Hacker News Reader

Comment by Anduia | Hacker News Reader

This is more of a side effect of providing self-support solutions, and a trend in Customer Support departments. Amazon Support has been on top of the lists and awards for best support because they have proper KPIs that incentive customer retention/satisfaction over just number of contacts resolved.

So when you have good support/sales staff and most contacts are solved with self-service, what remains are contacts about complicated cases and inquiries.

I imagine that they always had a lot of contacts about optimizing spending, and policies to help and retain those customers accordingly, and now the percentage of time spent in those is higher, probably because the other types of contacts are now self-service.

View on HN

AWS doesn't even have a way to report a bug... what "on top of the list" are you talking about? Who else is on that list?

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.

I work at AWS now (ProServe). But I got my start with AWS at a 60 person company that had business support. The live support was amazing and I often used them as the “easy button”

Hmm, I should use that more often

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.

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.

By internal support I meant the product teams.

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 been there 9). 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. For instance we knew R53 resolvers were coming, so we punted on service discovery as r53 resolvers solved it for us. Those engineers worked on another feature instead.

And you filed a bug in a bug tracker accessible to all AWS customers and was able to track the progress on your ticket and got some estimates on the issue being fixed? -- No, you didn't, because there's no such thing. Stop this unnecessary shilling / wilful misinterpretation of what I wrote.

For what it's worth I've worked at multiple companies where we had an AWS technical account rep in our slack channels helping us solve problems.

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.

A "dichotomy" that is explained by big bucks is not a dichotomy but mere business strategy from AWS's part.

> helping us solve problems.

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.

A few years a ago when I worked at a tiny startup(<5) we had direct contact with aws. Not sure if this has changed now

Same experience here, they were even hooking us up with credits. Even when we were tiny they wanted to understand how we used AWS and were available to help with PoCs for products we weren't familiar with.

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.

I built a CD service on AWS and I've never had issues with their support. Their automated systems sometimes cause unnecessary support incidents though, and waiting in the default support queue could easily cost a day of downtime for someone. Definitely gives me the impression that they try to steer people towards paying for support by forcing unnecessary interactions.

One more nonsense... Come on! Did you file a bug to AWS? -- No, you didn't. So, why are you answering me about your great experience? You are writing something irrelevant.

> AWS doesn’t even have a way to report a bug…

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.

That sounds pretty nice compared to the GCP world where every issue is your issue and you need to pay for support or forget it. Last time they fucked up, I had to raise the issue in a public bug tracker to which I got one of those "not a bug, wontfix, your problem, goodbye" kind of responses.

Whenever I've needed AWS support it was just as aweful as GCP. For example, 12 hour Aurora outage, support was only replying a generic "waiting for engineering team" answer, SLA only refund about $15 although we ended up paying for all the replicas we tried to spin up from backups and wouldn't start. Architect and account manager didn't give a damn about our issue.

The way to get good support from AWS and Google is the same: find someone on your team who is ex-[AMZN|GOOG] and get them to email their buds.

Or, if you purchase consulting hours from any of the major firms, get ahold of their sales team and have them run the ladder for you. A GTM partner is generally more than happy to leverage their firm's relationship with the public cloud providers in the service of their relationship with you.

Not sure that paying for support is even that helpful. I was responsible for a few tens of millions of dollars in client GCP spend (admittedly, a small fraction of client AWS and Azure spend), and I only spoke to any official GCP reps once -- and they were from a recent acquisition. Our GCP team had closer contacts, of course, but as far as my experience went Google compared unfavorably to both AWS and Microsoft, who were happy to throw SMEs at me anytime I had a question. (Even so, there's a lot I do like about GCP, even if I'm a bit uncomfortable with its long-term prospects.)

Where is the bug tracker? What are all these "there is huge customer support" claims and no evidence?

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.

AWS has some of the best support out there. You don't even have to 'cozy up'.

It sounds like you didn't use AWS support but you got AWS certified consultants.

