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You unfortunately get what you pay for. AWS is more expensive than God, but I'll be damned if you can't have a throat to choke in less than 10 minutes whenever

You unfortunately get what you pay for. AWS is more expensive than God, but I'll be damned if you can't have a throat to choke in less than 10 minutes whenever something like this happens.

orangepurple 3y ago
AWS support replies back to your messages when they feel like it. Their support is just as shady but they have better uptime for sure
- erulabs 3y ago
  FWIW, our aws enterprise support reps are available 24/7 and usually respond within a few minutes. But again, you get what you pay for.
  - eropple 3y ago
    I was working for a pretty big early AWS customer--one that had realized that for the low low price of all your money you could make DynamoDB scale to some truly massive numbers--and one time when we were having trouble around noon Eastern, a colleague called up our TAM. As he told it, the TAM sounded half-asleep, so my colleague asked if everything was alright. "I'm in Hawaii on my honeymoon and my backup missed your call, so it escalated." I probably wouldn't have answered the phone. Granted, that's why I don't do that job. But I have always had a real appreciation for the good TAMs ever since.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      Wonder if that marriage lasted though? ;)
    - silisili 3y ago
      Weird, I just begrudgingly went from Postgres to Dynamo because it was so much cheaper. We're not huge scale though, so I'm wondering where the costs start to diverge the other way.
      - kadoban 3y ago
        With Dynamo it seems to depend a lot exactly what you're doing. If you're careful about your queries, it's pretty cheap.
      - eropple 3y ago
        This was, 2012 and we were hitting read and write limits regionally. It was not a wise plan. It did, however, run. Technically.
- sho 3y ago
  No love for AWS, but this isn't true, at least for larger deploys. If you're running enough with them that you have an account manager, they are very good indeed. You can have someone, someone good, on the phone within minutes and they will stay on the line until the issue is sorted. I recall an incident at my old company where we were under DDOS, it was getting through cloudflare and saturating LBs in some complicated manner (don't recall the exact details) which made it hard for us to fix ourselves. They were on the phone with us for hours, well past midnight their time, helping us sort it out. The downtime sucked, but I was certainly impressed with their truly excellent support.
mike_d 3y ago
> I'll be damned if you can't have a throat to choke in less than 10 minutes whenever something like this happens That is a hell of generous description for a person who sits in your Slack instance and responds with "I have escalated to the team internally and am waiting to hear back on confirmation if this is an issue." Moving a Level 1 support engineer closer to the customer doesn't give them more information, it just reduces the latency to getting a non-answer.
joecool1029 3y ago
I had one situation where a Hetzner dedi didn't come back up on a reboot. Their dedis are cheap, this one is like $40ish/mo? Opened a ticket and support had it back up again within about 10 minutes, turned out to be a failed CPU fan which caused an overheat condition and made it so the system wouldn't complete the boot. They swapped the fan and it came up. It's the only failure I've had in years of dealing with them and was just impressed how quickly a physical failure event like that got handled.
- ps 3y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM Datacenters in my country usually had some rooms with tower servers 20 years ago here, well my first colo was for the tower server I brought in the large backpack:-). But density requirements, cold/hot aisles etc. prevailed and towers are generally considered inefficient for the datacenter purposes. And then you have Hetzner datacenter that probably all people running DCs I know would ridicule, but they would not be able to respond to fan replacement at the same time. I wonder how many rack server chassis are recycled each year because the manufacturer just won't let you reuse them with new motherboard, power supply due to new shape, design, ports placement etc.
pinkcan 3y ago
> a throat to choke yikes
- fuzztester 3y ago
  That's a common phrase, not to be taken literally. It just means one single person (at the vendor) who you can complain to, or raise an issue with.
  - pinkcan 3y ago
    yea, it's just another one to add to a list of expressions that are unnecessarily aggressive, and for which there are better alternatives
  - ctvo 3y ago
    Been in the industry a long time. It’s not a common phrase. It’s weirdly violent. At most “someone to yell at”. A throat to choke? What the fuck.
    - pinkcan 3y ago
      not a native speaker, but have been reading and writing english long enough to pick up the meaning immediately anyway, had the same though when typing my sibling comment, felt so disgusted reading that

