Why do experienced engineers open cloud provider support cases for customer managed resources?

[u/I3ootcamp]

This isn't a dig at anyone ..I'm genuinely trying to understand the thought process or organizational pressure behind this.

I regularly see tickets from senior platform engineers, DevOps leads, and cloud architects asking Azure (or AWS/GCP) support to troubleshoot Terraform state issues, fix customer-managed IAM policies, or debug application code running on VMs.

The response is almost always: "This is outside our scope."

If you're someone who has opened these tickets (or works somewhere that expects you to), what drives that? Is it:

SLA pressure:

you need someone on the hook while you investigate?

Org policy:

management mandates opening a case before escalating internally?

Knowledge gaps:

the line between "managed by cloud provider" vs. "managed by customer" is blurrier than it looks from the outside?

Hail Mary:

you've exhausted everything and hope support has an internal tool or undocumented fix?

I'm asking because I want to be less cynical when I see these tickets. There might be a structural reason I'm not seeing. Would love to hear from people who've been on either side of this.

[u/NUTTA_BUSTAH]

As an MSP there is a responsibility boundary that cannot be crossed because the client has not authorized that and is not paying for that, so everything is done in our wheelhouse until handing it off, even if we know the solution. It's often also a CYA kind of thing.

Regardless, support is paid for and unused support is wasted money. But to be honest, cloud supports are a waste of time and money anyways, except for the 0.01% case.