Six and a Half Years of Cloud Service Provider Support: What It Teaches You About Production Infrastructure
I’ve been at Veeam for six and a half years. I started as a support engineer taking calls from cloud service provider partners, and I’m now a Technical Lead running architectural assessments on their production environments. Along the way, I’ve seen more infrastructure failures than most engineers see in a career. Not because I’m special — it’s just the nature of the gig. VCSP support is a firehose of real-world production problems from dozens of different environments every week.
Here’s what that exposure teaches you that no lab environment can.
Every Environment Is a Snowflake
In theory, our partners follow reference architectures. In practice, every partner’s environment is a unique combination of hypervisor versions, storage backends, network topologies, and business constraints that produced something no architecture diagram predicted.
When you troubleshoot hundreds of these environments, you stop assuming anything about how infrastructure is configured. You learn to verify everything. “What version are you running?” “What’s behind the load balancer?” “Is that storage backed by SAN or local disk?” These questions become reflexive because you’ve been burned too many times by assumptions.
That habit, verify don’t assume, is the single most valuable thing I carried from support into engineering.
The Failure Modes You Won’t Find in Documentation
Documentation covers expected failure modes. Production generates unexpected ones. I’ve seen:
- Backup jobs failing because a storage array firmware update changed the behavior of a SCSI command that had worked the same way for a decade
- Replication breaking because a partner’s ISP started doing transparent proxy injection on specific TCP ports
- An entire Cloud Connect environment going down because a certificate renewal script ran during peak backup window and briefly interrupted TLS connections to every tenant
None of these are in any troubleshooting guide. You diagnose them by understanding the full stack: application, OS, network, storage, and the interactions between them. That cross-layer thinking is what years of support exposure gives you.
The Human Side of Outages
When a partner calls in and their production backup environment is down, they’re not having a technical problem. They’re having a business problem. Their customers are unprotected. Their SLAs are being violated. Their phone is ringing with calls from people who are angry and scared.
Learning to work effectively in that emotional environment, diagnosing the issue while simultaneously communicating clearly, managing expectations, and keeping the customer confident that you’re getting them to resolution, is a skill that doesn’t appear on any technical certification.
It also changes how you design systems later. When you’ve been the person on the phone during an outage, you think differently about alerting, about runbooks, about mean time to recovery. You don’t design for the happy path. You design for the 2 AM call where everything is broken and someone needs to fix it fast.
Why I’m Still Here
Seven years at one company is unusual in tech. People ask why I haven’t jumped. The honest answer is that Veeam gave me room to grow in ways that job-hopping wouldn’t have. I went from answering phones to leading a team of engineers to doing architectural reviews of production cloud environments. Each step built on the last one because I had the institutional knowledge and the relationships to make it happen.
The VCSP ecosystem specifically is a unique environment. You’re not just learning one company’s infrastructure. You’re learning how hundreds of companies build and operate their cloud platforms. Every partner engagement is a case study in how real organizations make infrastructure decisions, and how those decisions play out over time.
That breadth of exposure is something I wouldn’t trade for a bigger title at a company where I stare at the same environment every day. I’ve thought about it. The math doesn’t work for me.
What This Means Going Forward
I’m increasingly drawn to engineering roles — building infrastructure rather than just supporting it. Everything I described above, the troubleshooting instincts, the cross-layer thinking, the empathy for operators during outages, feeds directly into how I’d think about building reliable systems. Having spent years seeing how infrastructure fails in production gives me a clear picture of what “reliable” actually requires.