Some of the higher tiers of AWS enterprise support are INCREDIBLE. They're close the level of support I'm contracted to provide as a full time IC. Stuff like turnaround within hours? 30 minutes for critical issues? It just sounds like they're not a huge account.

Their point was, if you’re a small account you get terrible support. Saying huge accounts great support isn’t relevant for the overwhelming majority of AWS customers.

We don't have a huge account for our AWS. I'm not even sure of the tiers of support. The account manager we had assigned to us was great.

Not my experience at all - I was a small account. I was paying for support. They went way outside support scope and seemed to think nothing of it, they should tell customers to pound sand more often probably, but it seemed like they are willing to troubleshoot customer issues pretty thoroughly.

Did have some complaints about some things (classic flat network going away if you started with that had some bumps).

As a nobody with a few side projects on AWS I found support incredibly helpful- walking me through a long process of how to turn off and lock services when my account got hacked and a huge bill ran up.

I have a mid seven figure/year AWS spend and still have grandfathered "dev" level of support. Haven't gotten the (ridiculously expensive) "enterprise" level support because I'm just so happy with what we get with "dev" plan.

There is a mid level business tier.

We have a grandfathered in "dev" support that doesn't require a monthly percentage. Every plan otherwise has a 3-10% marginal premium.

What are all these declarations of "incredible" and so on? Where's the proof? Where's the bug tracker? I wrote literally that you cannot file a bug, and all answers here "oh, it's so great!" but still nothing about that bug tracker...

No. There's support for financial issues, or you can get support to tell you how to use AWS. If something is broken in AWS, you are on your own. Those people owe you nothing and won't do anything out of the goodness of their hearts because in most cases they don't even have a clue who within the organization they need to talk to in order to get a bug ticket created and processed.

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.

It's evident by the replies that many people don't share your experience. I've also had very effective support from AWS, from technical issues to spending optimizations. You seem to really care about whether a ticket exists to track your issue, which I don't really care about if I'm emailing a person and my issue is resolved.

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.

> AWS doesn't even have a way to report a bug... what "on top of the list" are you talking about? Who else is on that list?

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

> I can count on one hand the times this has happened

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.

I work with CloudFormation scripts extremely often in my line of work and while confusing at first they're extremely clean once you wrap your head around them. Like any tool or language there are multiple ways to approach issues, your solution can be clean and efficient or "a ream of dirty hacks", it really depends on how familiar you are with the tools.

CDK itself relies on a good number of hacks and workarounds, some of which are not well-vetted at all in my experience. Some of the workarounds are really a symptom in my opinion of certain resources not being part of CloudFormation itself, when if they were, it feels like it’d be almost entirely a non-issue.

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.

it's also worth noting that AWS has support reps split out based on your business sector. working in education related space we have an edtech rep.

Every year, managing 4000-5000 instances at least a handful of instances will fail to transition states for me. Support ticket usually clears it up.

> You can report bugs via your solution architect, via support, or via the Re:Post bug report tool.

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.

> AWS doesn't even have a way to report a bug

This is not true; we regularly open tickets with AWS for enhancements or bugs.

And where do you do this? Care to give a link to the bug tracker? I don't want to file mine because maybe I duplicate your issues?

You should probably talk to your AWS contact.

We are nowhere near being AWS' top customer, and have had absolutely incredible service from them.

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.

And did you submit a bug ticket? I bet you didn't. So what's this about?

Sorry, can't agree with this. The one time a customer support team actually dialed me up to solve a technical issue was with AWS. Support for billing issues was done in roughly 15 minutes after initial report. Support with free credits was done after a perfunctory 10 minute phone call. For a hacked account, account access was restored in 30 minutes, from escalation of the complaint down to resolution.

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.

And you found a bug in AWS and managed to file a ticket? Right? And that ticket is visible to other customers, so they don't need to duplicate it if they also find it? And they assigned the ticket, triaged it, scheduled the fix, released the fix? -- No, of course not, because there's no such thing.

Read what you are replying to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com