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Amazon Web Services in Plain English

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Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#13
post #7

What's amazing is the amount of services Amazon offers. Whenever I look at my AWS console I see these reems of badly named services and I think to myself "after I've dealt with the current problem for which I've logged in AWS, I might get to figure out what all that other stuff actually is". However, I never do because there is more stuff to take care of, and since AWS doesn't make this easy to understand, you just d…

I understand where you are coming from.

I'm just 'starting out' with a lot of this, despite a few years building/hosting websites, and these sort of services are the things I'm starting to look at.

I'm completely disinterested in Amazon's offerings chiefly because they're so obtuse. Why should I expend so much cognitive load just figuring out what each service is and what it could do for me?

It's undoubtedly possible to do, AWS has a hell of a lot of users, but I simply am not going to perform the mental gymnastics to work out what they could do for me, let alone work out the price (which seems cleverly designed to keep the final figure a total mystery).

Maybe I'm too early in my progression to really need this stuff yet ( I probably am TBH) and so I'm not motivated enough to really dig into it, but the point stands - why should I need to be?

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#16
post #10
post #8

So many ways to make your software depend on Amazon.

Seems to work for Reddit, Zynga, Dropbox and Netflix.

Netflix had to go through a massive engineering effort to make their system reliable enough to work on AWS. If they knew what it would take in human and capital investment, they may have chosen to build their own datacenter.

Re: Amazon Web Services in Plain English

#18
post #9

"It's like: Stacking cash on the sidewalk and lighting it on fire" Is an accurate description of a large number of products that I have been forced to use after various CTOs have played golf with a vendors sales team.

Except that lighting cash on fire would be more fun and take less time ;)
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