You unfortunately get what you pay for. AWS is more expensive than God, but I'll be damned if you can't have a throat to choke in less than 10 minutes whenever something like this happens.

orangepurple 3y ago

AWS support replies back to your messages when they feel like it. Their support is just as shady but they have better uptime for sure

erulabs 3y ago
FWIW, our aws enterprise support reps are available 24/7 and usually respond within a few minutes. But again, you get what you pay for.
- eropple 3y ago
  I was working for a pretty big early AWS customer--one that had realized that for the low low price of all your money you could make DynamoDB scale to some truly massive numbers--and one time when we were having trouble around noon Eastern, a colleague called up our TAM. As he told it, the TAM sounded half-asleep, so my colleague asked if everything was alright. "I'm in Hawaii on my honeymoon and my backup missed your call, so it escalated." I probably wouldn't have answered the phone. Granted, that's why I don't do that job. But I have always had a real appreciation for the good TAMs ever since.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Wonder if that marriage lasted though? ;)
  - silisili 3y ago
    Weird, I just begrudgingly went from Postgres to Dynamo because it was so much cheaper. We're not huge scale though, so I'm wondering where the costs start to diverge the other way.
    - kadoban 3y ago
      With Dynamo it seems to depend a lot exactly what you're doing. If you're careful about your queries, it's pretty cheap.
    - eropple 3y ago
      This was, 2012 and we were hitting read and write limits regionally. It was not a wise plan. It did, however, run. Technically.
sho 3y ago
No love for AWS, but this isn't true, at least for larger deploys. If you're running enough with them that you have an account manager, they are very good indeed. You can have someone, someone good, on the phone within minutes and they will stay on the line until the issue is sorted. I recall an incident at my old company where we were under DDOS, it was getting through cloudflare and saturating LBs in some complicated manner (don't recall the exact details) which made it hard for us to fix ourselves. They were on the phone with us for hours, well past midnight their time, helping us sort it out. The downtime sucked, but I was certainly impressed with their truly excellent support.

mike_d 3y ago

> I'll be damned if you can't have a throat to choke in less than 10 minutes whenever something like this happens That is a hell of generous description for a person who sits in your Slack instance and responds with "I have escalated to the team internally and am waiting to hear back on confirmation if this is an issue." Moving a Level 1 support engineer closer to the customer doesn't give them more information, it just reduces the latency to getting a non-answer.

joecool1029 3y ago

I had one situation where a Hetzner dedi didn't come back up on a reboot. Their dedis are cheap, this one is like $40ish/mo? Opened a ticket and support had it back up again within about 10 minutes, turned out to be a failed CPU fan which caused an overheat condition and made it so the system wouldn't complete the boot. They swapped the fan and it came up. It's the only failure I've had in years of dealing with them and was just impressed how quickly a physical failure event like that got handled.

ps 3y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eo8nz_niiM Datacenters in my country usually had some rooms with tower servers 20 years ago here, well my first colo was for the tower server I brought in the large backpack:-). But density requirements, cold/hot aisles etc. prevailed and towers are generally considered inefficient for the datacenter purposes. And then you have Hetzner datacenter that probably all people running DCs I know would ridicule, but they would not be able to respond to fan replacement at the same time. I wonder how many rack server chassis are recycled each year because the manufacturer just won't let you reuse them with new motherboard, power supply due to new shape, design, ports placement etc.

pinkcan 3y ago

> a throat to choke yikes

fuzztester 3y ago
That's a common phrase, not to be taken literally. It just means one single person (at the vendor) who you can complain to, or raise an issue with.
- pinkcan 3y ago
  yea, it's just another one to add to a list of expressions that are unnecessarily aggressive, and for which there are better alternatives
- ctvo 3y ago
  Been in the industry a long time. It’s not a common phrase. It’s weirdly violent. At most “someone to yell at”. A throat to choke? What the fuck.
  - pinkcan 3y ago
    not a native speaker, but have been reading and writing english long enough to pick up the meaning immediately anyway, had the same though when typing my sibling comment, felt so disgusted reading that