It's good this was rolled back, but the fact this got to production in the first place is worrying; it's baffling that anyone at any stage thought this was even remotely acceptable.
I always defaulted to AWS but this has me reconsidering other options for the future.
It usually starts with blindly suggesting we should get on cloud. Usually with no other reason than "Everyone else is doing it". That usually ends with a large pile of cash burnt and maybe a thought piece or two about how cloud is bad and we should just go back to banging rocks.
The non-blind suggestion usually has reasons on why you want cloud services, why AWS is the right choice over many other suppliers of cloud, and some cost analysis of what it would cost vs doing nothing or why you can't do nothing.
In tech, blind support of anything is simply based on superficial aspects like popularity or marketing without any specific supporting arguments around price, performance, etc.
Thus it’s easy to distinguish the two by asking in-depth questions. IE it’s fast! How fast?
The problem is that in most engineering discussions "big tech does this" is instant discussion win, while a solution that deviates from what coworkers perceive as "standard" will never get accepted, even if you use logical arguments.
I mean, if I'm doing a project with one other person, we can use logic to get to the best solution, but if it's three people in a group or more, then the most charismatic person becomes the leader, and the rest does whatever the leader wants, even if they make bad calls.
This isn’t really the official AWS “documentation”. AWS docs are located at a completely different website and are free to access.
The linked article is from “AWS re:Post” which is the equivalent of a “support forum” where you can ask questions and get crowdsourced answers from either other AWS users, or from AWS employees/AWS support themselves. Some of these questions are so popular that they show up in search results and so might be treated as documentation.
It’s dumb, but not uncommon in my experience for such “support forums” to be behind a paywall.
AWS's documentation about operating AWSs products and services I assume are correct and accurate.
If I follow their guides and end up breaking something because it turns out they forgot to tell me about something important, I would consider that a breach of warranty.
The only reason I can think of where documentation should be behind a pay/auth-wall is if it was generated specifically for your circumstances as part of some kind of solutions architecture or technical support process.
> The only reason I can think of where documentation should be behind a pay/auth-wall is if it was generated specifically for your circumstances as part of some kind of solutions architecture or technical support process.
That’s exactly what this is, actually. These aren’t the AWS docs. The linked site is the AWS support forums in which AWS employees, AWS support and/or other known contributors from the AWS community will give you personalized responses to questions you have.
Some of these questions are more generic, and so aren’t personalized, but they’re still the result of a question-and-answer on the forum.
I disagree that these are specific enough to warrant being private. I'm thinking more along the lines of your very specific resources/application/architecture.
This is more like a curated version of Stack Overflow.
I'll also name and shame iCIMS. Some API docs are public but then link to other pages that are blocked (restricted to direct customers or temporary access by contractors) for no good reason and with no obvious pattern.
This is common in specifications and standards, ISO standards are expensive to get, and good luck if you try to get the HDMI 2.1 specification. Usually, people need that type of documentation if they are developing products they will later sell (although there are other uses, like hobby and research...). Not saying that I second putting such documentation behind paywalls, but it is at least in part understandable. On the other hand, paywalling documentation about a product I have anyway to pay for if I want to use it feels very greedy.
Red Hat paywalled their knowledge base years ago. It was unpopular inside the company, but seen as required to respond to Oracle's wholesale ripping off of the content.
I was at Red Hat at the time. It was Oracle who ripped off Red Hat’s knowledge base content for their own knowledge base. IBM was not selling a RHEL clone at the time and had no reason to rip off the knowledge base. This was over 10 years ago.
Smallish company here - we have a premium support plan that over the years has cost us like 6k per support issue, all three times because of bugs on their end.
Edit: We feel that we need it in case anything really gets messed up - like some complex account hijack or similar. Does this make sense? Are we overpaying for no reason?
This attitude of theirs is why I'm never going to recommend or use AWS. When we first decided to evaluate if AWS would be a better fit for us over GCP, they never let our company get past their account verification.
We're a small US based company, just a few people. They required verification documents, business registration all a real headache. After all of that we couldn't use a single thing to run, not even cloud shell. It's as if the account was disabled in some very obscure way. We spent 2 weeks arguing with support to please reinstate access to our account, and after 4 false "it should work now" responses they told us to start paying for premium support.
PAY PREMIUM TECHNICAL SUPPORT FOR A SERVICE THAT WE NEVER GOT ACCESS TO OR USE.
Thats weird, you can open an account with just a credit card and update tax id / business details later.
Was it because you were doing "AWS activate" or something? If that experience is much worse than their regular signup process that's both funny and sad :/
With AWS support what I do is enable "developer support" (~$30/month) when I need to ask them a bunch of stuff, then I cancel it for the other 11 months of the year when I don't need their help. It's a bit cheap and I'm sure my account rep would have words if I was a "real business" but in practice it works for me.
If something goes wrong, you can sign up for a support plan on the spot, immediately file a ticket, and after a month cancel the plan. AWS doesn't care. If you only need it for rare incidents, you don't need to be paying for this every month.
The cause doesn't really matter, you pay for priorized access to them (otherwise you can send your complaints to the customer service like a message in a bottle)
It works the same for most companies where their product is a foundation of your business.
Think Apple store for instance: you'll pay for premium support tickets to have expedited reviews of your apps, even if it's to work around a bug they just pushed in their new OS update.
No. It's usually a small percentage of spend, but there are "tiers" mostly related to how much (if any) of their Pro-Services you're already contracting.
