Amazon Web Services - Scary good support?

9 January 2014 | Comments

Earlier this afternoon, I tweeted a question about Amazon Web Services:

I'm probably being paranoid, but is there any way of seeing whether an #AWS EC2 reserved instance is actually in use at the moment?
— Robert Chipperfield (@rmc47) January 9, 2014

Less than an hour later, I had an email from AWS support answering my question. But that's not the impressive bit. That email went to our office Information Systems team address - the account I'd used to purchase some reserved instances a little earlier. This means the support folks must have:

Spotted my tweet - which had the #AWS hashtag, but wasn't directed to them specifically. This is more than most companies do.
Looked at my Twitter biography and saw that I worked at Red Gate
Worked out which @red-gate.com AWS account had recently purchased some reserved instances
Open a support case and provide a useful reply

That's very impressive, both from a customer service and joined-up technology point of view.

At the same time, it needs care: when I got the email, it felt a bit weird. I'd asked a question, and had a reply via an unconnected route - it took a while for me to mentally unravel the steps they'd gone through, and it felt a little "stalker-ish".

It's something I've wondered about before - when I was working on a SaaS project, we could often see when customers were experiencing problems with the system, and had to trade off the opportunity to give great support with the surprise someone might feel when you email them unprompted and say "hey, I noticed you just saw this error message, and we're on the case already."