Sorry, I didn't phrase that well - it wasn't really supposed to be a criticism of AWS, but rather (what I thought to be) an interesting observation about how their model differs from most services.

To be fair to AWS we don't need support often; we really only have problems when everyone else does (major outages) and we can follow the status of that online, we don't need to call someone to be told "we're working on it". Also our account manager is responsive and pro-active in helping us out, and they've put us on free Business Support trials a couple of times, but because we need it so infrequently there's really no reason for us to fork out for it.

Support contracts are a form of backup.

Except with AWS you can start a support contract in about a minute, via the website, and turn it off after a week when you're done.

Well I guess I don't understand GP's point, then.

The paid support tier is also atrocious and close to useless. AWS routinely denies the existence of major flaws for months or years, until they eventually admit it, often by just documenting it instead of fixing it.

They're horrifically expensive, and low quality.

It's really, really sad that so many startups have been convinced that it's "cheap" when it's almost comically expensive and lousy.

It's not because it's cheap, it's because you can avoid capacity planning and blowing capital (for which you would need an ROI). Once you are big enough that you hire your own accounts, lawyers & ops, then you can make a capital investment into your hosting infrastructure get a return on it. Too early and that was money that could have been better invested into growth opportunities.

I don't mean to claim otherwise, but I'd be interested to see what instances led to your observation.

I suggest trying to asking for help with network problems. One of my admins spent a month going back and forth only to be told "nothing to be done, it's fine."

It really is truly terrible support.

As a simple example, if you have a moderate number of hosts in a single security group (e.g. 200+ hosts), you can expect to have intermittent communication problems between the nodes. They used to deny this was a problem.

here's a source, since you're attacking and disbelieving everybody who doesn't love AWS: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/2240203992/N...

Asking politely phrased questions is not an "attack". I just looked through the last 30 days of his comments, and I don't see anything attack-like there.

It may or may not be the same issue, but from what I have been able to gather a modification of a security group is basically a "delete, recreate, repopulate" operation. All of our intermittent network issues could be reasonably tied back to SG modifications.

That's a different issue. This one is instances that are launched into an sg that is then left unmodified. If there are a moderate to large number of instances in that sg, intermittent network connectivity problems will ensue.

The issue you mention (where you have to treat sg's as being immutable if you want them to work reliably) is another problem with the sg's.

I've found the opposite - the support techs I've talked to have been technically proficient, and willing to spin up VMs and test things out for me.