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Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

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Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#101

Post by Aeolun »

misiti3780 wrote: post #74
sackerhews wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt your pain when I read that. If it's of any help, I can promise you that creating a Terraform configuration to set this up will improve your life, happiness and general well being in the future. Yes, Terraform has a learning curve, but it's also a black magic effery for the cloud.

second this, terraform is a game changer if you are using aws (or any of the other clouds, it supports multiple backends)

And if you plan to use Terraform, you might as well skip that step and go directly to Pulumi.

Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#102

Post by properdine »

vishnugupta wrote: post #20

At this point AWS has gotten so complex that one has to jump through a dozen hoops to get the simplest of things done. To scale up our reporting I thought it’s a good idea to offload report generation to a lambda function. Read from MySQL, dump into S3 and mail a link to that S3 file, make the link expire after couple of hours. Reasonably simple enough. But by God was it painful!! IAM is a rabbit hole, now later VPC…

Totally get what you mean. I'll pitch for either terraform or AWS CDK as good ways to make some of this plumbing less painful (they both have you describe the end state you want and then generate resources to get there).

Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#103

Post by jachee »

properdine wrote: post #102
vishnugupta wrote: post #20

At this point AWS has gotten so complex that one has to jump through a dozen hoops to get the simplest of things done. To scale up our reporting I thought it’s a good idea to offload report generation to a lambda function. Read from MySQL, dump into S3 and mail a link to that S3 file, make the link expire after couple of hours. Reasonably simple enough. But by God was it painful!! IAM is a rabbit hole, now later VPC…

Totally get what you mean. I'll pitch for either terraform or AWS CDK as good ways to make some of this plumbing less painful (they both have you describe the end state you want and then generate resources to get there).

Terraform is—as a colleague described it—a combination very-sharp-knife and fully-loaded foot-seeking gun. Very powerful, but also requires a sufficient amount of respect and care.

e.g. You’ve defined a nice, fully-functional end-state, which was generated n time ago, but now you need to make a change to that state, so you run your

    terraform plan
…and it wants to destroy your entire infrastructure and recreate it all from scratch just to e.g. add a new hostname to the certs generated by certmanager.

That may be okay, but you should probably measure at least 3 times before you cut.

Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#104

Post by garethmcc »

danjac wrote: post #77
qorrect wrote: post #22

Amazon has turned developers into consumers. I like the site, I hate how un-hobbyist-friendly the dev world has become.

You hear horror stories of students/hobbyists playing around with AWS Lambda or some other service and ending up with huge bills. Maybe they get resolved but I certainly don't want to deal with the panic of misconfiguring some setting and losing a chunk of my savings. I'll use this stuff at work if needed but it certainly cools me on playing around with it in my spare time, which is how I best learn new tech.

This happened to me once and AWS entirely reversed the charges no questions asked. And its really something you don't need to worry about. AWS makes more than enough money off of legitimate traffic they don't need to deny someone asking for a refund for a genuine mistake.

And playing around with Serverless is awesome. Things can be created rapidly and very little maintenance. These days I cannot see myself building an application without at least some element of Serverless infrastructure if not the entire solution.

Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#105

Post by danjac »

garethmcc wrote: post #104
danjac wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You hear horror stories of students/hobbyists playing around with AWS Lambda or some other service and ending up with huge bills. Maybe they get resolved but I certainly don't want to deal with the panic of misconfiguring some setting and losing a chunk of my savings. I'll use this stuff at work if needed but it certainly cools me on playing around with it in my spare time, which is how I best learn new tech.

This happened to me once and AWS entirely reversed the charges no questions asked. And its really something you don't need to worry about. AWS makes more than enough money off of legitimate traffic they don't need to deny someone asking for a refund for a genuine mistake. And playing around with Serverless is awesome. Things can be created rapidly and very little maintenance. These days I cannot see myself building a…

OK, but I'd rather not have to make a panicked call to AWS customer service and throw myself at their mercy just so I can do some coding in my free time, thanks.

