It reminds me of my friend's hosting company that failed. They got a big customer and created a VM and the customer asked to fix a problem that involved getting a shell in the VM. Friend does it and the customer is gone next day.

This aside, even though we had too many support cases so far with AWS, and having highest support level, they mostly cannot access user data, just the metadata. We had a major problem with RDS once, and they specifically requested to load that snapshot to an internal instance to reproduce. It can happen in AWS, but not very common, in my experience.

> It reminds me of my friend's hosting company that failed. They got a big customer and created a VM and the customer asked to fix a problem that involved getting a shell in the VM. Friend does it and the customer is gone next day.

The customer asked the support people to access a shell on their VM and they then quit because...? - or the support people accessed a shell without the customer’s express permission?

I think it's because the support people even had the possibility of that access at all.

And I agree; support people shouldn't have that kind of access, with or without consent.

It is a fairly common method to test to see if they have access.

It's not common, but it certainly happens. Sometimes you just can't reproduce a problem without specific data.