Ask HN: Why is AWS Support so frustrating?
4 comments
So, everything in Amazon and AWS is done by two-pizza teams, and those teams have to implement the full stack for the products they develop, including all support. That means many teams are super-narrowly focused, and they have probably developed extensive FAQ processes that cover everything that could possibly go wrong with their code.
So, the support process becomes just a simple matter of searching through your trouble report for certain key words and then giving you the top hit in the database for those key words.
But while all their data is available to all the other teams, it becomes impossible to discover and surface the critical information that is found in those multiple thousands and millions of data lakes, and there’s nothing to synthesize all that information.
And suddenly everything starts looking like a nail for the custom hammer that they have built to solve this one unique problem.
You are lost in a maze of twisty passages, all alike — but also unique.
So, the support process becomes just a simple matter of searching through your trouble report for certain key words and then giving you the top hit in the database for those key words.
But while all their data is available to all the other teams, it becomes impossible to discover and surface the critical information that is found in those multiple thousands and millions of data lakes, and there’s nothing to synthesize all that information.
And suddenly everything starts looking like a nail for the custom hammer that they have built to solve this one unique problem.
You are lost in a maze of twisty passages, all alike — but also unique.
We're in the same situation, I think AWS's product release has constantly outpaced their support. Basically, support seems to be lagging behind development and release. I think they will eventually stabilize in the next few years (i.e. support will catch up to dev)
To be fair to AWS, the top tier “Enterprise” support applies to all sub-accounts; premium support is per-account only.
I run zunzun.com on GCE and have never had a support experience like this.
Our company pays for the highest premium business support from AWS yet every interaction with them is a battle to have them understand the issue and even how their own services work.
I understand why it takes some time to familiarise yourself with a new issue from a specific organisation but I constantly see myself having to explain to them some of the basics of their own services.
The solution or responses when they will "need to take it offline" are usually incorrect which then adds more delays and frustration.
And another thing, we use sub organisations per AWS best practices (their new review thing) yet somehow the support is unable to provide help for these suborganisations as they don't realise there is a main billing / support account and virtual organisations underneath.