8 ms·

AWS paywalling select knowledge base articles, requiring Premium Support plan

193 points by gpi 2y ago

belter 2y ago
The next Oracle...
timewizard 2y ago
Well that's a great way to just move all your traffic to an open support forum. Why do companies think their garbage can of support, the "knowledge base," is worth _anything_?
- belter 2y ago
  Download these while you can...The MBA's are in charge: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhr1KZpdzukfdjsOHZ-BazZt1iK1J8UUw https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhr1KZpdzukfdjsOHZ-Ba...
chedabob 2y ago
I'm impressed they've somehow managed to make their documentation worse.
encoderer 2y ago
What makes this even more insulting is that their “premium support” is trash. You pay a percentage of your gross AWS bill and the support is useless in my experience.
- sokoloff 2y ago
  We’ve had excellent experiences with AWS enterprise support over several instances. It’s not cheap (nor is AWS overall), but my experience is that the support is quite good rather than useless. I have no doubt that others have had bad experiences, but that’s not been ours. (I have no connection to Amazon, other than as a user of AWS and retail and holder of broad-based funds some of which hold Amazon.)
  - encoderer 2y ago
    That’s good to hear and I have had good experiences when I worked at a large company with a giant bill and a dedicated TAM. But now I run a startup with about $150k in annual AWS spend and the Business Support tier has been extremely distressing. My most recent example was a scary query regression on aurora. We could provide a query that one day started returning objectively wrong results. Share everything with support including steps to reproduce. Their response? We can’t see your data or run this query sorry but here are some docs to read about schema optimization.
    - Corrado 2y ago
      Yes, it's been my experience that there is a huge gulf between the "Premium" AWS support plans (Enterprise) and all the others. The Enterprise plan is extremely pricey but you get very good support. I've tried debugging site-to-site VPN connections using both Business and Enterprise and there is no comparison. Business requests are processed by an overseas support team and you usually get a reply 24-48 hours. The reply is generally non-helpful and usually just suggests KB articles to look at. On the other hand, Enterprise requests go straight to actual AWS engineers in the department of the product that you are having trouble with. In the case of VPN tunnels, we received detailed logs of the traffic across the tunnel withing minutes of submitting the request. It was truly impressive and makes me sad that I don't currently have access to that level of support.
- bolognafairy 2y ago
  I haven’t used it in a few years but I’ve had wholly good experiences. Example: I had to parachute into an abandoned project running an ancient version of RDS Postgres. I was having a hard time working out the many steps required to actually get it to a modern version. The agent went as far as to run through the process on their end, showing the version jumps they needed to do, config options they needed to change at each step, etc. That was easily worth the money.
arjunaaqa 2y ago
Curious if AI models have already ingested this data. Or this is just to avoid them scraping and being up to date. Then only AWS AI can be monetized to help with their super complex platform. What a genius idea ! - make platform super complex -> write disastrous documentation -> put it behind paywall They don’t care if their customers keep getting hacked due to this complexity and unclear documentation.
lysace 2y ago
This is just... bad. Smallish company here - we have a premium support plan that over the years has cost us like 6k per support issue, all three times because of bugs on their end. Edit: We feel that we need it in case anything really gets messed up - like some complex account hijack or similar. Does this make sense? Are we overpaying for no reason?
- nicce 2y ago
  They charge on ticket-basis even if it is their fault?
  - lysace 2y ago
    They charge a percentage of your spend for access to this support, starting at 10%. Yes, that is both smart and gross.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    The cause doesn't really matter, you pay for priorized access to them (otherwise you can send your complaints to the customer service like a message in a bottle) It works the same for most companies where their product is a foundation of your business. Think Apple store for instance: you'll pay for premium support tickets to have expedited reviews of your apps, even if it's to work around a bug they just pushed in their new OS update.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - calmbonsai 2y ago
    No. It's usually a small percentage of spend, but there are "tiers" mostly related to how much (if any) of their Pro-Services you're already contracting. One "hack" I've recommended for larger enterprises is to budget a minuscule amount for their pro-services, but only to rely upon AWS "Principal or Product" engineers. I've been involved in far too many "Pro Services Remediation" engagements.
- 2y ago
jjmarr 2y ago
They've removed the paywall, here's an archive of what it looked like: https://archive.is/1if4M https://archive.is/1if4M
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- megadata 2y ago
  Did they remove it just on this article or did they stop this treacherous act altogether?
DevelopingElk 2y ago
Can you please point to where on the article documentation is being paywalled? I'm not seeing it. If Amazon removed it can you point to an archive link?
- notwhereyouare 2y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43095029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43095029
alfiedotwtf 2y ago
I see the Oraclifaction of Amazon has began
- smallmancontrov 2y ago
  The amount of pain that my management is willing to tolerate from Amazon is truly staggering. If it's not in AWS, it doesn't exist. If it's broken or decrepit in AWS, they just keep trying. If it's overpriced they pay and if an Amazon bug or broken promise costs loads of money they still pay (or maybe feebly ask for a partial refund). The profits from squeezing them will be monumental. Bullish AMZN.
- ignoramous 2y ago
  Aren't ex-Oracle sales & execs accumulating pockets of power at AWS for a good while now? To win enterprise deals, there's no way around hiring folks with long-term, robust, deep business networks (ex: folks at Microsoft & Oracle). See also: CEO at GCP ;) It is Oracle's world, enterprises merely live in it.
  - alfiedotwtf 2y ago
    Yikes! Having gone through the enshitification of Oracle while working at a university followed by the even more enshitification of MySQL once Oracle bought Sun, yeah… this is worrying for Amazon 100%
re 2y ago
