[electricEmu]

What was your experience like on Azure and GCE?

Azure had me on the phone within minutes of filing critical issues. Their engineering department provided updates all night.

Amazon issue resolution could be summarized as "won't fix" or "someday/maybe". Their API inconsistencies might be considered a poor developer experience [0].

It's great you like AWS. I do too for some use cases! I disagree their customer service is "better" though.

[0] http://apievangelist.com/2017/01/05/what-i-learned-crafting-...

[endymi0n]

To be honest, all of this depends heavily on the support level and company size as well.

While we had gold support at GCP (initial free offering), we were using one of their beta APIs that wasn't working properly — and within minutes we were talking to one of their Zurich SREs who was top notch and filed an issue that was resolved within a day.

When we scaled down to developer support (and even with a 5 digit infrastructure spend per month), we got delegated to an outsourced first-level support team somewhere in Asia with a complex problem and couldn't get through to anyone who didn't ask the equivalent of "have you tried turning it on and off again?", even after several tries. Eventually we gave up on using IAP completely due to severe bugs. Guess we'll upgrade again soon despite the cost, since the difference was night and day.

Just as a finishing line, the support experience at AWS was always equally mediocre, even in business support.

[philliphaydon]

Ah their API is far more consistent than Azure. Azure has the worst API of all. But their services are much faster than AWS.

Aws is much more consistent if you know how to use one API then learning a new feature is simple because it’s more or less the same thing (only basing this on .NET and JavaScript SDKs)

Been on Aws for... 6 years now. I was an Azure insider for like 5 years till they discontinued the program and use it for contract work.

GCE I don’t have a lot of experience in but just try to Ensure I know what’s going on incase we need to switch one day or I move to new job.

[ToFundorNot]

We had an instance crash (first time), once we were bestowed the honor of submitting a ticket after an hours of downtime (to which the clock only started an hour after the instance went offline, we were able to solve the issue ourselves, and closed the ticket an hour after submitting it... to which a couple of days later we received a response asking about the issue.

[philliphaydon]

Ah I had that experience on Azure. With aws we have paid support so when we have issues and raise critical tickets they respond in ~20m but azure. When they were still doing sql server as a service I lost access to my database. Support told me there was no problem. The azure insiders forum said others were having issues. The support wouldn’t even acknowledge I couldn’t access the database. 2 days later I finally got access again randomly. I never got a response to why this happened. I’m just Glad this was a non production application for some contract work but they ended up wanting to go aws over the experience.

I Guess at the end of the day we all experience different levels of support from all these providers.

[mattmanser]

I got some support from Azure a few months ago asking about DTU spikes, more of a shot in the dark than hoping for a good answer, but got an extremely good, knowledgeable woman go through it with me within a day. We only spend a few thousand a year at the moment.

I may hate their admin interface, but their support was top notch in my experience.