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AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

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Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#21

Post by ignoramous »

jacquesm wrote: post #16

One of the questions we always ask of cloud hosted companies what their plan is in case they ever lose their cloud account. Typically this is met with incredulity: nobody has ever lost their AWS account and all it's data? Right? Right??? Well, not normally, no. But it does happen. Not often enough to be a meaningful statistical issue, but if it were to happen to you then a little forethought can turn a complete disas…

> Typically this is met with incredulity

Surprising. In my time, things always got pretty serious if your service could not recover from loss due to regretable events.

TFA alluded to a possible but "undocumented" way to restore terminated infrastructure. I don't think all AWS services nuke everything on deletion, but if it is not in writing ...

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#22

Post by Group_B »

qualeed wrote: post #12

Awesome that the author got their stuff back. But... > My data is back. Not because of viral pressure. Not because of bad PR. [...] > “I am devastated to read on your blog about the deletion of your AWS data. I did want to reach out to let you know that people in positions of leadership, such as my boss, are aware of your blog post and I’ve been tasked with finding out what I can, and to at least prevent this from ha…

So lesson learned, write a blog post if you need support with AWS?

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#23

Post by mox1 »

electroly wrote: post #14

Lesson learned: If you have important workloads in AWS, but don't spend enough to get a dedicated account rep, make sure you have some sort of online presence that you can use later to gain access to the real support group.

...or ensure you have backups of data in a non-AWS location?

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#24

Post by seuros »

qualeed wrote: post #12

Awesome that the author got their stuff back. But... > My data is back. Not because of viral pressure. Not because of bad PR. [...] > “I am devastated to read on your blog about the deletion of your AWS data. I did want to reach out to let you know that people in positions of leadership, such as my boss, are aware of your blog post and I’ve been tasked with finding out what I can, and to at least prevent this from ha…

The AWS employee actually contacted me before my blog post even reached three digits in views. So no, it wasn’t PR-driven in the reactive sense.

But here’s what I learned from this experience: If you are stuck in a room full of deaf people, stop screaming, just open the door and go find someone who can hear you.

The 20 days of pain I went through, it wasn’t because AWS couldnt fix it.

It’s because I believed that one of the 9 support agents would eventually break script and act like a human. Or that they get monitored by another team.

Turns out, that never happened.

It took someone from outside the ticketing system to actually listen and say: Wait. This makes no sense.

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#25

Post by Traubenfuchs »

jacquesm wrote: post #16

One of the questions we always ask of cloud hosted companies what their plan is in case they ever lose their cloud account. Typically this is met with incredulity: nobody has ever lost their AWS account and all it's data? Right? Right??? Well, not normally, no. But it does happen. Not often enough to be a meaningful statistical issue, but if it were to happen to you then a little forethought can turn a complete disas…

We have a slack channel with more than 20 external @amazon.com engineers and salespeople that instantly respond to all our queries, sometimes proactively inform us of stuff or offer advice...

Doesn't everyone has this?

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#26

Post by electroly »

mox1 wrote: post #23
electroly wrote: post #14

Lesson learned: If you have important workloads in AWS, but don't spend enough to get a dedicated account rep, make sure you have some sort of online presence that you can use later to gain access to the real support group.

...or ensure you have backups of data in a non-AWS location?

It's not an "or" situation--these are orthogonal issues. The way support behaved is about AWS. Backups are about you. You should have backups and AWS should not arbitrarily terminate accounts without support recourse. We can discuss them separately if we want. I care about the uptime of my AWS accounts even though I have comprehensive backups.

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#27

Post by IlikeKitties »

pjc50 wrote: post #8

Social media is the true support channel of last resort, especially in a community like HN where your message might just find its way to an insider with enough seniority to go off script and fix things. Re: "The Support Agents Who Became LLMs"; yes, institutionalized support is terrible almost everywhere. Partly because it costs real money to pay real humans to do it properly, so it ends up as a squeezed cost centre.

Is it just me or have others here also just plainly given up using support channels of almost any company? I feel like in most cases they are neither able or willing to help you and they rarely are able to do more than yourself using the webuis.

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#28

Post by boogieknite »

qualeed wrote: post #12

Awesome that the author got their stuff back. But... > My data is back. Not because of viral pressure. Not because of bad PR. [...] > “I am devastated to read on your blog about the deletion of your AWS data. I did want to reach out to let you know that people in positions of leadership, such as my boss, are aware of your blog post and I’ve been tasked with finding out what I can, and to at least prevent this from ha…

much much much smaller scale but i accidentally signed up for some AWS certificate service i didnt understand or use and took a $700 bill on the chin

customer service was great and refunded my money without me blogging about it. we messaged back and forth about what i was trying to do and what i thought i was signing up for. i think it helped to have a long history of tiny aws instances because they mentioned reviewing my customer history

i want to hate amazon but they provided surprisingly pleasant and personable service to a small fry like me. that exchange alone probably cost amazon more money than ive spent in aws. won my probably misguided customer loyalty

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#29

Post by lotsofpulp »

colmmacc wrote: post #20
eqvinox wrote: post #11

> "people in positions of leadership, such as my boss, are aware of your blog post and I’ve been tasked with finding out what I can" Translation: "someone noticed it trending on HN, decided it was bad publicity, and that they should do something about it" Implication: what mattered was the bad publicity, not the poor support infrastructure. The latter won't change, and the next person with similar problems will get t…

Every week at AWS we have an account protection meeting; it's got the teams who handle fraud and abuse detection, compromised accounts (e.g. when a customer has a security issue on their side), non-payment, forgotten creds, as well as our support team. You'll find the most junior members of those teams, all the way up to VPs, in the same meeting diving into the nitty gritty. Every week. Disabling a legitimate in-use…

It might not be for you, but it is an acceptable cost of doing business for whoever is high enough up the chain that is setting the budget such that sufficient customer support is not available.

And disabling an in use account was not the issue here. There not being a way to get the account re enabled is the issue.

Re: AWS Restored My Account: The Human Who Made the Difference

#30

Post by bigstrat2003 »

qualeed wrote: post #12

Awesome that the author got their stuff back. But... > My data is back. Not because of viral pressure. Not because of bad PR. [...] > “I am devastated to read on your blog about the deletion of your AWS data. I did want to reach out to let you know that people in positions of leadership, such as my boss, are aware of your blog post and I’ve been tasked with finding out what I can, and to at least prevent this from ha…

I think the blog made a difference, yes - but that doesn't mean it was just a PR move by Amazon. It's perfectly possible that the Amazon employee who contacted the author truly does care and wanted to help because of that. It's fair to say that without the blog post this issue wouldn't have been noticed or fixed, but anything past that is really just speculating about people's motives.
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