An employee commented on this on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1isd0wi/aws_blocking_troubshooting_docs_behind_paid/mdfha0l/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1isd0wi/aws_blocking_t... E1337Recon 257 points 7 hours ago (Tue Feb 18 14:00:30 2025 UTC) > Hey I’m gonna raise this internally as this is not a good change in my opinion. (Strictly my own opinion and not that of AWS) > Edit: The change is being rolled back
- victor9000 2y ago
  From my view, the specific article is not the issue
- ignoramous 2y ago
  > as this is not a good change in my opinion (Strictly my own opinion and not that of AWS) Hope that's the opinion of Matt Garman, too. Such changes reek of Day 2 mentality.
  - nine_zeros 2y ago
    Amazon is at Day 100 already
- worble 2y ago
  It's good this was rolled back, but the fact this got to production in the first place is worrying; it's baffling that anyone at any stage thought this was even remotely acceptable. I always defaulted to AWS but this has me reconsidering other options for the future.
  - karmasimida 2y ago
    True. Doesn't sound like customer obsession to me
    - belter 2y ago
      Neither Leaders are right ...a lot....
victor9000 2y ago
It's been a while since I used AWS, is premium documentation a thing now? Monetizing documentation just seens so sleazy.
- portaouflop 2y ago
  Haven’t really seen this anywhere tbh - most devs would rightfully not even start evaluating such a product.
  - Spivak 2y ago
    RedHat does this with their kb which famously have really high-quality answers.
    - szundi 2y ago
      [dead]
  - OptionOfT 2y ago
    Workday is an example. And I don't believe you can download the Z-Wave specification without paying a membership.
    - ale42 2y ago
      This is common in specifications and standards, ISO standards are expensive to get, and good luck if you try to get the HDMI 2.1 specification. Usually, people need that type of documentation if they are developing products they will later sell (although there are other uses, like hobby and research...). Not saying that I second putting such documentation behind paywalls, but it is at least in part understandable. On the other hand, paywalling documentation about a product I have anyway to pay for if I want to use it feels very greedy.
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      > Workday is an example. I'll also name and shame iCIMS. Some API docs are public but then link to other pages that are blocked (restricted to direct customers or temporary access by contractors) for no good reason and with no obvious pattern.
datadeft 2y ago
Aren't these already in *GPT?
bilekas 2y ago
I hope this was an accident though ? Seems counter intuitive to payway documentation, for me at least that's one of the selling points before buying a service - How well documented is it ? I can't resist the urge to complain about the quality of AWS documentation though. It might have been a good thing for peoples mental health to paywall it.
joshstrange 2y ago
I know they've fixed it but I really hope whoever made the change internally is chastised and not told "Just wait a few months and we will try again". Paywalling help/documentation is just evil. Period. I despise using tools/sass/software/etc that login/pay-wall their docs. The only thing worse is getting a PDF of the docs.
mattigames 2y ago
Games taught companies that they can get away with a lot, loot boxes and battle passes and DLCs but for documentation are coming, I hope that my company finally buys the JavaScript code samples DLC
- kvirani 2y ago
  Aren't AAA game companies hurting at least partly because of the blowback from those models?
  - tacticus 2y ago
    yeah but it takes years for that to happen so all the stock bonuses vest fine.
renewiltord 2y ago
Interesting. The only mainstream provider who does this that I know of is Red Hat[0]. It's amusing because it's a validation of the belief that companies will try to maximize customer spend on their highest margin SKUs. 0: Example https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1220203 https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1220203
- Spooky23 2y ago
  Huh? Don’t all of the network gesr manufacturers do this?
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    Yeah, they do. I guess I thought of AWS more as a software product than a hardware product in my head. But that's meaningless.
- tryauuum 2y ago
  don't you unlock it with a free account?
megadata 2y ago
I remember back in the day that some software sold the manual separately. Even the digital copies. I think that's one of the most incredibly short sighted moves you can make. Effectively paywalling the people that want to use your software. I have to say that I'm not really flabbergasted that AWS did it, although it's definitely a new low. Stark warning to newcomers.
casenmgreen 2y ago
AWS blocked Tor some time ago.
StratusBen 2y ago
Absolutely wild. Just as a community-supported plug here on the billing documentation front, we just launched https://cur.vantage.sh/ https://cur.vantage.sh/ which we will never paywall. It's meant to be a free resource for looking up AWS billing codes with descriptions in layman's terms...specifically because AWS' documentation is so sparse/rough here. We also maintain https://ec2instances.info/ https://ec2instances.info/ which we'll try to add more documentation to (we recently added helpful docs and articles on each instance type page) to try and help the broader community.
Terr_ 2y ago
At work, I do a lot of integrations with other third-party APIs, and I've seen some put crucial portions of their documentation behind "you need to be a customer first." In my book that is always a big negative sign, since it indicates possible issues like: 1. The company doesn't really support the API or consider it important. 2. The feature isn't really being used, being either obsolete, unreliable, or not useful. 3. The company's management is a weird kind of paranoid and the process of integrating is going to be painful because of that.
placardloop 2y ago
For what it’s worth, the linked article is not the official AWS documentation, and the official AWS documentation has never been paywalled as far as I know. The linked article is from “AWS re:Post” which is the equivalent of a support forum where you can ask questions and get crowdsourced answers from AWS employees, support, or other AWS users. IME it’s not uncommon for such support forums for enterprise software to be behind some sort of paywall (or at least login-wall). The real problem IMO is that some of these support forum answers have become so popular and important that they really should be part of the official documentation rather than existing solely on the crowdsourced platform.
the_arun 2y ago
It has a bigger side effect. If they paywall, how LLMs/Search Engines are going to train themselves on AWS knowledge?

