Agreed that their general support (and some of the design and implementation of their services) makes me want to give up and go outside and touch grass instead of working in tech, but as soon as you reach the level where you are in contact with support directly, they're very responsive. It's a weird dichotomy.
That is a different thing. We don't need AWS to help solve our problems. We need them to fix theirs and give us feedback on how that's going.
I interviewed many people in my life and every once in a while a candidate would be an AWS Solutions Architect. To my surprise it turns out that much of their time is spent helping customers implement their cloud workloads.
At $BigCorp when stuff wasn't working I had regularly had AWS bite their nails out trying to understand what was wrong until we got to a working solution.
Internal support (eg contacting dynamo sr devs/product) is better for more architecture type stuff/design and real optimization. Support is great at diagnosing and debugging. If I was external I'd use aws SAs for the equivalent to the internal stuff. But I'm an sr dev so I deal more with the SA/Design side of the house.
I work in ProServe (app dev) and I touch a lot of different services. Usually I can reach out to an SA or the service teams Slack channel. I’ve been able to get an API bug fixed relatively fast by posting a sample to the service teams Slack channel.
“fast” is relative. Even though the fix was fast, it takes forever to propagate non urgent fixes through out the entire AWS infrastructure.
AWS isn't free for internal teams, we're still paying real money and that moves the KPIs.
Not sure what you mean by internal support, I was talking about the enterprise support or the team itself.
When I say fix for urgent things it's usually poking a management api, restarting some process, swapping hosts, etc. Or calling out some other issue. Same thing that enterprise support does (has access to) or asks the team oncall to do for any customer. Common obvious example is checking elasticache logs for odd error conditions or networking issues. Or checking if your instance is on a possibly degraded host/rack etc.
When I say fix non-urgent things, I'm patient. AWS has fixed many things for me esp if you look at the 1, 3, 5 year time horizon. I've got lots of problems, having someone solve them helps, many things can be hobbled along for 1-2 years if you know it's going to be fixed and you can fix something else. Much of my job involves paying attention to roadmaps for aws teams internal and external and guiding my platforms work to best leverage that.
Customers are able to report literally any issue at all via support. AWS support is a huge organization. On my service team, there were plenty of instances where bugs were reported by customers.
No. You cannot submit a ticket and wait for developers to process it and get any feedback. You can either get an assigned person (which comes with extra pay and only for customers who are deemed worthy) who will not deal with issues like working with AWS bugs -- their goal is to tell you how to use AWS, but if something in AWS doesn't work, it's out of their hands.
Or you can get assistance with payments. Nice, but not what I was talking about.
It sounds like you didn't use AWS support but you got AWS certified consultants.
Did have some complaints about some things (classic flat network going away if you started with that had some bumps).
On a personal level: as an individual developer, I have never been even able to reach to anyone from AWS about their bugs simply because the "solution architect" wouldn't even bother to talk to rank-and-file, and other than that the only other option is to vent into a text area in the AWS console, which I'm sure is just some JavaScript for show. You cannot file a bug, nor can you see what other bugs have been filed. Nor can you get any estimates on whether the bug was reproduced, nor anything about the plans of fixing the bug.
Based on all the feedback you are receiving, it may be wise to reevaluate your points of contact with AWS and make sure you are speaking to the right person, and in the right way. Sorry to hear you've had bad luck until now.
You gotta love these assertions at the top of a post that flag people who confidently are saying they have no idea what they're talking about.
You can report bugs via your solution architect, via support, or via the Re:Post bug report tool.
> AWS support is atrocious, unless you cozy up to them somehow to get special treatment. If you are a "regular" customer, you get zilch. AWS offers best performance for the best price, that and they are the largest service provider is what makes them succeed. They don't need to spend anything on support -- it's not cost effective.
Even basic support is great, I've had most of my issues fixed within 8 hours. If you pay for business or enterprise support you'll have a dedicated person you deal with. Try comparing that to GCP...
> My personal experience: we provided a service through AWS marketplace related to storage. So, we are not your "regular" customer, had to pay them some for accreditation... and here's the thing: it's probably something about how we create EBS snapshots, but about every thousand or so snapshots creation stalls. Doesn't fail, doesn't succeed, just hangs forever. There's nobody to talk to in AWS about this. People who "certified" us (what a joke...) cannot do anything about this problem.
If you were a solution partner you would have had a partner solution architect who would take point on this problem for you. This sounds like your organisation didn't accurately share access to this resource with the right people.
> And there's more stuff like that. Sometimes some resources won't delete first 1-2-3 times you try. Some other resources are created, but don't work once in a blue moon. And all you can do about it is just curse and try again.
I've been AWS facing for 11 years and I can count on one hand the times this has happened. Did you file a support ticket?
Source: Work in an AWS consultancy, before that was running tech for a startup on AWS
You must never have worked with CloudFormation/CDK. What a shitshow. If you need to do anything non-trivial you are basically guaranteed to need a whole ream of dirty hacks and workarounds.
To be fair, that’s during creation. I’ve never had resources not work after creation.
It’s a little odd that at this point in the game, the prospect of “make a thing that depends on another thing” is still not an entirely solved problem within AWS.
My solution architect? Do you realize that most AWS customers don't have an assigned solution architect? Also, yes. We did talk to our solution architect. That's the part where "what a joke" comes in. Solution architect owes you nothing. Not even an acknowledgement that the development team on the other end received the information. You will never see the ticket in any kind of a bug tracker, no indication that any work on your problem has been done. Like I said, zilch.
Support in AWS doesn't exist. That is not a thing. There's support of financial issues. There's no such thing as tech support in AWS.
Re:Post is dead. Nobody ever replies there. No developer within AWS has a duty to look into that board. It looks like it's mostly intended for customers to help each other out. It's more like a place you can go to vent, if you feel very frustrated. Nobody owes you any follow up, nobody notifies you if things are fixed. It's not a substitute for bug tracker or customer support.
This is not true; we regularly open tickets with AWS for enhancements or bugs.
Not only that, but we were proactively contacted by an AWS account team before we had even spent our first $100, and they spent many days providing guidance and support to our team before we even breached $1,000/month.
It may not be the norm, but my experience with Azure has been exactly the opposite. After having an (admittedly small) Azure presence for 4 years now, I'm going through the "front door" of their sales site to try to get an account person from them. So far, I recommend AWS over anyone else 100 times out of 100, 10 days a week.
Imagine getting that kind of support from any of the competition. GCP support was laughably inadequate (apparently they have separate support for Firebase and GCP, and GCP can't support for Firebase), while Azure support is exactly as you describe - great for enterprise, sucks for basic support. As for the innumerable AWS "startup" competitors like Digital Ocean , Fly.io or Render, support ranges from condescending to non-existent. In one of the above cases, support tickets were so backlogged, I was giving support hints to guys stuck on issues for days.
Read what you are replying to.
AWS support is atrocious, unless you cozy up to them somehow to get special treatment. If you are a "regular" customer, you get zilch. AWS offers best performance for the best price, that and they are the largest service provider is what makes them succeed. They don't need to spend anything on support -- it's not cost effective.
My personal experience: we provided a service through AWS marketplace related to storage. So, we are not your "regular" customer, had to pay them some for accreditation... and here's the thing: it's probably something about how we create EBS snapshots, but about every thousand or so snapshots creation stalls. Doesn't fail, doesn't succeed, just hangs forever. There's nobody to talk to in AWS about this. People who "certified" us (what a joke...) cannot do anything about this problem.
And there's more stuff like that. Sometimes some resources won't delete first 1-2-3 times you try. Some other resources are created, but don't work once in a blue moon. And all you can do about it is just curse and try again.