You get reimbursed?!?! We've been pleading for several months now for a service credit or at least an acknowledgment that they screwed up. Discovered an arcane issue with ARPing to elasticache from within a vpc. Cost us ~$8000 in instances we left running at their request to diagnose, and about the same in man time from our side. Took them 6 weeks to diagnose, too - bloody pathetic.
We spend $30k a month with AWS and they treat us like crap. The tech is ok, but their communications and customer service are mindblowingly atrocious.
If I can give one bit of advice - don't pay for either their support or an account manager. They don't provide either, and their staff turnover is severe, so your account manager will be a noob to their business every few weeks.
I work at AWS (npinguy does not to the best of my knowledge). If you've spent $8,000 on maintaining instances you wouldn't have running otherwise to reproduce a bug on our behest, we don't want you to have to pay for that. I'd like to look into getting a refund for you. Is there an email address I can reach you at to get more details on the situation?
No, don't work at AWS, for the record. But responses like this is why I'm a big fan of the Amazon platform and the point I was trying to make. Oh well.
Oddly enough, a few hours after my post we were advised that we'll be getting a credit. Not as much as we'd hoped for, and it's taken three months of daily chasing by us to get here.
Hi madaxe_again,
Would you mind sending me an e-mail to zamansky@amazon.com? I am the Product Manager of Amazon ElastiCache, want to make sure you received the appropriate refund and address any issues.
Thanks
When a script mistakingly provisioned a ridiculous amount of read/write capacity on hundreds of DynamoDB tables, we were presented with a bill in the thousands of dollars. We got reimbursed after talking with our account manager for 15 minutes.
Maybe my experience is the exception, but my account manager has always been extremely helpful at resolving whatever issues we had.
We had one with barely $7,000 of spending per month, but it might be because I already had my foot in the door with a previous account that brought them about $40,000/month.
I've been reimbursed after an issue that led to an unknown malicious attacker spinning up many maximally-sized EC2 instances for a day. We just had to ask support and comply with cleaning up our instances (which we had done anyway...).
I apologize for your poor experience with Amazon, and have no doubt that many mistakes were made with your account.
But you should recognize that your experience is the exception not the rule. The vast majority of customers have nothing but good things to say, and Amazon works tirelessly to maintain that reputation.
Why are you apologizing unless you work for Amazon?
If you do work for Amazon, I would suggest this approach is not very good customer relations, it's only going to make people madder.
If you don't work for Amazon, and are some kind of Amazon fanboy trying to do free volunteer customer relations for Amazon... you're not helping.
("Oh yeah, we totally fucked up your account, but I insist you recognize that we're awesome anyway, even though I'm not doing anything to make good on our mistakes. Why do you have to recognize that? Cause most people have 'nothing but good things to say' about us, and besides we work really hard, and you can know both of those things are true because I say so.")
Not sure if you actually work for Amazon, but your apology would probably be worth something if you actually decided to take steps to rebuild Amazon's reputation with madaxe_again rather than telling them they're the exception not the rule.
I do work at AWS - npinguy does not to the best of my knowledge - and we're looking into a refund for madaxe_again. I'm hoping for a reply from him so we can get more details as to which company this is for, as we'd need that to get the refund process going.
At AWS, we work to keep prices as low as possible and we definitely don't like seeing customers spend money where they wouldn't normally - for example, in reproducing a bug at our request. We're totally happy to look into getting some a refund, and if there's any frustrations with AWS that you or anyone else has, please don't hesitate to let us know.
The current security issue that's causing the need for rebooting EC2 instances isn't something anyone wants, and we do not take steps like this lightly. We work to make sure that the EC2 platform is stable and secure, and in the event of a bug that causes security issues that have the potential to affect our customer's infrastructure that runs on AWS, we want to make sure that the impact is as minimal as possible. In this case, we did not have any other options unfortunately, and we are working with our customers to try and keep the impact as minimal as possible. If you're an AWS customer and you're having issues caused by this (or anything else), please contact us so we can assist you.
We spend $30k a month with AWS and they treat us like crap. The tech is ok, but their communications and customer service are mindblowingly atrocious.
If I can give one bit of advice - don't pay for either their support or an account manager. They don't provide either, and their staff turnover is severe, so your account manager will be a noob to their business every few weeks.