purchase a new license from Microsoft.

Yes, customers with AWS Support plans will be able to engage AWS Support for technical issues.

Note: As per Microsoft's policy, after the end of the Extended Support, Microsoft will no longer provide patches or security updates unless Extended Security updates has been purchased.

Find more information on AWS Support plans here.

Please email aws.EOS.Microsoft@amazon.com.

July 1st, 2019

• Windows_Server-2003-R2_SP2-English-32Bit-Base-*
• Windows_Server-2003-R2_SP2-English-64Bit-Base-*
• Windows_Server-2003-R2_SP2-English-64Bit-SQL_2005_SP4_Express-*
• Windows_Server-2003-R2_SP2-English-64Bit-SQL_2005_SP4_Standard-*
• Windows_Server-2003-R2_SP2-Language_Packs-32Bit-Base-*
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• Windows_Server-2003-R2_SP2-Language_Packs-64Bit-SQL_2005_SP4_Express-*
• Windows_Server-2003-R2_SP2-Language_Packs-64Bit-SQL_2005_SP4_Standard-*

July 9th, 2019

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• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-English-64Bit-SQL_2008_R2_SP3_Web-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-Japanese-64Bit-SQL_2008_R2_SP3_Express-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-Japanese-64Bit-SQL_2008_R2_SP3_Standard-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-Japanese-64Bit-SQL_2008_R2_SP3_Web-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-Language_Packs-64Bit-SQL_2008_R2_SP3_Express-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-Language_Packs-64Bit-SQL_2008_R2_SP3_Standard-*
• Windows_Server-2008-SP2-English-64Bit-SQL_2008_SP4_Express-*
• Windows_Server-2008-SP2-English-64Bit-SQL_2008_SP4_Standard-*
• Windows_Server-2012-RTM-English-64Bit-SQL_2008_R2_SP3_Express-*
• Windows_Server-2012-RTM-English-64Bit-SQL_2008_R2_SP3_Standard-*
• Windows_Server-2012-RTM-English-64Bit-SQL_2008_R2_SP3_Web-*
• Windows_Server-2012-RTM-Japanese-64Bit-SQL_2008_R2_SP3_Express-*
• Windows_Server-2012-RTM-Japanese-64Bit-SQL_2008_R2_SP3_Standard-*

January 14th, 2020

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• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-Chinese_PRC-64Bit-Base-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-English-64Bit-Base-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-English-64Bit-Core-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-English-64Bit-Core_SQL_2012_SP4_Standard-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-English-64Bit
• SharePoint_2010_SP2_Foundation-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-English-64Bit-SQL_2012_RTM_SP2_Enterprise-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-English-64Bit-SQL_2012_SP4_Enterprise-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-English-64Bit-SQL_2012_SP4_Express-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-English-64Bit-SQL_2012_SP4_Standard-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-English-64Bit-SQL_2012_SP4_Web-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-Japanese-64Bit-Base-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-Japanese-64Bit-SQL_2012_SP4_Express-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-Japanese-64Bit-SQL_2012_SP4_Standard-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-Korean-64Bit-Base-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-Language_Packs-64Bit-Base-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-Portuguese_Brazil-64Bit-Base-*
• Windows_Server-2008-R2_SP1-Portuguese_Brazil-64Bit-Core-*
• Windows_Server-2008-SP2-English-32Bit-Base-*
• Windows_Server-2008-SP2-English-64Bit-Base-*
• Windows_Server-2008-SP2-Portuguese_Brazil-32Bit-Base-*
• Windows_Server-2008-SP2-Portuguese_Brazil-64Bit-Base-*

Glossary

AMI (Amazon Machine Image): Is a template for the root volume for the instance (for example, an operating system, an application server, and applications), manages launch permissions that control which AWS accounts can use the AMI to launch instances. Contains a block device mapping that specifies the volumes to attach to the instance when it's launched.

AWS (Amazon Web Services): offers a broad set of global compute, storage, database, analytics, application, and deployment services that help organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale applications.

AWS Management Console: access and manage Amazon Web Services through a simple and intuitive web-based user interface.

BYOL (Bring Your Own License): is a process you can use to deploy software that you have previously licensed on physically dedicated AWS hardware. If you BYOL, you do not pay for instances with licensing included in the cost. Instead, you pay the same rate as EC2 instances with Amazon Linux pricing. When you BYOL, you are responsible for managing your own licenses.

CloudEndure: offers reliable business continuity solutions that minimize data loss and downtime due to human errors, network failures, external threats, or any other disruptions. Our Disaster Recovery and Migration solutions are powered by innovative workload mobility technology, which continuously replicates applications from any physical, virtual, or cloud-based infrastructure into Amazon Web Services (AWS). As such, CloudEndure is uniquely qualified to support large-scale, heterogeneous environments with diverse applications and infrastructure.

Custom AMI: is an AMI created in your account either built from an imported image or captured from an existing instance. For example, you can launch an instance from an existing AMI, customize the instance, and then save this updated configuration as a custom AMI. Instances launched from this new custom AMI include the customizations that you made when you created the AMI.

EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud): provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

EOS (End of support): is a term used to reference Microsoft ending support for a product, in accordance with their Product Lifecycle policy.

Hyperscale: refers to the facilities and provisioning required in distributed computing environments to efficiently scale from a few servers to thousands of servers. Hyperscale computing is usually used in environments such as big data and cloud computing.

In-Place Upgrade: upgrades the operating system files while your personal settings and files are intact.

Instance (EC2 Instance): is a virtual server in the AWS cloud. Its configuration at launch is a copy of the AMI that you specified when you launched the instance.

LI (License Included): refers to the use of Amazon's Microsoft Licensing Agreement for Windows Server and SQL Server.

VMIE (AWS VM Import/Export): is an AWS Service used to import Operating System Images to AWS EC2 in an offline mode.

RDS (Amazon Relational Database Service): is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks.

SA (Software Assurance): is a comprehensive program offered by Microsoft to help deploy, manage, and use Microsoft products efficiently.

SMS (AWS Server Migration Service): is an AWS Service used to import Operating System Images to AWS EC2 in an online mode.

WorkSpaces (Amazon Workspaces): is a managed, secure cloud desktop service. You can use Amazon WorkSpaces to provision either Windows or Linux desktops in just a few minutes and quickly scale to provide thousands of desktops to workers across the globe.

AWS Incident Detection and Response provides customized support for critical applications. It offers 24x7 proactive engagement, 5-minute response time and incident management for critical applications. AWS Incident Detection and Response is designed to help you improve your operations, increase workload resiliency, and accelerate your recovery from critical incidents. AWS Incident Detection and Response leverages the proven operational, enhanced monitoring, and incident management capabilities used internally by AWS teams and externally by AWS Managed Services (AMS).

AWS Incident Detection and Response offers a 5-minute response time SLO (Service Level Objective) for critical cases (Business-critical system down) raised to AWS Incident Detection and Response. Unlike the Enterprise Support response time, which is measured from the moment a case is submitted, engagement time for AWS Incident Detection and Response is measured from the moment an incident is triggered on your workload or when your case is submitted.

AWS Managed Services (AMS) augments your existing team with cloud operations. It provides monitoring, incident management, patch, backup, a designated Cloud Service Delivery Manager (CSDM), Cloud Architect (CA), and access to the AMS Security team. AWS Incident Detection and Response is available at no additional charge and in eligible regions for AWS Managed Services direct customers with AWS Enterprise Support. AMS customers that meet this criteria can contact their AMS Cloud Service Delivery Manager (CSDM) to learn more.

AWS Incident Detection and Response is available in English and Japanese for workloads hosted in the following regions: Africa (Capetown), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Melbourne), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), Canada (Central), Canada West (Calgary), EU (Zurich), EU (Milan), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Spain), Israel (Tel Aviv), Middle East (Bahrain), Middle East (UAE), South America (São Paulo), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), US East (Ohio).

As a premium AWS Support Service, AWS Incident Detection and Response provides 24x7 coverage supported by a global team of engineers. When AWS Incident Detection and Response responds to an incident, the first available Incident Manager from any of our regions is assigned to your case to help you as quickly as possible.

You can subscribe (or unsubscribe) accounts to AWS Incident Detection and Response by raising a support case to AWS Incident Detection and Response. Subscription can only be performed by creating the request from the payer account. AWS requires a 30-day notice to unsubscribe an account from the service. Kindly refer to the service user guide on how to raise a subscription request.

Yes. You can subscribe an account to AWS Incident Detection and Response for a fixed duration with a minimum duration of 90 days.

Yes, billing is based on the usage of the workloads you onboard. AWS Incident Detection and Response is charged monthly as the greater of $7K or 2.0% of the monthly AWS charges accrued by onboarded workloads. AWS Incident Detection and Response requires that the resources of your workloads are appropriately tagged.

