Rick Kipfer's picture

Hi, In light of this development in the AWS Key Generation area (an error on Amazon's side that effectively cripples us from using the service), I seem to get this impression that AWS offers basically no method for contacting them about an issue unless you pay for their support. That's the impression I get, but I'd like to start a conversation here about it. Is this true? Is the AWS tech support really that limited for us unless we pay for it? I wanted to contact them regarding this Key Generation issue, but found no way. Is this everyone else's experience, or am I missing something?

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Matthew Roberts's picture

Hi Rich,

In summary: It's an issue on Amazon's side.

See this thread below.

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/forum/support/20130117/error-linking-aws-hub

Rick Kipfer's picture

Thanks for that Matthew, I appreciate it. I'll give it a try!

But the key generation issue aside, I would like this topic to still continue as a discussion about AWS support. I would still like anyone's input as to how we characterize it. Does it exist for us or not? 

Matthew Roberts's picture

No problem at all.

The first thing I did was try to contact tech support for this. I ended up sending a support ticket to accounting. After a few days I recieved a reply. They pretty much told me I'd have to purchase their paid support (Developer 49$/mo or Business 100$/mo.) Otherwise the only free support we could receive would be white papers or forums. 

 

I'm not too sure what the point of purchasing extra support ontop of paying for their service. :/ But I'm guessing TKL has support purchased with them. So going through the TKL developers is kind of the "long way around" to tech support.

Rick Kipfer's picture

That's deplorable, IMO. Gives me a really sick feeling that they don't have a way to directly get help or feedback with issues that are clearly theirs. I have no problem with having to pay for support, if it's to support MY errors or lack of knowledge. I imagine down the road when I have a few servers with them and everything is humming along and their service goes down for two days, and I have to scramble to sign up for their paid support just to find out when they will be back up again. Ug.    

:(

Rick Kipfer's picture

Thanks for your input Forest. I admit I did not see that "Technical support for health checks" cell in the service level reference chart. That does give me a "moderate" level of satisfaction, however, it may not be as warm and fuzzy as you might think it is for your customers.

For a serious problem that is not 'health check' related (that originates with Amazon), the idea of posting to a forum gives almost no sense of service. However, knowing that the forums are monitored by Amazon technical personel does help a little. May I suggest, if you want people to be more informed about their true basic support relationship, that you specify on the support level grid that the forums are monitored by Support staff? To me, forums have always meant "You're on your own unless you luck out and get someone who cares."  Maybe it would be worthwhile to somehow let people know that a forum has a strong technical support presence. That's the only way they may feel confident it is a viable option for them.

I don't know HOW to do that, I can only tell you how I (and probably a percentage of others as well) perceive a forum as an avenue for support.

Thanks again for your input,

Rick.

Jeremy Davis's picture

I am not aware of any reason why you couldn't upgrade Magento to the latest 1.9.x version. So it should just be a case of following the instructions as suggested by Magento.

If you run into any problems, please start a new thread here in the forums.

If you have trouble posting due to our spam filtering, please ensure that you have created a forum user account and ping me via jeremy@turnkeylinux.org and tell me your user account email. I can ensure that you user account can skip most of the spam filters.

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