> I'll be damned if you can't have a throat to choke in less than 10 minutes whenever something like this happens
That is a hell of generous description for a person who sits in your Slack instance and responds with "I have escalated to the team internally and am waiting to hear back on confirmation if this is an issue."
Moving a Level 1 support engineer closer to the customer doesn't give them more information, it just reduces the latency to getting a non-answer.
I had one situation where a Hetzner dedi didn't come back up on a reboot. Their dedis are cheap, this one is like $40ish/mo?
Opened a ticket and support had it back up again within about 10 minutes, turned out to be a failed CPU fan which caused an overheat condition and made it so the system wouldn't complete the boot. They swapped the fan and it came up. It's the only failure I've had in years of dealing with them and was just impressed how quickly a physical failure event like that got handled.
Datacenters in my country usually had some rooms with tower servers 20 years ago here, well my first colo was for the tower server I brought in the large backpack:-). But density requirements, cold/hot aisles etc. prevailed and towers are generally considered inefficient for the datacenter purposes.
And then you have Hetzner datacenter that probably all people running DCs I know would ridicule, but they would not be able to respond to fan replacement at the same time. I wonder how many rack server chassis are recycled each year because the manufacturer just won't let you reuse them with new motherboard, power supply due to new shape, design, ports placement etc.
No love for AWS, but this isn't true, at least for larger deploys. If you're running enough with them that you have an account manager, they are very good indeed. You can have someone, someone good, on the phone within minutes and they will stay on the line until the issue is sorted.
I recall an incident at my old company where we were under DDOS, it was getting through cloudflare and saturating LBs in some complicated manner (don't recall the exact details) which made it hard for us to fix ourselves. They were on the phone with us for hours, well past midnight their time, helping us sort it out. The downtime sucked, but I was certainly impressed with their truly excellent support.
I was working for a pretty big early AWS customer--one that had realized that for the low low price of all your money you could make DynamoDB scale to some truly massive numbers--and one time when we were having trouble around noon Eastern, a colleague called up our TAM. As he told it, the TAM sounded half-asleep, so my colleague asked if everything was alright.
"I'm in Hawaii on my honeymoon and my backup missed your call, so it escalated."
I probably wouldn't have answered the phone. Granted, that's why I don't do that job. But I have always had a real appreciation for the good TAMs ever since.
Weird, I just begrudgingly went from Postgres to Dynamo because it was so much cheaper. We're not huge scale though, so I'm wondering where the costs start to diverge the other way.
That is a hell of generous description for a person who sits in your Slack instance and responds with "I have escalated to the team internally and am waiting to hear back on confirmation if this is an issue."
Moving a Level 1 support engineer closer to the customer doesn't give them more information, it just reduces the latency to getting a non-answer.