My AWS account manager took me fishing. That’s what you get for a >$1M/yr spend. I don’t sense they would roll in mud with me, which is kind of incredible. I wonder how much you need to spend to get into mud rolling territory?
I’ve been on 4 hour screenshare with AWS engineers working through some infrastructure issues in the past, and we only spend $100k/yr.
Even at the $100k/yr spend level, AWS regularly reaches out with offers to try new services they’re launching for free. We’ve said “sure” a couple times, and AWS shows up with 4-6 people on their end of the call (half of them engineers).
In the past 10 years, we’ve had maybe 2-3 emergency issues per year, and every time I’m able to get a really smart person on a call within 5 minutes.
This is the #1 thing I’d be concerned about losing if we did colo or bare metal with cheaper providers.
With other vendors, when I call a support line with an obscure issue that maybe only I hit in the whole world I fully expect to explain it to an overseas call centre drone with a poor voice line and rudimentary English. Then I expect to have to repeatedly escalate over months and be told “We can’t reproduce this glaringly obvious bug, closed.” That’s ignoring the series of very closely related family of issues I dug up in the process of troubleshooting. Which they continue to ignore because it’s “out of scope” for the ticket. “Open a new ticket and go through the pain again, peasant!”
With AWS my experience has always been “I’ve fixed that right up for you, is there anything else you’d like help with?”. Often after mere minutes!
I’m usually left speechless, ready to go on a well-practiced tirade of how “We’re spending millions on this crap and none of it works properly!”, but instead I just sit there gawping like a fish out of water, stammer “No, thank you, that was it.” and hang up in shame.
I just don’t understand why no other enterprise on Earth seems to have support this good. What’s the thing holding them back!? Maybe they assume that good support works only for this tiny upstart org called Amazon that will clearly never amount to anything!
A direct comparison is a nearly identical issue with Azure SQL Server Managed Instance. It too had IOPS proportional to the size of each file of a database. We migrated a database that used many small partitions (per month I think?), each with its own small file. Its performance was horrendous, easily 100x slower than on-prem. The support team could barely speak English, got repeatedly confused about the product (Azure SQL Database != SQL Managed Instance), couldn't understand the problem, and even insisted that totally broken performance "was a feature" and we should redesign "our database". Sure buddy, I'll go tell the third-party vendor that, meanwhile Microsoft themselves insisted we should migrate all of our legacy databases to this garbage. We did, it took months, cost a ton of money, and now it basically doesn't work! We abandoned the product, as have many other people. At the time, this had been an issue for many years with Microsoft engineering basically whistling at the ceiling as they cheerfully ignored it. More than a year later they fixed it, but you've got to wonder what else is still wrong with it that support can't help with.
There's more examples, but that pair stuck in my mind because they had the same root cause but wildly different outcomes.
We went through two rounds of migration. First placing our data warehouse, where BigQuery was just so far past Redshift it was almost a joke. Then we wanted to move to a cloud provider with good container orchestration and GKE was obviously better than AKS and all of Amazon's proprietary orchestrators. It was pretty good.
Customer support varied between excellent and ~fine. Amazon customer support throughout that time (we had a few small bits on Amazon) was fine, but less enthusiastic about winning our business.
Not long after a friend of mine reported a security incident to AWS, something that looked like Amazon privileged access to their data, and it took months to get a response from them, and it was never an adequate explanation for what looked in all ways like a hack.
When I was at AWS, our team used to (religiously / proactively) keep track of customers having multiple complaints, especially repeat complaints (all of which manifested in to some form of downtime for them). Regardless of their spend, these customers ended up getting the "white glove" treatment, which otherwise is reserved for (potential) top spenders (though, engs are mostly oblivious to the numbers).
This is besides the fact that some account managers & support engs may indeed escalate (quite easily at that) to push product eng teams to really & immediately pay that tech debt that's hurting their customers.
Andy Jassy? Previously, he ran AWS for a decade and a half.
2. More
3. AWS has this idea of “customer obsession.” They will spend an absurd amount of time trying to understand your business and make sense of it.
I assume that's written into the contract somewhere and not a kickback, right?
Even interns have to go through training on how accepting on $30 gift might be inappropriate and sway their terribly important judgement..
Unless the company is yours or it's a private company that can raise a compliance issue...Any other gifts?