AWS paywalling select knowledge base articles, requiring Premium Support plan
repost.aws
repost.aws
E1337Recon 257 points 7 hours ago (Tue Feb 18 14:00:30 2025 UTC)
> Hey I’m gonna raise this internally as this is not a good change in my opinion. (Strictly my own opinion and not that of AWS)
> Edit: The change is being rolled back
Hope that's the opinion of Matt Garman, too. Such changes reek of Day 2 mentality.
I always defaulted to AWS but this has me reconsidering other options for the future.
But otherwise it seems more like an insult.
Yeah, no. I have to strongly disagree with this.
AWS's documentation about operating AWSs products and services I assume are correct and accurate.
If I follow their guides and end up breaking something because it turns out they forgot to tell me about something important, I would consider that a breach of warranty.
The only reason I can think of where documentation should be behind a pay/auth-wall is if it was generated specifically for your circumstances as part of some kind of solutions architecture or technical support process.
That’s exactly what this is, actually. These aren’t the AWS docs. The linked site is the AWS support forums in which AWS employees, AWS support and/or other known contributors from the AWS community will give you personalized responses to questions you have.
Some of these questions are more generic, and so aren’t personalized, but they’re still the result of a question-and-answer on the forum.
I disagree that these are specific enough to warrant being private. I'm thinking more along the lines of your very specific resources/application/architecture.
This is more like a curated version of Stack Overflow.
And I don't believe you can download the Z-Wave specification without paying a membership.
I'll also name and shame iCIMS. Some API docs are public but then link to other pages that are blocked (restricted to direct customers or temporary access by contractors) for no good reason and with no obvious pattern.
But I don't think sleazy is the right term for hitting yourself in confusion.
Maybe moronic fits better?
Or is everyone that disagrees with you simply not seeing the Objective Truth of which you are aware and they are not?
Sheesh.
Thus it’s easy to distinguish the two by asking in-depth questions. IE it’s fast! How fast?
I mean, if I'm doing a project with one other person, we can use logic to get to the best solution, but if it's three people in a group or more, then the most charismatic person becomes the leader, and the rest does whatever the leader wants, even if they make bad calls.
The non-blind suggestion usually has reasons on why you want cloud services, why AWS is the right choice over many other suppliers of cloud, and some cost analysis of what it would cost vs doing nothing or why you can't do nothing.
Not going to spell out a design meeting if your first instinct is an ad hominem.
Sheesh
The linked article is from “AWS re:Post” which is the equivalent of a “support forum” where you can ask questions and get crowdsourced answers from either other AWS users, or from AWS employees/AWS support themselves. Some of these questions are so popular that they show up in search results and so might be treated as documentation.
It’s dumb, but not uncommon in my experience for such “support forums” to be behind a paywall.
Smallish company here - we have a premium support plan that over the years has cost us like 6k per support issue, all three times because of bugs on their end.
Edit: We feel that we need it in case anything really gets messed up - like some complex account hijack or similar. Does this make sense? Are we overpaying for no reason?
It works the same for most companies where their product is a foundation of your business.
Think Apple store for instance: you'll pay for premium support tickets to have expedited reviews of your apps, even if it's to work around a bug they just pushed in their new OS update.
One "hack" I've recommended for larger enterprises is to budget a minuscule amount for their pro-services, but only to rely upon AWS "Principal or Product" engineers. I've been involved in far too many "Pro Services Remediation" engagements.
We're a small US based company, just a few people. They required verification documents, business registration all a real headache. After all of that we couldn't use a single thing to run, not even cloud shell. It's as if the account was disabled in some very obscure way. We spent 2 weeks arguing with support to please reinstate access to our account, and after 4 false "it should work now" responses they told us to start paying for premium support.
PAY PREMIUM TECHNICAL SUPPORT FOR A SERVICE THAT WE NEVER GOT ACCESS TO OR USE.
Was it because you were doing "AWS activate" or something? If that experience is much worse than their regular signup process that's both funny and sad :/
With AWS support what I do is enable "developer support" (~$30/month) when I need to ask them a bunch of stuff, then I cancel it for the other 11 months of the year when I don't need their help. It's a bit cheap and I'm sure my account rep would have words if I was a "real business" but in practice it works for me.
It's not like that was my first time working with AWS, it was my first time with my company though. It was weird for everyone.
In my book that is always a big negative sign, since it indicates possible issues like:
1. The company doesn't really support the API or consider it important.
2. The feature isn't really being used, being either obsolete, unreliable, or not useful.
3. The company's management is a weird kind of paranoid and the process of integrating is going to be painful because of that.
You pay a percentage of your gross AWS bill and the support is useless in my experience.
I have no doubt that others have had bad experiences, but that’s not been ours.
(I have no connection to Amazon, other than as a user of AWS and retail and holder of broad-based funds some of which hold Amazon.)
But now I run a startup with about $150k in annual AWS spend and the Business Support tier has been extremely distressing.
My most recent example was a scary query regression on aurora. We could provide a query that one day started returning objectively wrong results. Share everything with support including steps to reproduce. Their response? We can’t see your data or run this query sorry but here are some docs to read about schema optimization.
On the other hand, Enterprise requests go straight to actual AWS engineers in the department of the product that you are having trouble with. In the case of VPN tunnels, we received detailed logs of the traffic across the tunnel withing minutes of submitting the request. It was truly impressive and makes me sad that I don't currently have access to that level of support.
Example: I had to parachute into an abandoned project running an ancient version of RDS Postgres. I was having a hard time working out the many steps required to actually get it to a modern version.
The agent went as far as to run through the process on their end, showing the version jumps they needed to do, config options they needed to change at each step, etc.
That was easily worth the money.
The profits from squeezing them will be monumental. Bullish AMZN.
See also: CEO at GCP ;) It is Oracle's world, enterprises merely live in it.
0: Example https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1220203
The linked article is from “AWS re:Post” which is the equivalent of a support forum where you can ask questions and get crowdsourced answers from AWS employees, support, or other AWS users. IME it’s not uncommon for such support forums for enterprise software to be behind some sort of paywall (or at least login-wall).
The real problem IMO is that some of these support forum answers have become so popular and important that they really should be part of the official documentation rather than existing solely on the crowdsourced platform.
Just as a community-supported plug here on the billing documentation front, we just launched https://cur.vantage.sh/ which we will never paywall. It's meant to be a free resource for looking up AWS billing codes with descriptions in layman's terms...specifically because AWS' documentation is so sparse/rough here.
We also maintain https://ec2instances.info/ which we'll try to add more documentation to (we recently added helpful docs and articles on each instance type page) to try and help the broader community.
I think that's one of the most incredibly short sighted moves you can make. Effectively paywalling the people that want to use your software.
I have to say that I'm not really flabbergasted that AWS did it, although it's definitely a new low. Stark warning to newcomers.
I can't resist the urge to complain about the quality of AWS documentation though. It might have been a good thing for peoples mental health to paywall it.
I despise using tools/sass/software/etc that login/pay-wall their docs. The only thing worse is getting a PDF of the docs.
Or this is just to avoid them scraping and being up to date.
Then only AWS AI can be monetized to help with their super complex platform.
What a genius idea !
- make platform super complex -> write disastrous documentation -> put it behind paywall
They don’t care if their customers keep getting hacked due to this complexity and unclear documentation.