193 points by gpi 2y ago

The next Oracle...

Well that's a great way to just move all your traffic to an open support forum. Why do companies think their garbage can of support, the "knowledge base," is worth _anything_?

belter 2y ago
Download these while you can...The MBA's are in charge: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhr1KZpdzukfdjsOHZ-BazZt1iK1J8UUw https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhr1KZpdzukfdjsOHZ-Ba...

chedabob 2y ago

I'm impressed they've somehow managed to make their documentation worse.

encoderer 2y ago

What makes this even more insulting is that their “premium support” is trash. You pay a percentage of your gross AWS bill and the support is useless in my experience.

sokoloff 2y ago
We’ve had excellent experiences with AWS enterprise support over several instances. It’s not cheap (nor is AWS overall), but my experience is that the support is quite good rather than useless. I have no doubt that others have had bad experiences, but that’s not been ours. (I have no connection to Amazon, other than as a user of AWS and retail and holder of broad-based funds some of which hold Amazon.)
- encoderer 2y ago
  That’s good to hear and I have had good experiences when I worked at a large company with a giant bill and a dedicated TAM. But now I run a startup with about $150k in annual AWS spend and the Business Support tier has been extremely distressing. My most recent example was a scary query regression on aurora. We could provide a query that one day started returning objectively wrong results. Share everything with support including steps to reproduce. Their response? We can’t see your data or run this query sorry but here are some docs to read about schema optimization.
  - Corrado 2y ago
    Yes, it's been my experience that there is a huge gulf between the "Premium" AWS support plans (Enterprise) and all the others. The Enterprise plan is extremely pricey but you get very good support. I've tried debugging site-to-site VPN connections using both Business and Enterprise and there is no comparison. Business requests are processed by an overseas support team and you usually get a reply 24-48 hours. The reply is generally non-helpful and usually just suggests KB articles to look at. On the other hand, Enterprise requests go straight to actual AWS engineers in the department of the product that you are having trouble with. In the case of VPN tunnels, we received detailed logs of the traffic across the tunnel withing minutes of submitting the request. It was truly impressive and makes me sad that I don't currently have access to that level of support.
bolognafairy 2y ago
I haven’t used it in a few years but I’ve had wholly good experiences. Example: I had to parachute into an abandoned project running an ancient version of RDS Postgres. I was having a hard time working out the many steps required to actually get it to a modern version. The agent went as far as to run through the process on their end, showing the version jumps they needed to do, config options they needed to change at each step, etc. That was easily worth the money.

