AWS staff spending ‘much of their time ’optimizing customers' clouds'

Re:AWS staff spending ‘much of their time ’optimizing custom... by grogenaut on Monday April 17, 2023 @09:21PM (#35608830)

If you have it definitely use it. Working internal to amazon we have enterprise support on every account and I can page the teams internally. I often have to remind our line engineers to open a live support ticket immediately upon issue (they forget and forget to parallelize). The enterprise support is just great for most things. Whenever we're having an urgent issue, as I said, constantly reminding them to poke support. 80% of the time the support person has analyzed and figured out parts of our issues before I even find the internal contact to ask a question. They're also great at just debugging odd corners of the api. Deploy go wierd? Can' figure out how to get a feature turned on in some of the more complicated areas? they're basically a pair programmer. I've handed them my CFN and they fork their own account and try setting up the infra. I do the same. Massively reduces the Debug time. And people talk all the time about Chat GPT for this, well you're paying for it if you have support, and they have acess to the internal logs/dashboards/etc KB, etc so they're quite fast/good. Also super scrappy.

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.

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Re:AWS staff spending ‘much of their time ’optimizing custom... by scarface74 on Tuesday April 18, 2023 @01:02AM (#35610141)

How in the world do you get internal support to help you as an AWS employee? My understanding was that there KPIs were measured by helping external customers?

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.

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Re:AWS staff spending ‘much of their time ’optimizing custom... by grogenaut on Tuesday April 18, 2023 @01:32AM (#35610313)

We have 4 options I can think of... I can talk to Enterprise support via the normal channel, I can talk to our SAs / TAMs like any customer who has engaged them, we can try and engage Pro Serve (like any customer), or what you're saying, I just ping the service team oncall, manager, product, etc on slack, ticket, email, etc. Only the 4th option is really different to external, and I know folks from 3rd parties with that level of access as well.

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.

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