Bad news. AWS is no different. EC2, IAM, whatever will have issues for hours, AWS won't update their status board (to the point someone wrote an extension to show the "real" status [1]), etc. And this is with business support we pay for. You needed to autoscale? Better go make yourself a mojito and wait for the dust to settle.
"There is no cloud, its just someone else's computer" [2]
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/real-aws-status/ka...
In the end someone has a pager, a machine and an editor. In ye-old-days this problem was in-house with a COLO machine. That's the reasoning behind uptime. 99%/year is 361 and just over half a day. Can you loose two and a half days at christmas? (web commerce) or the same time on a new product release? (SaaS) or 2.5 days development time at a critical bug fix with your customers?
The bad stuff always happens at the worst time. The market is saying, ^cloud^ but the tradeoff is ^service^. I don't know the answer(s).
but such a product would be expensive
Maybe there was a way to escalate it, but it wasn't readily evident. Which tells you something. So, I just moved on to AWS. More transparency on the platform and more predictable support.