Absolutely agreed. My cofounder and I have real conversations with real websolr customers every day, who are thrilled to have access to search experts.
Not just customer service, too, but end to end developer experience can be a huge advantage. I'm personally very active in maintaining the popular Sunspot Ruby library for Solr, and have passing familiarity with the internals of half a dozen other clients as well. This makes for improvements at all levels of the stack.
While the CloudSearch API looks a bit more reasonable than the recently released DynamoDB, Amazon has traditionally been somewhat poor in terms of end-to-end developer experience.
Not just customer service, too, but end to end developer experience can be a huge advantage. I'm personally very active in maintaining the popular Sunspot Ruby library for Solr, and have passing familiarity with the internals of half a dozen other clients as well. This makes for improvements at all levels of the stack.
While the CloudSearch API looks a bit more reasonable than the recently released DynamoDB, Amazon has traditionally been somewhat poor in terms of end-to-end developer experience.