Amazon staffs up to give Trusted Advisor more powers

When it comes to winning enterprise workloads, delivering the right services is obviously table stakes, but providing credible support and metrics is also critical. That’s one reason Amazon is staffing up Trusted Advisor, a service which guides customers on how to best deploy the Amazon Web Services they use — to choose the right instance type for a given task; to plug security gaps etc.

For example, the company is looking to hire a software development manager for its “Kumo team” who will manage:

” .. software development engineers who are developing algorithms and building systems to automatically solve a variety of Information Retrieval and Data Mining problems related to the AWS Trusted Advisor — one of the company’s biggest assets.”

The Kumo team is also looking for a software development engineer and a senior product manager.

For enterprise support, more is more

That AWS should seek to add richer functionality to Trusted Advisor should come as zero surprise. The boilerplate describing the service says AWS will continually add to the number of checks it performs.

Reached for comment, a spokeswoman said AWS is investing heavily in support “not just with Trusted Advisor but also with the Service Health Dashboard, Forums, Social Media Monitoring, Service Health Checks Support APIs” and other tools that allow its engineers and associates to deliver a good user experience.

As for “Kumo,” it means cloud in Japanese and is the name of the AWS Support software development team.

But what about third-party partners?

It’s clear that as AWS wants to make itself as enterprise-friendly as possible, providing services like these is a no brainer. But, for a half dozen or so small companies that were founded to provide cloud implementation guidance, particularly on AWS, this has to be a concern. Companies including Cloudyn, Cloudability, CloudVertical, and Newvem all harvest — with customer permission — usage data from Amazon’s APIs and use that to make their recommendations. Some of them monitor multiple clouds. Others are for AWS only, a strategy they want to reconsider going forward.

Earlier this month, AWS made a support API available that, among other things, gives customers API access to their Trusted Advisor recommendations. That was seen as a huge deal by some in the AWS partner community.

Some of these partners flipped out when Amazon made Trusted Advisor available for free for a short period. They really don’t like that it’s now making all that key data programmatically available.

Said the CEO of one of these companies: “This is another step, in a roundabout way, of AWS giving their customers a Cloud Economics toolset. I’m not sure they haven’t just head-on launched a Cloud Economics tool — users need quite a lot of expertise to hack together the various data sets you can get exported to S3 – and now this. I suppose that’s the short-term opportunity for companies like ourselves.”