Workload onboarding starts after the constituent accounts that make up the workload are subscribed to AWS Incident Detection and Response. The focus of the workload onboarding process is for AWS to collect as much context about the workload as you are willing to share. This may include the ARNs and functions of the services used in your workload and the critical alarms that speak to the workload's outcomes. We also develop runbooks and response plans for incident management during the onboarding process.

Critical alarms triggered on your workloads will be sent via Event Bridge to the AWS Incident Management tool and the Incident Management Engineer (IME) on call will be notified. The IME will triage the alarm, engage you on a conference bridge, and follow pre-established incident management response plans to guide you to recovery. The actions taken during the call may, for instance, include providing up-to-the minute insights on AWS Service health, triggering an escalation within AWS, or advising you on how to drive resolution. The IME will manage the incident and ensure that you remain engaged with the right AWS resources until the incident is resolved or mitigated. Upon closure of the incident, the IME may provide an incident resolution report that summarizes the incident and informs improvements to the application architecture, metrics, and response procedures. For AMS customers, operations engineers are also engaged in the incident management process to help resolve the incident.

During a Service Event, AWS will notify you of an ongoing service event whether or not your workload is impacted. If your workload is impacted by the service event, AWS will create a Support Case to engage you, receive feedback on impact and sentiment, and provide pre-determined guidance to invoke your disaster recovery plans during the event. You will also receive a notification via AWS Health containing details of the Support Case created for you. Customers who are not affected by the AWS-owned service event (e.g., operating in a different region, do not use the AWS service that is impaired, etc.) will continue to be supported by our standard engagement.

Yes. You can ingest events from any monitoring tool to AWS Incident Detection and Response via Amazon EventBridge. Kindly refer to the AWS Incident Detection and Response User Guide for more details on onboarding your workloads.

Yes, you can still raise critical cases on your own directly to AWS Support or to AWS Incident Detection and Response. AWS Incident Detection and Response provides a 5-minute response time to Business-critical system down cases. Refer to the service user guide to learn more about raising a case to AWS Incident Detection and Response.

AWS Incident Detection and Response does not replace your monitoring team. AWS Incident Detection and Response works in partnership with your monitoring teams and is focused on the management of critical incidents.

AWS re:Post Private is a fully managed, secure, and private space for you to build an organization-specific cloud community and provide access to proprietary knowledge resources. AWS re:Post Private centralizes trusted AWS technical content and offers private discussion forums to improve how your teams collaborate internally—and with AWS—to remove technical obstacles, accelerate innovation, and scale more efficiently in the cloud.

You can get started with re:Post Private by visiting the AWS Management Console and setting up re:Post Private for your organization. You need to have either the AWS Enterprise or Enterprise On-Ramp Support Plan. 

AWS Countdown is an AWS Support offering designed for a broad range of cloud use cases, including migrations, modernizations, product launches, and go-live events. AWS Countdown helps you throughout the project lifecycle to assess operational readiness, identify and mitigate risks, and plan capacity, using proven playbooks developed by AWS experts. It empowers you with resources for operational readiness, AWS Well-Architected assessments, security reviews, and infrastructure capacity planning for your projects. AWS Countdown replaces AWS Support’s Infrastructure Event Management (IEM) service, and is included with Enterprise Support. Enterprise On-Ramp customers receive one (1) Countdown engagement each year at no cost.

AWS Countdown Premium is a paid add-on which provides critical support across all phases of your cloud projects from design to post launch retrospectives. It offers designated engineers selected from a team of AWS experts who provide proactive guidance and troubleshooting. Designated engineers get involved from project inception to ensure continuity, provide access to subject matter experts, and leverage support tools for faster issue resolution. They participate in critical events calls, e.g. for sales events or migration cutovers, to provide rapid issue resolution. AWS Countdown Premium helps you increase your infrastructure investment return by accelerating migrations and modernizations, and enabling you to deliver high impact go-live events and achieve your business goals.

AWS Countdown Premium is available in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean for workloads hosted in all available AWS Regions and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, except the AWS China Regions. As a premium AWS Support Service, AWS Countdown Premium is supported by a global team of engineers.

You can subscribe to AWS Countdown by reaching to your account team. Additionally, Enterprise Support customers can reach out to their TAMs for registering a Countdown engagement.

You can subscribe to AWS Countdown Premium from the AWS Countdown webpage by clicking on Get Started. You will be redirected to AWS Support Plans page in AWS Console for completing the sign up process. You can also sign up for Countdown Premium by signing in AWS Console and then choosing Support > view/update support plans. You can also reach out to your account team for additional help. You will receive communication on Countdown Premium engagement on all AWS accounts shared during the sign-up via AWS support tickets within 3-4 business days. To ensure proper planning and coordination, we kindly request that you provide at least two weeks' notice prior to your event date.

You can unsubscribe from AWS Countdown Premium subscription by creating an AWS Support ticket by using the this quicklink or by logging into the AWS Support Center and choosing Account and billing > Billing > Update Billing Details. Use "AWS Countdown Premium Unsubscribe" as the subject and in the body of the case please state "Please unsubscribe all accounts related to this AWS Countdown Premium subscription starting on mm/dd/yyyy". Please note that Countdown Premium is available in monthly increments only. Raise the support ticket from the same AWS account where you subscribed to AWS Countdown Premium. You can also reach out to your designated Countdown Premium engineer or account team for help. AWS requires a 30-day notice to unsubscribe an account from the service.

Yes. You can subscribe to AWS Countdown Premium for a fixed duration in monthly increments, with a minimum of one (1) month subscription.

Yes, AWS Countdown Premium is available for AWS Resold Support customers and works the same as a direct customer. It supplements your migration, modernization, or event with on-demand expertise and support. Please reach out to your account team or email us at aws-countdown-subscription@amazon.com to start your Countdown subscription.

AWS Countdown (Standard & Premium) is currently designed for and supports AWS direct customers only. It does not extend its services to end-customers of Partners enrolled in the AWS Partner-Led Support Program. However, if a Partner wishes to leverage AWS Countdown (Standard & Premium) for their internal accounts or workloads, they are entitled to use this service as an AWS direct customer.

You can sign-up for one monthly subscription per use-case such as product launch, live streaming, migration, or modernization. Multiple subscriptions will be required if you have multiple projects going in parallel. This ensures that we assign a separate engineer to each team vs trying to spread one engineer across multiple. For e.g. you are planning to migrate 3 systems in parallel, you should buy 3 subscriptions for each migration team.

You will see an Out-of-Cycle (OCB) bill for AWS Countdown Premium. It is not included in anniversary invoices. Under charge description it will read “out of cycle bill” and the amount and description will reflect the Countdown monthly fee. AWS Countdown Premium invoices will indicate the bill period in which the bill is issued.

You will receive bills during the first week in the next month of your AWS Countdown Premium Subscription. The bill will be prorated based on your start date. For example, if you start a two (2) month subscription for AWS Countdown Premium starting on February 15th, then you will receive following three bills – 1) $5000 in first week of March, 2) $10000 in first week of April, and 3) $5000 in first week of May. The exact date of invoices will depend on your organization’s billing cycle.

You can extend or reduce the subscription months for an existing AWS Countdown Premium subscription by creating an AWS Support ticket by using the this quicklink or by logging into the AWS Support Center and choosing Account and billing > Billing > Update Billing Details. Use "AWS Countdown Premium Modification" as the subject and in the body of the case please state "Please modify this subscription for all accounts related to this AWS Countdown Premium by "increasing(decreasing) this subscription by x months". Please raise the support ticket from the same AWS account where you subscribed to AWS Countdown Premium. You can also reach out to your designated Countdown Premium engineer or account team for additional help. AWS requires a 30-day notice to unsubscribe an account from the service.

AWS Partners provide proactive guidance and best-practices, as well as offer additional products and services as part of their support offering. PLS enables customers to receive support on AWS services from their Partner, who plays a critical role in helping transform their businesses across all industries by migrating workloads, developing cloud-native applications, providing managed services, along with offering local language, and even onsite support.

AWS Partners leverage Partner-Led Support to build their own support offerings, as they do not pass directly through to their customers. Each AWS Partner differentiates their Partner-Led Support offering in their own way. It is important to consult with your AWS Partner to review their support options, contact methods, and response times.

Partner-Led Support requires that customers allow their AWS Partner to access their AWS accounts to run diagnostic tools and to provide support, along with opening support cases to AWS on their behalf when necessary. Customers must request support from their AWS Partner, and will not have direct access to AWS Support, including access to an AWS Technical Account Manager (TAM), or to open support cases directly to AWS. Customers will not be able to contact AWS Support directly, and all requests will be serviced by their AWS Partner.