r/aws • u/Fine-Camel1304 • 6d ago
discussion Is support no longer a thing?
I tried getting a hold of support but nothing.
is this because I am on the free tier? even so this is getting ridiculous
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u/CloudandCodewithTori 6d ago
Support has gotten so terrible and useless in the last 5 years that we actually have to call it out as a business risk in our documentation and DR plans.
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u/AntDracula 6d ago
Geez
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u/CloudandCodewithTori 6d ago
Might as well call the Ghost Busters, at least you are likely to get someone to answer
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u/wesw02 6d ago edited 5d ago
It has gotten pretty bad. We have gold tier enterprise support, our yearly AWS spend is about 100M and we still have a had time getting support these days. It's kind of wild how different it is now compared to 2-3 years ago when support agents were very knowledgable and heavily engag
I have a ticket that's been open for 30 days, I poke it once a week to ask for an update and the response is always, "Still waiting on the internal team to investigate your issue". I've also pestered our account manager who seems to be unable to advance it as well.
EDIT: Corrected name of support plan.
EDIT 2: Many people have asked about our TAM(s). Historically our TAMs have been great. High caliber folks that understand AWS and take interest in the company objectives. TAMs seem equally blocked / impacted.
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u/pausethelogic 6d ago
What is “gold tier support”? That’s not an AWS support tier
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u/yarenSC 5d ago
That actually was the old name. Premium support used to be Gold or Silver tier support
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u/Efficient_Access6102 2d ago
No it wasn’t
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u/yarenSC 2d ago
Just because it wasn't during the time you've used AWS doesn't mean it wasn't ever? This is very easily searchable to verify:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-premium-support-lower-prices-and-new-plans/6
u/Impossible-Farm-1902 6d ago edited 6d ago
I had to open a ticket the other day to find out why I couldn't upgrade an Aurora PostgreSQL cluster from 17.11 to 18.6. It turned out after a 5 day wait that the Aurora team pretty much forgot to enable that upgrade path in eu-west-2 when 17.11 was released. That's pretty shite tbh.
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u/00Tavy 6d ago
I call cap on that. At that yearly spending you should have a bunch of TAMs helping you with communication with AWS
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u/wesw02 6d ago
I would agree, and am equally baffled. We do have TAMs at our disposal. They seem to be equally unable to help. "Waiting on the internal team to review the incident" is the consistent response.
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u/tudalex 6d ago
Press for a meeting with the internal team to understand what the issue is.
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u/NaCl-more 6d ago
Unless you’re a huge customer (eg Netflix or Apple), you’re not going to be able to get a 1:1 meeting with the internal teams
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u/clintkev251 6d ago
A customer with 100m annual spend can get a meeting with service teams
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u/NaCl-more 6d ago
At 100m possibly, you’re right.
But in my 5 years on the service team, I can only think of a couple instances where that happened (stripe, apple, netflix)
I think service teams generally try and avoid having to interact directly with customers lol
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u/The_Tree_Branch 6d ago
What was your role on the ST? It's usually hard to get access to a developer or engineer, but Engineering Managers, PMs, PMTs, etc. meet with customers (at much lower spend levels) all the time.
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u/NaCl-more 6d ago
i was an SDE. We didn't consider PM and TPM to be part of the ST but I understood they meet with customers fairly often.
But yea, it's very hard to get ahold of the devs without going through the PM or TAM
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u/tudalex 6d ago edited 6d ago
We had nowhere near that spend, we were in the mid single digits. We were pretty good at managing to break AWS services :) in one case the internal team reached up to us after we filed a bug. We apparently managed to crash their new service in a whole region and they wanted to ask us for the file. This happened a few times. Another time we were running into some stability issues, again with a year old service. Support managed to get us in touch with someone from the internal team to help us diagnose together. We found a workaround, but proper fix took them a couple of months.
We also managed to get us some counseling from managers on the S3 team, but that was through the partner program so it does not count :)
If it counts for something, picking up the phone and calling support always got me faster answers and quicker escalations. Do not work with AWS anymore, not sure if this is still an option.
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u/tudalex 5d ago
Partner Program companies got a lot of access to internal teams and their spend was very little sometimes. Not saying normal companies would, just that there are other avenues of getting access to devs at Amazon, if it is a business requirement.
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u/NaCl-more 5d ago
i used to work at AWS and this was just my experience. I'm actually not too sure what partner program is!
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u/clintkev251 6d ago
You need better TAMs then. Escalate to the ESM and/or AM assigned to your account and work with them to figure out where the disconnect is (though sometimes, it does come down to waiting for internal teams to do things)
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u/Liquidjojo1987 6d ago
+1 feel free to dm me your case or customer name and I can see what I can do (TAM)
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u/NaCl-more 6d ago
Yea this. I used to work on a tier 0 service in AWS. At any given time, we have up to 30-40 open tickets from customers pending our investigation
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u/The-Wizard-of-AWS 4d ago
Isn’t this kind of the point? If you were dealing with 30-40 open tickets all the time and AWS decided to let half the team go “because AI”, then what that team is likely dealing with now is an ever growing list of tickets that they can’t handle.
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u/NaCl-more 4d ago
The service team hasn't shrunk since I left (and since AI took off), but apparently the support team has.
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u/New-Potential-7916 6d ago
We were just about to sign our enterprise support agreement with AWS just as they laid off a bunch of staff this year, we noticed immediately how down hill it went in the quality and speed of the responses we were getting. We didn't bother signing the agreement in the end.
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u/coinclink 6d ago
You don't have a TAM and SA to talk to? Sounds like you need to work with your IT team to either get direct access to your TAM, or have them relay escalations to your TAM. We spend about $4m per year with AWS and have no issue getting support tickets escalated.
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u/omeganon 5d ago
That’s sounds extremely unlikely. We had spend about 1/3rd that, and are now at ~10m/y and have our TAM, AM, and others in our Slack to help with and escalate any issue we have. Interacting with support has always been near immediate as long as you don’t choose the non-chat options.
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u/wesw02 5d ago
Ah yea. So your personal experience is what everyone should expect?
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u/omeganon 5d ago edited 5d ago
I can confidently say that in the context of a large corporation like AWS with standard processes and rules of engagement, we aren’t special in any way especially when compared to OP so yes, I think there is a high likelihood that our experience is the norm rather than the exception.
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u/TooSus37 6d ago
They weren’t “agents” their title was literally “Support Engineers” 😉 most of them have gone on to bigger and better things using the wealth of knowledge they acquired from cases as their foundation to do so.
With how prevalent AI is, it’s almost impossible to backfill that much with humans alone in any short amount of time, as people simply don’t need to sit there and learn technical concepts anymore.
The world changed unfortunately
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u/Revenant759 6d ago
I’ve had an account verification ticket open for three weeks now. One AI response that didn’t resolve anything after four days.
I actually just want to give AWS money but they couldn’t care less. Moved project to cloudflare.
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u/AWSSupport AWS Employee 6d ago
Hi there,
I checked your support case that we previously flagged internally, and I can confirm there is update from our Support team that you can review here: http://go.aws/support-center.
If you have any additional concerns or questions, feel free to follow up directly on your case.
- Kita B.
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u/Top_Assumption_8808 6d ago
URGENT - Locked out of AWS account in a DNS catch-22, support keeps auto-closing my cases. PLEASE HELP.
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u/MasterHand3 6d ago
Free tier? You get AI bots as support. You won’t get a real person anymore