Why don't I hear about these incidents with AWS? Is it just less common or different business takes on quotas and rate limits?
Plenty of people care more about other job qualities than how much it pays, and a well run business can create a great environment without paying more than average. Look for companies where turnover is almost zero (assuming company is not growing) and you often find happy employees.
Places with worse employee conditions have to pay more, everything else held equal.
Anecdotally, I have certainly stayed in jobs with poorer pay because I liked my colleagues and the working conditions; but alternatively I have stayed in another job mostly because the pay was great.
I am an engineer working on such products and it was a routine on-call shift where I got this kind of question.
Admittedly we should have this cover by our support engineers, that are very very good, but this one slip through and I took the time to answer such query.
I am not a fanboy or anything, I could not be further from a fanboy or a blind fan.
But after working on AWS, I do suggest it as very sensible choice. Again, not because it is my employer but because they really take care of operations and customers.
Screw ups can happen but they are very rare in my experience.
Here is a ticket I opened recently (paraphrased):
> Me: I'm seeing an S3 charge in my billing and usage report called "AMZN-Out-Bytes" what does this mean? I already read the list of billing codes in this page (link) and it's not there.
> Support: Actually the majority of your report is "DataTransfer-Out-Bytes" charges which is caused by egress traffic to the internet. For more information see (link I already gave them).
> Me: Thanks but I don't need assistance with that billing code, please explain "AMZN-Out-Bytes." And can you explain how it's different from "AWS-Out-Bytes" as explained in (link)?
> Support: As explained in the page you linked, "AWS-Out-Bytes" refers to data transferred between different regions in the AWS network.
> Me: Please explain "AMZN-Out-Bytes."
> Support: Please close this ticket and reopen it with the S3 team. (who ended up answering my question)
In comparison, Google support could only be described as hostile, seemingly looking for any reason to close the ticket as my fault.
Neither, you're probably not seeking out such stories (there are plenty, even on HN). Google tends to get more negative attention on this particular forum, which might play a role, but the larger component is probably just chance.
AWS is _extremely_ customer friendly and if this happened would likely be offering dedicated support to make it right, credits for the business loss, etc.
Google's customer service is the worst I've experienced in the industry (like even speaking to a person is hard). While AWS is some of the best I've received.
Though, when it might not be baked into the culture as much as at AWS, I don't know offhand how to reconcile a customer happiness turnaround with the rush to avoid being an also-ran in the AI deployment frenzy.
(Are you going to assign conflicting KPIs in a company that has cultivated a career-driven culture, and hope that individuals strike optimal balances for the company? Or partition the goal assignments to separate teams, when the optimal outcome requires holistic thinking and behavior across teams?)
Literally failing upward.
It doesn't take much legwork to find counterexamples of that claim, even on HN (see below, I spent 2 minutes searching to find those).
> Google's customer service is the worst I've experienced in the industry (like even speaking to a person is hard). While AWS is some of the best I've received.
This is a bit too hyperbolic for me, but on balance I agree that Amazon has better customer experience than Google. That doesn't really answer what GP is asking, especially given all the posts made about AWS on this very forum that only sometimes get attention.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2478129
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25224220
If these are your examples of angry AWS posts then I think it just proves that AWS has amazing in customer service.
>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2478129
That's 12 years old but a legitimate complaint about AWS customer service.
>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25224220
Sounds like AWS had an outage, not sure how this is about customer service?
>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35375558
That's a list of AWS customer's having security incidents and, again, nothing about AWS customer service.
>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16283547
Not sure what this is about since the link is dead except due to being 5 years old but, based on the upvotes, it's someone failing to get people to have angry opinions about AWS? Not sure how this is about AWS customer service given the context.
> That's 12 years old but a legitimate complaint about AWS customer service.
Should have at least prompted you to do your own search. The fact that it didn't is the end of this discussion.
Meanwhile we can't even get Google to answer an email about serious incidents that were very obviously their fault, much less assign a dedicated human point person (hell with AWS, we even had several backup contacts assigned to cover for vacation time). We were important enough to be featured on their client success frontpage, but that didn't make a difference in support quality we received.
I can't imagine why anyone would risk their business with GCE. Especially since it tends to cost more than AWS these days.
You're seeing culture in operation.
Amazon really is customer obsessed. If a department fails its customers that departments leadership will be replaced
I know they are trying to improve visibility on quota limits, and they have a tool now, but in my experience it was half baked and only knew about a handful of the limits we were running into.
Where it ends up being a bit of a nightmare is stuff like SMS on SNS where they would specify a quota but we could still hit it before their system reported it. We never did figure out if they were looking at a rolling monthly average and bursty campaigns could cause it to creep above their projection. This was always a manual review for this product and the only way we could avoid it was getting way higher quotas than we needed approved. Ultimately we ended up moving SMS over to Nexmo (now Vonage) for bulk SMS so we didn't have to have potential outages when the mystery quota of the now was reached.
They have a support page for quota changes and are usually actioned in around 15-30m on average.
What more do you want?
Only time I ever got pushback was trying to get them to make an unreasonable quota increase to work around a bug in early GKE that left stale network backend lying around, and when I explained they approved it.
I’ve found GCP support to be reasonable, but you have to pay for the enterprise tier. Their pricing model used to be insane ($250/seat??) but they fixed that a few years ago. I suspect a lot (not all!) of the complaints around here are for hobbyist / free tier, which sure, is garbage. If you spend $K/yr on support it’s fine though.
Gotta check out FBA/Amazin Marketplace to find all the nasty on Amazon.
AWS has to much hype riding behind it.
It’s not enterprise class and looks very incohesive.
Mine. And Gartner’s.
I use GCP and AWS, and AWS outclasses GCP handily.