Comment by ttul
3 months ago
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!
What kind of issues you had that they could fix them immediately? I assume this is not about configuration issues on your part, but maybe I’m mistaken
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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.
Yeah, I'm a little biased here as I now work at Google, but I joined in part due the positive experience we had migrating from bare metal to Google Cloud.
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.
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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...
> That was probably in the time of Bezos... Now with the new MBA CEO
Andy Jassy? Previously, he ran AWS for a decade and a half.
What services are you talking about?
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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?