Lucky you! And I've recently had a bad experience with Cloudflare support, but I'm still making my offhand comment, because recently an AWS sales rep told me that the formal support process for one of their enterprise products is, paraphrased, "post to a discussion forum, and if I'm not on vacation, I'll see it and escalate internally to get you support" in as many words. I actually restated it to them to confirm and they paused noticeably before unhappily saying "Yes, that's correct". So it'll be a while before they earn back my respect in that particular regard — I may be upset at receiving poor support one time, but it's still better than not even having a ticketing system available from the other.
AWS has 24/7 phone/email/chat support on the business and enterprise support plans (with severity-based SLAs) with not only a ticketing system but a case management API, and business hours support on their developer support plan. Your sales rep sounds like they just want to maintain control of the relationship.
Yup, I second this. At a past job we needed support for Kafka, and their tech support's advice was so fantastic that it was actually circulated around the company for general reading. We had an entire team of people who were expert in Kafka - including myself - to the point of having given widely viewed talks etc, and we learned a lot from them. I can't rate it highly enough.
That said, it's famous that there's a very big difference between the different tiers of AWS support. When I say 'tier', I just mean in the sense of how far your query gets escalated, though it's possible that only large clients get to be escalated to the very high tiers. (We were worth billions and spent near enough a million a month, so we were at least a t2.large to them.)
On Azure you can file a ticket and an engineer will be blowing up your phone in short order. That's on the developer plan. The expensive enterprise planes are the exact same support only faster with a guaranteed SLA.
Azure smokes AWS on docs, community, and support. Just my experience...over and over again.
I'm at a huge high profile company where we have dedicated AWS staff. We have a dedicated email address at AWS to reach them. First time I tried to use the email address I got no reply at all. Took a while to figure out it had changed. I had formed my above-stated opinion long before that whilst trying to use various services and referring to their docs and community to navigate all the undocumented and out of date cruft. This is almost a decade now of the same experience.
> Azure smokes AWS on docs, community, and support. Just my experience...over and over again.
Great. If only their tech stack was at the same level.
In terms of support (filing tickets) we can generally get on a call with AWS in a matter of minutes.
If there's one thing that's annoying, is the status page. We'll often get notified of outages by our account rep way before there's anything in the status page.
No joke. Sometimes I appreciate the way Azure has chosen to differentiate itself in terms of developer experience.
Then there are times using it when I want to walk into an ocean.
Interestingly, those times seem to be anytime I have to deal with Application Insights or LogAnalytics. Azure, if anyone working on those two products are reading this, y’all need to go read up on this thing called ‘correlation’ because the Azure native logging and APM is…
whistles
boy.
It’s something. I just love waiting 5-15 minutes just to see a log line, if I even see it at all with how routinely problematic and unstable their logging infrastructure is[1]