One "hack" I've recommended for larger enterprises is to budget a minuscule amount for their pro-services, but only to rely upon AWS "Principal or Product" engineers. I've been involved in far too many "Pro Services Remediation" engagements.
At work, I do a lot of integrations with other third-party APIs, and I've seen some put crucial portions of their documentation behind "you need to be a customer first."
In my book that is always a big negative sign, since it indicates possible issues like:
1. The company doesn't really support the API or consider it important.
2. The feature isn't really being used, being either obsolete, unreliable, or not useful.
3. The company's management is a weird kind of paranoid and the process of integrating is going to be painful because of that.
We’ve had excellent experiences with AWS enterprise support over several instances. It’s not cheap (nor is AWS overall), but my experience is that the support is quite good rather than useless.
I have no doubt that others have had bad experiences, but that’s not been ours.
(I have no connection to Amazon, other than as a user of AWS and retail and holder of broad-based funds some of which hold Amazon.)
That’s good to hear and I have had good experiences when I worked at a large company with a giant bill and a dedicated TAM.
But now I run a startup with about $150k in annual AWS spend and the Business Support tier has been extremely distressing.
My most recent example was a scary query regression on aurora. We could provide a query that one day started returning objectively wrong results. Share everything with support including steps to reproduce. Their response? We can’t see your data or run this query sorry but here are some docs to read about schema optimization.
Yes, it's been my experience that there is a huge gulf between the "Premium" AWS support plans (Enterprise) and all the others. The Enterprise plan is extremely pricey but you get very good support. I've tried debugging site-to-site VPN connections using both Business and Enterprise and there is no comparison. Business requests are processed by an overseas support team and you usually get a reply 24-48 hours. The reply is generally non-helpful and usually just suggests KB articles to look at.
On the other hand, Enterprise requests go straight to actual AWS engineers in the department of the product that you are having trouble with. In the case of VPN tunnels, we received detailed logs of the traffic across the tunnel withing minutes of submitting the request. It was truly impressive and makes me sad that I don't currently have access to that level of support.
I haven’t used it in a few years but I’ve had wholly good experiences.
Example: I had to parachute into an abandoned project running an ancient version of RDS Postgres. I was having a hard time working out the many steps required to actually get it to a modern version.
The agent went as far as to run through the process on their end, showing the version jumps they needed to do, config options they needed to change at each step, etc.
Games taught companies that they can get away with a lot, loot boxes and battle passes and DLCs but for documentation are coming, I hope that my company finally buys the JavaScript code samples DLC
The amount of pain that my management is willing to tolerate from Amazon is truly staggering. If it's not in AWS, it doesn't exist. If it's broken or decrepit in AWS, they just keep trying. If it's overpriced they pay and if an Amazon bug or broken promise costs loads of money they still pay (or maybe feebly ask for a partial refund).
The profits from squeezing them will be monumental. Bullish AMZN.
Aren't ex-Oracle sales & execs accumulating pockets of power at AWS for a good while now? To win enterprise deals, there's no way around hiring folks with long-term, robust, deep business networks (ex: folks at Microsoft & Oracle).
See also: CEO at GCP ;) It is Oracle's world, enterprises merely live in it.
Yikes! Having gone through the enshitification of Oracle while working at a university followed by the even more enshitification of MySQL once Oracle bought Sun, yeah… this is worrying for Amazon 100%
Interesting. The only mainstream provider who does this that I know of is Red Hat[0]. It's amusing because it's a validation of the belief that companies will try to maximize customer spend on their highest margin SKUs.
For what it’s worth, the linked article is not the official AWS documentation, and the official AWS documentation has never been paywalled as far as I know.
The linked article is from “AWS re:Post” which is the equivalent of a support forum where you can ask questions and get crowdsourced answers from AWS employees, support, or other AWS users. IME it’s not uncommon for such support forums for enterprise software to be behind some sort of paywall (or at least login-wall).
The real problem IMO is that some of these support forum answers have become so popular and important that they really should be part of the official documentation rather than existing solely on the crowdsourced platform.
Just as a community-supported plug here on the billing documentation front, we just launched https://cur.vantage.sh/ which we will never paywall. It's meant to be a free resource for looking up AWS billing codes with descriptions in layman's terms...specifically because AWS' documentation is so sparse/rough here.
We also maintain https://ec2instances.info/ which we'll try to add more documentation to (we recently added helpful docs and articles on each instance type page) to try and help the broader community.
Well that's a great way to just move all your traffic to an open support forum. Why do companies think their garbage can of support, the "knowledge base," is worth _anything_?
I hope this was an accident though ? Seems counter intuitive to payway documentation, for me at least that's one of the selling points before buying a service - How well documented is it ?
I can't resist the urge to complain about the quality of AWS documentation though. It might have been a good thing for peoples mental health to paywall it.
I know they've fixed it but I really hope whoever made the change internally is chastised and not told "Just wait a few months and we will try again". Paywalling help/documentation is just evil. Period.
I despise using tools/sass/software/etc that login/pay-wall their docs. The only thing worse is getting a PDF of the docs.
Can you please point to where on the article documentation is being paywalled? I'm not seeing it. If Amazon removed it can you point to an archive link?
E1337Recon 257 points 7 hours ago (Tue Feb 18 14:00:30 2025 UTC)
> Hey I’m gonna raise this internally as this is not a good change in my opinion. (Strictly my own opinion and not that of AWS)
> Edit: The change is being rolled back