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Comment by ShakataGaNai | Hacker News Reader

All of the managed products from the different cloud providers are, more or less, great. The problem is they are black boxes. When something goes wrong you're completely at the whim of support. Ever call Dell/Comcast support and want to tear your hair out? Yea... it's like that except neither AWS nor Google have phone numbers to call.

The other problem is that most of these things aren't easy to migrate to. AWS RDS is much easier because its just managed whatever you're already using. But cloudspanner? DynamoDB? You have to completely re-architect your application. Then you have to move your application, and data, to this new system...without massive outages. It's a lot of work and a lot of cost. So until things go HORRIBLY sideways, most companies don't have the spare time/money.

Been there, tried that.

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If your service is mission-critical, you’ll have a support contract, and there absolutely is a number you can call. I have high confidence that Google and Amazon will make every effort to make sure their services perform to spec, the real problem is the feeling of helplessness when something does go wrong.

Of course you have a support contract, but how fast you can get a response still doesn't change. AWS Business Support - which is what is very common, a "Production Down" has a 1hr SLA for response. That's a long ass time for a database to be down without doing anything more than sitting on your hands.

Epic would have enterprise with the money they are making. That's business critical <15min response time for production down. https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/compare-plans/

> Yea... it's like that except neither AWS nor Google have phone numbers to call.

At my current company we have access to AWS support. I'm not high enough on the ladder to know the specifics (separate contract, size threshold?), but when we've had issues in Aurora we've had personalized support. I have no doubt if you're scaling to thousands of instances you would have personalized support, if for no other reason that a cloud provider would not want to lose such a huge customer.

Yes, certainly. Large companies have good relationships with the cloud providers and have "necks to strangle" when things go south. But unfortunately that's not everyone on these providers. You've gotta grow up from a lil ol startup (when you hopefully start using all these cool technologies suggested) to a big company before you get the attention and during that time... you can get majorly screwed.

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