I do the same thing, often searching Twitter for "aws" or "outage" and find people complaining about the problem which confirms my suspicions. It's a sad state of affairs when you have to do this and Amazon doesn't seem interested in fixing it.
It wasn't indicated on the status page until after it was fixed. And it was indicated as a green check in a sea of green checks. With a small "i" in the corner to represent the outage.
I love AWS. It's not without fault but overall I think it's been well architected, well documented, and well implemented.
But the status page has got to be the ultimate example of what not to do.
I think everyone complains in forums and online but doesn't actually file tickets about it. These things are worth tickets too.
1. File ticket.
2. Wait. Then wait some more. Even if you pay big money for a support contract, they take a long time to respond (often > 1 hour).
3. Get a response from a first level rep who has no access to anything, has little dev experience, and asks some inane questions which I'm convinced is a purposeful stalling tactic.
4. Play the dumb question/obvious response dance, waiting an hour or more for a response each time.
5. If you are lucky (usually a couple hours in now) they acknowledge there's some problem (but never give you any detail) and escalate your ticket to a higher level internal team. If you are unlucky, you are calling up your account rep (do you even have one??) and getting them to harass tech support.
6. Usually around now the problem "magically" disappears if you haven't already fixed it yourself.
7. If you are lucky, a few hours, days, weeks later you get a response asking if you are still having the problem? You, of course, are NOT having the problem since you long ago solved it yourself. If you are really unlucky they try to schedule a meeting with one of their "solution architects" who is then going to waste an hour of your time telling you how to properly "design" your software for the cloud (i.e. trying to sell you on even more of their services).
8. Ticket is closed having never gotten to the bottom of the problem, maybe get a survey.
I've never seen this go down differently. Filing more tickets isn't going to change this. You want to really change things?
STOP PAYING THEM!
If a few mid-sized customers stop paying them and make a big-stink when they do it, then I guarantee you things will change! Until then, they have little incentive to improve and the big customers have a direct line to Amazon so they can circumvent all this crap. It's up to the small and mid-sized customers to push for change and the most effective way to do this would be to spend your money elsewhere.
One example: redshift. Had an expensive temporary cluster that couldn't be deleted, for days. Was stuck "pending" or "rebuilding". Assigned account rep would take forever to respond, and just didn't understand, would forward directions to using AWS console. Yeah, DOESN'T WORK. After a week decided to try getting attention on twitter, got it fixed in about 12 hours.
My experiences don't reflect this, perhaps we are familiar with different levels of support contracts. I use AWS for work only so I can only speak to one level if their support.
>3. Get a response from a first level rep who has no access to anything, has little dev experience, and asks some inane questions which I'm convinced is a purposeful stalling tactic. 4. Play the dumb question/obvious response dance, waiting an hour or more for a response each time.
I can't agree with this either. I almost always use their chat option and a rep is usually available within 15m unless there is an AWS outage.
I do however completely agree with 5 and 6, but I don't let it bother me. They can't expose too much info about their infrastructure. I'm usually just looking for a confirmation of an issue in their side or not which they have always been willing to provide.
If you're using aws for business and are unhappy with their current level if support maybe you should talk with their sales folks to find out about higher tier support plans.
Basically, if Netflix isn't the source of the complaint, they're not going to give two fucks.
/me suspects that netflix engineers get outage notifications through some other avenue than the status page.
This was the post I was googling for
http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/10/flux-new-approach-to-sys... (prepare to have your mind blown)
And what I found in the Google results
From 2015-04 http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/04/introducing-vector-netfl...
And 2014-01 http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/01/improving-netflixs-opera...
That is some crazy fast innovation there
Hasn't worked yet.
