Same terrible experience here with GCP sales and support, but the other options aren't much better. The reality is that unless you are in the 7 figure range, you don't get serious attention. I'm still surprised why sales is so dysfunctional but billions of quarterly profit means there's little need to change.
Since at least when we started spending about $100k/yr we've had a dedicated account rep we can contact at any time. They also get in touch to schedule a check-in every few months.
They've been genuinely helpful in several situations and have scheduled meetings with various teams around AWS (like, actual engineers) to get us answers to questions, support, and guidance. We've been put in touch with team leads and engineers working on beta features when we tried to use them and had issues to report.
Obviously this is all a sales tactic: if we have questions about X, putting us in touch with experts in X makes it more likely we'll successfully implement it and then pay them to use it. But it's the kind of sales we're getting value from, not just blindly pushing us to pay them more money.
This is for $100/MONTH!! That is the deal of the century.
And they are ridiculously helpful.
I don't understand this - AWS must be losing money at least on support side, though they obviously get happy customers (myself included).
And even at $150 this would be great.
I had a client on gsuite with google 8 years ago - we COULD NOT get anyone to help with some weird admin state flow issue - it just was not possible to talk to a human being for ANY amount of money.
I suspect that AWS is 'losing money' on this in the same way that Apple are 'losing money' on their high Street retail shops.
Working at a place with AWS enterprise support by contrast, for the second occasion, I would suggest that many of the places paying $15kpm don't cost that to support.
Yeah. AWS is probably "losing" tens of dollars per month hosting my personal account. They've made a few million dollars in sales as a result. I've personally started several projects on top of AWS which spend that much now. That started with the free tier back when AWS was young.
Google has treated me so badly so many times now on my personal account (as well as on business accounts, for that matter) in so many different ways that they've, conversely, lost MANY million dollars in business sales. It's hard to even count; a lot of people ask me for advise on decisions, and whenever someone even thinks about using Google Cloud in a business setting....
This is not a hole I see Google getting out of, except by eventually shutting down the Google cloud. Too many people have had too many bad experiences, and reputations take a long time to recover.
And the failures just keep on piling up.
Google is great for personal use, but I think they're diversifying in all the wrong directions. They're not structured for success there.
Google has been relying on it for years. It's completely seamless and means you get even better reliability by insulating from the underlying hardware issues.
Looking at support as a cost kind of misses the point. Bugs are bugs, and your big-ticket customers might just drop you rather than helping you figure out what is wrong with your product. Ignoring paying customers (even small-time ones) prevents you from improving your product. If they took the time to reach out (and especially if they're paying $100/month for support) you really need to listen to them and try and figure out how you can fix the issue so it won't affect big-ticket customers.
The price starts to go up steeply once you hit the % of monthly spend.
I'd guess they don't get many resource intensive support queries from the < $10k a month customers (and at that level you probably don't get the A team support)
Another comment later identified this - I actually did get a weirdly A-team support response. That's what made me scratch my head because I was coming in the poor / cheap / don't know what they are doing door (and most support is crap user misconfig issues at least from my experience). I just wanted the thing noted somewhere in case others were hitting it, instead I got a way above standard support specific technical response and some suggestions.
The other poster indicated it is possible for stuff like this that you get bumped, even on the el cheapo plan, to someone actually on product team. While I'd hate to be on the product team having to answer these, it perhaps keeps folks aware of customer issues so they can at least improve docs for corner cases?
That's what it says, but in practice I've asked some really general and technical questions of AWS support and always received a helpful reply without a paid support plan as well. With a paid plan the response time is better.
In general the AWS support has been great. In many cases, they've forwarded our requests to product teams who have even fixed bugs we've run into and contacted us directly.
Our other experience is with paid Azure support, which did little else than direct us to the (not related to the question) docs. They also had a really hard time understanding our technical questions about specific APIs. To their credit, they did eventually escalate to the PM of the service in question.
In general, the team responsible for the service really must be able to help out with support requests. In AWS this is definitely the case, in Azure as well but there's a bit of gatekeeping. Does developers and PMs in GCP participate in support?
Microsoft support is always useless in that way and the TAMs are pretty powerless. I hired an intern just to contest the hours to effectively cut our (large) premier bill 70-80%.
Their model was fault-based, and a “bug” gets billed to the support group. So the game was always for MS to avoid assignment for non Sev-A cases, and our game was to find a product defect for anything.
Or support helpfully suggests that you file a suggestion in the public Azure feedback forums.
Yeah... just like the other 5 dupes of the same suggestion with hundreds of upvotes that the product teams have dutifully ignored because it only matters to customers.
