Amazon Makes A Play For Startups With Its AWS Activate Service Bundle And Support Network

Amazon’s AWS cloud services division has become one of the go-to places for startups like Pinterest, Reddit and Spotify looking for hosting and other services for their apps and other business. Today, Amazon redoubled its efforts to target them with the launch of AWS Activate, a bundle of services that offers startups, and the organizations that support them (think incubators and accelerators) support in the form of training, geniuses to help out with certain issues, a community forum — as well as credits for AWS services and offers for third parties to expand the business those startups push to AWS.

The move is the latest to come from a number of enhancements that Amazon has been making to focus specifically on developers. These include basic services like hosting apps and regular iterations on the pricing of instances, but also other support services, such as this deal from June when it partnered with Cloud vLab to come up with a program to teach developers how to use AWS better.

Interestingly, Amazon is targeting this not only at startups directly, but also the bigger organizations such as incubators and accelerators that already support them — a ramping up of how it is positioning its developer services. It’s actually a surprise that Amazon hadn’t made an effort to go after the latter group before. If you think about it, signing up users through an accelerator program can potentially add dozens of new customers to AWS in one go.

The Self-Starter package includes access to the AWS Free Usage Tier (one year of free access to various AWS services); one month of Developer-level AWS Support (a “one-on-one, fast-response support channel that is staffed 24x7x365 with experienced technical support engineers to help customers of all sizes and technical abilities successfully use AWS”); web-based training and one self-paced lab. Amazon says self-paced labs are online, hands-on tutorials designed to help customers acquire new skills and gain practical experience with AWS technologies — essentially this looks like those services launched with Cloud vLabs. Also included is access to the AWS Startup Forum — a kind of social network support system that lets you pick up knowledge from other founders and AWS architects. And third-party offers.

The Portfolio package has a few extras. There are some AWS credits, which can be redeemed against fees for eligible services, including Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Glacier. There is also business-level AWS Support (this is Developer-level AWS Support plus extras such as AWS Trusted Advisor access, phone and chat and email support, and a one-hour response time promise). There is also web-based and instructor-led training, including class labs and credit for four self-paced labs.

Interestingly, it looks like the latter offering for Portfolio already has some very high profile supports, and perhaps customers:

“Programs like AWS Activate make our job of helping new companies change the world easier in that it helps startups get access to the technology resources they need more quickly. We work closely with startups to help them leverage AWS, and AWS Activate makes this even simpler for the future,” David Cohen, Founder and CEO, Techstars, noted one testimonial.

And that also seems to extend, too, to VCs: “The ability for startups to quickly build and scale is crucial to their success. With access to resources like AWS Activate, startups can swiftly and easily use AWS and focus on growing their businesses,” said Mark Cranney, Partner, Andreessen Horowitz.

More to come.