A factor which is not so often discussed when comparing Cloud providers is the support plans. How much will it cost to have some support, what will you get for that money? In this post I will compare AWS, which I have worked with extensively, and Scaleway, which I am exploring right now.
I am not yet at a point where I can judge the actual interactions with the support team at Scaleway, but I can at least make a comparison on what they say that you get and what you pay.
My impression here is that Scaleway support is probably cheaper and more predictable compared to AWS support, at least for small/medium-sized companies. The kind of support you can get is somewhat similar, although at least in writing with an edge for Scaleway.
Support plans
Both AWS and Scaleway have a couple of levels of support plans, with the most basic support plan being free in both cases. On the AWS side, the support plans are:
- Basic (the free one)
- Developer (minimum $29/month, per AWS account)
- Business (minimum $100/month, per AWS account)
- Enterprise On-ramp (minimum $5500/month, across all AWS accounts)
- Enterprise (minimum $15000/month, across all AWS accounts)
On the Scaleway side the support plans are:
- Basic (the free one)
- Silver (€59/month)
- Gold (minimum €499/month)
- Platinum (custom, talk with Scaleway)
For all the paid support plans in AWS, you either pay a minumum fixed amount at that level, or a percentage of the spend on the resources/services of that cloud provider. For Scaleway, there is a fixed fee at Silver, either a minimum fee or a percentage at Gold, and some custom agreement at Platinum.
Scope of support plans
The AWS support plans are paid for each AWS account at the Developer and Business levels. This means in practice that you actually pay a lot more in total for the support, since most AWS customers nowadays have many different AWS accounts, as per AWS recommendations. There may be one or a couple of production AWS accounts, and several non-production AWS accounts (dev, test, etc.).
Not every AWS account will have a paid support plan in that case, and not every AWS account will be at the same support level. Once you get up to the enterprise level support plans, you do not have to worry about individual AWS accounts.
For Scaleway it does not explicitly state the scope, so I would assume it is likely per corporate account. You can have many different projects in each corporate account, which can represent different environments and/or business areas.
Most likely a small/medium-sized company may have a single corporate account, while medium/large companies may have more than one corporate account.
Type of support and response times
24/7 ticketing support is available for all support plans for Scaleway, including the free plan. For AWS, you do not have technical support with the free plan, you have to get a paid plan. Scaleway does not distinguish between the type of tickets in their information.
For phone support, you get essentially business hours support with the Scaleway Silver plan, and 24/7 with Gold and Platinum. For AWS, you get 24/7 phone support with Business or either Enterprise plan.
You get a Technical Account Manager (TAM) at the enterprise levels in AWS, and at the Gold and Platinum levels for Scaleway. Scaleway includes a quarterly review with the TAM at these levels as well. Both Scaleway and AWS offers a yearly architectural review at the higher support levels.
For Scaleway, you get a dedicated premium support team even from the Silver level, and you also get custom onboarding for the Gold and Platinum levels for the support team. This is not quite the same for AWS support levels.
Response times for support tickets are within 1 hour, 30 minutes, and 15 minutes for the Scaleway Silver, Gold, and Platinum levels. AWS has similar response times for production/business critical issues for Business, Enterprise On-ramp and Enterprise levels. but longer response times for other types of issues.
There are more details and more types of channels for AWS support compared to Scaleway though.
Example of support cost
For simplicity, I will not calculate exchange rates between Euro and US dollars, but pretty much consider them equivalent.
Case 1: Small set of workloads around $600/€600 per month
In AWS case, we assume there is only a single AWS account with paid support and we picked the Business level. There is a minimum $100 support fee per month, or 10% of monthly charges up to $10000. So the cost will be $100, since 10% of $600 is $60.
In Scaleway case, only the Silver plan would make sense here, with is €59 fixed fee.
Case 2: Slightly larger set of workloads around $4000/€4000 per month
In AWS case, Busibness level support is still the one that makes sense. If we still assume that this is only for a single production AWS account, the support cost would be 10% of $4000, or $400 per month. If 25% of the cost would be for a test account and 75% for a production account, we would end up with $100 + $300, so the same amount.
In Scaleway case, it could either be Silver support at €59/month still, or possibly Gold support at €499/month. The distribution between production and non-production workloads would not matter.
Case 3: Larger set of workloads around $20000/€20000 per month
In AWS case, it would likely still be Business level support, since the enterprise options would perhaps be a bit too much on top of the actual AWS cost. At this level of cost the distribution of the cost among AWS accounts would become a more noticeable factor. If it were for only a single AWS account the support cost would be 7% of $20000, or $1400 per month. If it were for 2 different AWS accounts, it would be 2 * 10% of $10000, or $2000. If it were for 3 different AWS accounts with 25%, 25%, and 50% distribution, we would end up with $500 + $500 + $1000 = $2000.
In Scaleway case, it would likely be Gold support, and in this case it would be 3% of €20000, or €600. Distribution between production workloads and non-production workloads would not matter.
Larger cases
At some point here, the scale would go into “contact us” territory for Scaleway and we do not have any particular prices to compare. It would not make much sense to go really large and compare.
Scale of AWS vs Scaleway
Looking at the different support levels, it is pretty clear that for AWS, large scale means something different than for Scaleway. To be considered a significant customer for AWS, you have to be really big in spending on AWS. For Scaleway, you can become really significant at a lower spending level, in comparison.
If you are a really large enterprise, AWS might be a good choice here - just because you can expect them to be used to dealing with really large scale customers. For companies that are not that large in terms of AWS usage, Scaleway could potentially be a better fit.
Just from a support level and associated cost perspective, I think I would be more inclined to consider Scaleway for small/medium businesses. Simpler cost model, possibly lower cost, and in theory, at least as good support as AWS.
Source data which I have used for this blog post include: