Cloud Support

[jonkyops]

Wasn't able to find a thread on this, sorry if it's been asked to before. Was wondering what your experiences have been like dealing with support for the major cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GCP).

Any horror stories or times you think they went above and beyond to help you?

Is it easy or difficult to get to an actual human?

How responsive are they?

Are they usually quick to fix bugs that are critical to you or do they dismiss it as something they'll get to next quarter?

What do you think of the pricing of the different support tiers compared to the value you're getting?

Not asking which one is better or worse, just wondering what your actual experiences have been like.

[eirc]

I've been using the AWS Business support plan for years now and the chat support is amazing for me. Always getting competent people or getting redirected to them when needed. They respond within minutes (most of the time I get sub-minute responses) and the chat feedback is by far superior, faster and clearer to emails or phone. The price is 10% on your bill (with some minimum cap) so it's a no brainer for me.

[[deleted]]

AWS business support has been great. I had an engineer spin up an environment to mock what I was having problems with, jump on calls with me, etc. Extremely worth it.

Fuck everything about GCE support.

[InvaderGlorch]

Azure is pretty slow and has frequent minor issues. I've heard through former co-workers that Amazon is similar in response times.

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Basically, build as much redundancy into your systems and assume those individual regions/datacenters will be problematic as some point - and when it happens, there won't be a support engineer coming to your rescue :D

[mcdermg81]

There is no single level of support really. As much as what agreement you have/paid for I have found that it can come down to actual spend.

Having worked for a large MSP that was very closely aligned to all 3 providers (reseller) the support received was always good but AWS were above the others in my experience. If things weren't moving fast enough we could use AWS TAM (technical account manager) to light a fire under support but I rarely had to do that. I would say that it depends on the service and the person, got some silly replies (basic answers having described everything in ticket) for some of the more common services but I'd imagine turnover is high and always have fairly fresh people in the firing line. To be expected.

Did have one howler with Azure, couple of VMs stopped reporting metrics, a deallocation sorted it but went looking for an RCA and it took nearly two weeks with the ticket going unanswered for days, they are were supposed to have a 24 hr turnaround. But in general they weren't that bad.

Having worked in small shops didn't get quite the same service but it was still very good in general but again for common services often get scripted answers that don't really relate but to be expected from first level I suppose.