Buy AWS direct or through a reseller/VAR?

January 18, 2019 1:23 PM

Do organizations buy their AWS services directly, or go through a VAR/reseller/partner? And if you have to use a reseller, how do you choose?

A previous employee at my organization set us up to buy our AWS services through a partner. (That company also did our initial AWS implementation, but subsequently canned their entire professional services division, so now they pretty much just send a monthly bill and open our AWS support tickets for us.)

Do we have to keep going through this company, or can we buy direct from Amazon?

If we must use a reseller, what criteria would we want to consider, besides price (discount)?

Thanks for any suggestions!

posted by wenestvedt to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Directly. I wouldn't consider using a reseller personally, but also I'm capable of setting all the stuff up myself. If you need hand-holding, I guess that's a value add that a reseller might provide? Even as an individual I buy my AWS stuff myself for my private projects.
posted by RustyBrooks at 1:32 PM on January 18, 2019 [3 favorites]

Do you have resources with the skillset to do it yourself? If you don't, do you want to hire those resources and pay them and keep them happy? If not, then reseller.

But it's not hard to find cloud infrastructure ops people and if you have skills infrastructure resources right now, they may view learning AWS cloud as a big career perk.
posted by cmm at 3:01 PM on January 18, 2019 [1 favorite]

AWS does let you buy better/faster responses to tickets. I don't know if they'll sell it to resellers, but if they do, getting access to a better support tier than you could otherwise afford is the only reason I can see to go through a reseller. If you needed to build something out and were out of your depth, there are consultancies that do AWS work without repackaging the services.
posted by hoyland at 5:27 AM on January 19, 2019 [1 favorite]