arjunaaqa 2y ago

Curious if AI models have already ingested this data. Or this is just to avoid them scraping and being up to date. Then only AWS AI can be monetized to help with their super complex platform. What a genius idea ! - make platform super complex -> write disastrous documentation -> put it behind paywall They don’t care if their customers keep getting hacked due to this complexity and unclear documentation.

lysace 2y ago

This is just... bad. Smallish company here - we have a premium support plan that over the years has cost us like 6k per support issue, all three times because of bugs on their end. Edit: We feel that we need it in case anything really gets messed up - like some complex account hijack or similar. Does this make sense? Are we overpaying for no reason?

nicce 2y ago
They charge on ticket-basis even if it is their fault?
- lysace 2y ago
  They charge a percentage of your spend for access to this support, starting at 10%. Yes, that is both smart and gross.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  The cause doesn't really matter, you pay for priorized access to them (otherwise you can send your complaints to the customer service like a message in a bottle) It works the same for most companies where their product is a foundation of your business. Think Apple store for instance: you'll pay for premium support tickets to have expedited reviews of your apps, even if it's to work around a bug they just pushed in their new OS update.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- calmbonsai 2y ago
  No. It's usually a small percentage of spend, but there are "tiers" mostly related to how much (if any) of their Pro-Services you're already contracting. One "hack" I've recommended for larger enterprises is to budget a minuscule amount for their pro-services, but only to rely upon AWS "Principal or Product" engineers. I've been involved in far too many "Pro Services Remediation" engagements.
2y ago

jjmarr 2y ago

They've removed the paywall, here's an archive of what it looked like: https://archive.is/1if4M https://archive.is/1if4M

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
megadata 2y ago
Did they remove it just on this article or did they stop this treacherous act altogether?

DevelopingElk 2y ago

Can you please point to where on the article documentation is being paywalled? I'm not seeing it. If Amazon removed it can you point to an archive link?

notwhereyouare 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43095029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43095029

alfiedotwtf 2y ago

I see the Oraclifaction of Amazon has began

smallmancontrov 2y ago
The amount of pain that my management is willing to tolerate from Amazon is truly staggering. If it's not in AWS, it doesn't exist. If it's broken or decrepit in AWS, they just keep trying. If it's overpriced they pay and if an Amazon bug or broken promise costs loads of money they still pay (or maybe feebly ask for a partial refund). The profits from squeezing them will be monumental. Bullish AMZN.
ignoramous 2y ago
Aren't ex-Oracle sales & execs accumulating pockets of power at AWS for a good while now? To win enterprise deals, there's no way around hiring folks with long-term, robust, deep business networks (ex: folks at Microsoft & Oracle). See also: CEO at GCP ;) It is Oracle's world, enterprises merely live in it.
- alfiedotwtf 2y ago
  Yikes! Having gone through the enshitification of Oracle while working at a university followed by the even more enshitification of MySQL once Oracle bought Sun, yeah… this is worrying for Amazon 100%

re 2y ago

An employee commented on this on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1isd0wi/aws_blocking_troubshooting_docs_behind_paid/mdfha0l/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1isd0wi/aws_blocking_t... E1337Recon 257 points 7 hours ago (Tue Feb 18 14:00:30 2025 UTC) > Hey I’m gonna raise this internally as this is not a good change in my opinion. (Strictly my own opinion and not that of AWS) > Edit: The change is being rolled back

victor9000 2y ago
From my view, the specific article is not the issue
ignoramous 2y ago
> as this is not a good change in my opinion (Strictly my own opinion and not that of AWS) Hope that's the opinion of Matt Garman, too. Such changes reek of Day 2 mentality.
- nine_zeros 2y ago
  Amazon is at Day 100 already
worble 2y ago
It's good this was rolled back, but the fact this got to production in the first place is worrying; it's baffling that anyone at any stage thought this was even remotely acceptable. I always defaulted to AWS but this has me reconsidering other options for the future.
- karmasimida 2y ago
  True. Doesn't sound like customer obsession to me
  - belter 2y ago
    Neither Leaders are right ...a lot....

victor9000 2y ago

It's been a while since I used AWS, is premium documentation a thing now? Monetizing documentation just seens so sleazy.