And think about how that applies to some student at college or boot camp on a tight budget with rent/bills to pay.

Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#106

Post by saargrin »

jrockway wrote: post #61
vishnugupta wrote: post #20

At this point AWS has gotten so complex that one has to jump through a dozen hoops to get the simplest of things done. To scale up our reporting I thought it’s a good idea to offload report generation to a lambda function. Read from MySQL, dump into S3 and mail a link to that S3 file, make the link expire after couple of hours. Reasonably simple enough. But by God was it painful!! IAM is a rabbit hole, now later VPC…

Sometimes I wonder if the old world where you had to buy computers and drive to the datacenter at 3 in the morning to replace dead hard drives was really so bad. I guess it was really so bad. Everything you have to build for yourself in the cloud is something you probably needed in your self-hosted stack -- a directory of users, permissions (and escalation), firewall rules, SSH key material, etc. I feel like no matte…

im working as a devops for a security conscious on-prem startup and .. oh boy it IS really so bad

Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#107

Post by danjac »

crazygringo wrote: post #68
qorrect wrote: post #22

Amazon has turned developers into consumers. I like the site, I hate how un-hobbyist-friendly the dev world has become.

??? The dev world is probably more hobbyist-friendly than any other world I can think of. But AWS isn't meant for hobbyists any more than SalesForce is meant as a personal contacts list. If you want to build a hobby project, use something meant for that, like a $5/mo droplet at Digital Ocean. It's fine and good for the dev world to have an enterprise-focused part too.

AWS is increasingly a standard that people need to learn to get employment, and the risk of a huge bill because you have misconfigured something somewhere will put off a lot of people, particularly students, from learning it in their spare time in hobby and school projects.

Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#108

Post by aynsof »

joshuamarksmith wrote: post #91

I might be too late to not get lost in the comments, but I did notice this flashcard: > How can you establish a secure connection from your office or on-premises datacenter to AWS? > Connections to AWS resources are typically encrypted by default (HTTPS, SSH, etc.) > You can establish a Site-to-Site VPN between your VPC and your on-premises network. > If you do not want traffic to cross the internet, you may be able…

Note that DX now supports MACsec in some locations/configurations: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/03/aws-direc...

Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#109

Post by baobabKoodaa »

joshuamarksmith wrote: post #91

I might be too late to not get lost in the comments, but I did notice this flashcard: > How can you establish a secure connection from your office or on-premises datacenter to AWS? > Connections to AWS resources are typically encrypted by default (HTTPS, SSH, etc.) > You can establish a Site-to-Site VPN between your VPC and your on-premises network. > If you do not want traffic to cross the internet, you may be able…

> I want to note that Direct Connect traffic is NOT encrypted by default and this is common misconception, both in real life and in exams. You must combine DX and S2S VPN.

This is true. However, I'm not sure how to improve the card. The examples of "typically encrypted" connections on the card were HTTPS and SSH. If you SSH to an EC2 instance over a Direct Connect connection, your connection is encrypted (because you are using SSH, not because you are using Direct Connect).

Re: Show HN: Flashcards to learn AWS skills

#110

Post by KptMarchewa »

vishnugupta wrote: post #20

At this point AWS has gotten so complex that one has to jump through a dozen hoops to get the simplest of things done. To scale up our reporting I thought it’s a good idea to offload report generation to a lambda function. Read from MySQL, dump into S3 and mail a link to that S3 file, make the link expire after couple of hours. Reasonably simple enough. But by God was it painful!! IAM is a rabbit hole, now later VPC…

>IAM is a rabbit hole, now later VPC restrictions on top

My idea is to build simpler system on top of cloud networking and IAM/permissions.

Why would I want to have networking between components that are permissioned to interact with each other, and the other way, why some app/lambda's service account have permission to interact with particular database, but be blacklisted on firewall? Have GUI on top to drag and drop "routes" between apps.

Of course, make it optional etc, but I think it would save tons of devops time for smaller organisations without audit requirements unlike fintechs, medical stuff etc.

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