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.
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?