portaouflop 2y ago
Haven’t really seen this anywhere tbh - most devs would rightfully not even start evaluating such a product.
- Spivak 2y ago
  RedHat does this with their kb which famously have really high-quality answers.
  - szundi 2y ago
    [dead]
- OptionOfT 2y ago
  Workday is an example. And I don't believe you can download the Z-Wave specification without paying a membership.
  - ale42 2y ago
    This is common in specifications and standards, ISO standards are expensive to get, and good luck if you try to get the HDMI 2.1 specification. Usually, people need that type of documentation if they are developing products they will later sell (although there are other uses, like hobby and research...). Not saying that I second putting such documentation behind paywalls, but it is at least in part understandable. On the other hand, paywalling documentation about a product I have anyway to pay for if I want to use it feels very greedy.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    > Workday is an example. I'll also name and shame iCIMS. Some API docs are public but then link to other pages that are blocked (restricted to direct customers or temporary access by contractors) for no good reason and with no obvious pattern.

datadeft 2y ago

Aren't these already in *GPT?

bilekas 2y ago

I hope this was an accident though ? Seems counter intuitive to payway documentation, for me at least that's one of the selling points before buying a service - How well documented is it ? I can't resist the urge to complain about the quality of AWS documentation though. It might have been a good thing for peoples mental health to paywall it.

joshstrange 2y ago

I know they've fixed it but I really hope whoever made the change internally is chastised and not told "Just wait a few months and we will try again". Paywalling help/documentation is just evil. Period. I despise using tools/sass/software/etc that login/pay-wall their docs. The only thing worse is getting a PDF of the docs.

mattigames 2y ago

Games taught companies that they can get away with a lot, loot boxes and battle passes and DLCs but for documentation are coming, I hope that my company finally buys the JavaScript code samples DLC

kvirani 2y ago
Aren't AAA game companies hurting at least partly because of the blowback from those models?
- tacticus 2y ago
  yeah but it takes years for that to happen so all the stock bonuses vest fine.

renewiltord 2y ago

Interesting. The only mainstream provider who does this that I know of is Red Hat[0]. It's amusing because it's a validation of the belief that companies will try to maximize customer spend on their highest margin SKUs. 0: Example https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1220203 https://access.redhat.com/solutions/1220203

Spooky23 2y ago
Huh? Don’t all of the network gesr manufacturers do this?
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Yeah, they do. I guess I thought of AWS more as a software product than a hardware product in my head. But that's meaningless.
tryauuum 2y ago
don't you unlock it with a free account?

megadata 2y ago

I remember back in the day that some software sold the manual separately. Even the digital copies. I think that's one of the most incredibly short sighted moves you can make. Effectively paywalling the people that want to use your software. I have to say that I'm not really flabbergasted that AWS did it, although it's definitely a new low. Stark warning to newcomers.

casenmgreen 2y ago

AWS blocked Tor some time ago.

StratusBen 2y ago

Absolutely wild. Just as a community-supported plug here on the billing documentation front, we just launched https://cur.vantage.sh/ https://cur.vantage.sh/ which we will never paywall. It's meant to be a free resource for looking up AWS billing codes with descriptions in layman's terms...specifically because AWS' documentation is so sparse/rough here. We also maintain https://ec2instances.info/ https://ec2instances.info/ which we'll try to add more documentation to (we recently added helpful docs and articles on each instance type page) to try and help the broader community.

Terr_ 2y ago

At work, I do a lot of integrations with other third-party APIs, and I've seen some put crucial portions of their documentation behind "you need to be a customer first." In my book that is always a big negative sign, since it indicates possible issues like: 1. The company doesn't really support the API or consider it important. 2. The feature isn't really being used, being either obsolete, unreliable, or not useful. 3. The company's management is a weird kind of paranoid and the process of integrating is going to be painful because of that.

placardloop 2y ago

For what it’s worth, the linked article is not the official AWS documentation, and the official AWS documentation has never been paywalled as far as I know. The linked article is from “AWS re:Post” which is the equivalent of a support forum where you can ask questions and get crowdsourced answers from AWS employees, support, or other AWS users. IME it’s not uncommon for such support forums for enterprise software to be behind some sort of paywall (or at least login-wall). The real problem IMO is that some of these support forum answers have become so popular and important that they really should be part of the official documentation rather than existing solely on the crowdsourced platform.

the_arun 2y ago

It has a bigger side effect. If they paywall, how LLMs/Search Engines are going to train themselves on AWS knowledge?