Comment by motoboi
3 months ago
I’m my experience and based on writeups like this: Google hates having customers.
Someone decided they have to have a public cloud, so they did it, but they want to keep clients away with a 3 meter pole.
My AWS account manager is someone I am 100% certain would roll in the mud with me if necessary. Would sleep in the floor with us if we asked in a crisis.
Our Google cloud representatives make me sad because I can see that they are even less loved and supported by Google than us. It’s sad seeing someone trying to convince their company to sell and actually do a good job providing service. It’s like they are setup to fail.
Microsoft guys are just bulletproof and excel in selling, providing a good service and squeezing all your money out of your pockets and you are mortally convinced it’s for your own good. Also have a very strange cloud… thing.
As for the railway company going metal, well, I have some 15 years of experience with it. I’ll never, NEVER, EVER return to it. It’s just not worth it. But I guess you’ll have to discover it by yourselves. This is the way.
You soon discover what in freaking world is Google having so much trouble with. Just make sure you really really love and really really want to sell service to people, instead of building borgs and artificial brains and you’ll do 100x better.
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?
AWS support in general is extremely good in my experience. (We pay for whatever the tier below Enterprise is called, I think it costs 10% of your spend)
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.
My experience with AWS support has been downright freaky.
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!
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I've had similar experiences with Google as well. Reaching out with new services, hours with some of their technical people, invites to meetups, free credits, an extremely pleasing and responsive account manager. We spend a few hundred thousand dollars a year with them. The actual software is top notch. Most haven't been just turn it on and forget it.
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> ... wonder how much you need to spend to get into mud rolling territory?
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.
That was probably in the time of Bezos...Now with the new MBA CEO, it seems the rule now is to deprecate services without even putting out a newsletter or blog post. Customers just find out when they click on the Console...
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1. AWS and their account managers are relatively frugal compared to other enterprise sales teams. As far as I can tell, this is a good thing.
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.
> "My AWS account manager took me fishing. That’s what you get for a >$1M/yr spend."
I assume that's written into the contract somewhere and not a kickback, right?
It wasn’t quite as gauche as I made it sound in my comment. The fishing invitation was extended to a few customers and was an official AWS sponsored event.
Such a middle-class concern. The elites live on kickbacks.
Even interns have to go through training on how accepting on $30 gift might be inappropriate and sway their terribly important judgement..
Hell, I'd roll in the mud if that's what it takes to upsell $10k worth of compute to $1M.
I worked for a large company that committed to a >$400M spend with AWS. Even though I owned a very tiny piece of that pie, I could get my account manager and a technical resource on the phone at pretty much any time.
> My AWS account manager took me fishing.
Unless the company is yours or it's a private company that can raise a compliance issue...Any other gifts?
> Microsoft (...) have a very strange cloud… thing.
Risking a going off on a tangent, this is something I rarely see discussed but is perhaps one of the main problems with Azure. The whole cloud service feels like something someone oblivious to cloud computing would design if all they knew was renting bare metal servers. It's cloud computing in a way that completely defeats the whole concept of cloud computing.
Same feeling here. It's like they wanted a way to "play datacenter in the browser", but then asked 30 different teams to do it on their own, and only have them come together after they are all done to put the pieces together.
Then find out it's not good at all and go "oh well, I guess we'll polish it over in the UI" (not knowing that no serious scale works with a UI).
If I can't have AWS I'll make do with GCP. But if someone wants to go full Azure, I'll find work elsewhere. Screw that. Life is too short to work with bad technology.
I don't think that's it. I think Microsoft wanted a way to migrate already Microsoft workloads to something they could more aggressively bill by the GB or second or user or whatever revenue extraction metric you're down with. Basically, O365 extended to the entire M$ ecosystem. And for that it seems...er...ok. We've migrated a couple of dozen major M$ workloads from on-prem reasonably easily, and a bunch of little ones. Lots of skillsets transferred easily...I vividly recall talking a really fine SQLServer admin off the ledge when the "move to cloud" mandate came out who's now like "I had to learn a few new things, but it's pretty much like what I was doing before". Big win.
But then everyone said "a cloud should do X and Y and Z", and they try to bolt X/Y/Z on to the side with various levels of success. And now all the app owners who aren't native M$ have declared Azure not fit for purpose and picked up the torches and pitchforks. So we're going to support AWS, too.
Seriously wondering what you guys experienced with Azure. Never had an issue and prefer it over AWS.
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Can you be more specific?
> Can you be more specific?
To start off, read up on the ass-backwards concept of an app service plan. That nonsense is the ultimate anti-cloud computing approach to cloud computing.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/overview...
It's sad, because I legit found my experience working with Google's "serverless" stuff (like Cloud Run) to be superior to the AWS equivalent. The GCP command line tools ("gcloud") also feel better designed.
That's the thing GP is saying, Google might excel in engineering and even build superior products, but the issue bringing them down these days is that they can't manage customers/partners/etc for shit and if they fumble on search it could be over.
Most telling example was how iirc Terraria was a launch highlight for Stadia to show awesome indies, then somehow their magic systems lock down the developers account and despite internal pressure from Stadia devrel people they don't get it back in time until the developer just cancels development of the Stadia port. https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/lf7iie/terraria_on_s...
No account manager can help when the support is so bad it would have been better if they admitted they had no idea and superb if they admitted the feature we were sold didn't exist and had no plans of existing.
Would save me months of lead time.
Personal experience goes that Google Cloud support treated us quite well even when called by small 3 person team doing minuscule spend, in another company Microsoft treated us very well but our spend could be probably tracked by nationwide powergrid monitoring of their datacenters.
And AWS lied about features and ultimately never responded back.
I figure the account managers talking to high level management about contracting mandatory multi-million spend on AWS know how to talk with said management.
But at the end, what comes to actually developing and delivering products for others, we were left in the dust.
To make it funnier, part of what made it so hard was that the feature they lied to us was supposed to be critical for making sure the UX for end-users was really stellar.
As a dev I recently sent my first AWS support request. Received a non useful response featuring factually incorrect statements about their own platform. Replied to support ticket, no reply. Sent email to two AWS reps, never got a reply.
My potential aws account manager told me I was stupid, and that if I listened carefully to him, I would understand he was right and I was wrong.
I’m quite happy I’m not using aws - in my case (hpc, spot instances don’t work ) they don’t work.
I'm probably an outlier here. My experience with GCP support has been nothing but stellar, like I described in another comment down below
Having something work right is worth 10 account managers rolling in the mud in my opinion.