| AWS without paying extra for support can still be fine for a lot of people. Where I work we use AWS, but not many AWS services other than basic virtual machines. As far as what we run on the machines goes (OS, applications) we are fine dealing with that ourselves. It's what we did back when our machines were machines we owned at a colocation facility, and its not much different when its on a VM at Amazon. When something goes wrong that affects us and requires AWS intervention, 99.9% of the time it is something that is going wrong for many other people too, some of those will have paid support and bring it to Amazon's attention if it isn't something Amazon notices on their own, and when Amazon fixes it that fix will fix it for all of us. I can only recall one time it didn't work that way. I was trying to track down a problem with our applications that involved something whose processing involved steps on three different systems. I needed to rely on the logs from those three systems to figure out the order things had happened in, and it was making no sense. I checked the clocks, and found that the three systems had wildly different notions of time. It turned out that the clocks on some of our instances were ticking at the wrong rate. They were ticking at steady rates, and normally the time code in Linux systems can figure out how far off the rate is and apply a correction, but some of the AWS instances had rates that were something like an order of magnitude more than the Linux code can deal with. We found some other people talking about this in the forums, but it apparently wasn't hitting anyone with paid support. Someone finally bought some paid support and reported it, and it got fixed. (It turned out that it had only affected one fairly small instance type, and only an older version of it that you were supposed to migrate away from over the next few months, which made it so that only a very small fraction of VMs were affected). |