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AWS mistakes to avoid

cloudonaut.io

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Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#101

Post by eropple »

sagichmal wrote: post #99
eropple wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terraform, as an idea, is brilliant. Mitchell and company isolated a hugely important need and tried to fill it, and I give them all the credit in the world for that. Cross-platform cloud provisioning? Gimme. But I cannot in good conscience not relate what a disastrous experience Terraform has been for me at both jobs and clients. Writing reusable code in Terraform is an exercise in frustration due to the extreme clu…

> The application architecture is reckless and full of race conditions Honestly curious, can you point to one or two?

I don't have a toy example offhand, but the resource failure case I mentioned is one. If resources A, B, and C are in flight at the same time and A fails, Terraform in some as-yet-undiagnosed circumstances will not record state changes caused by the still-in-progress work on B and C. This happens a lot with SNS queues, IIRC, because SNS queue operations on the AWS API take a relatively long time to resolve. So if, say, you mistyped an attribute for an EC2 instance, it can fail out and Terraform will happily forget that it created an SNS queue for you.

I have a sneaking hunch that the continuing problems with template-file resources (complaining that the "rendered" attribute doesn't exist in dependent resources) are related to this, but can't prove that; my clients don't pay me to debug Terraform, but to get their stuff working, and that doesn't leave much time to get in-depth with it now that I've decided not to use it for my own purposes anymore.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#102

Post by sergiotapia »

I wonder when Amazon is going to invest their ungodly earnings into UX. Their UI is absolutely terrible and I shudder every time I have to log into it. Is it purposely built that way to confuse people who don't belong in there?

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#103

Post by ddevault »

Full disclosure: I work for Linode and I am super biased. This is my own opinion etc etc

Perhaps the first AWS mistake you might make is... using AWS? Even before I started at Linode, I thought it was terrible. It's extremely, unreasonably pricey. The UI is terrible. Their offerings are availble elsewhere. I started MediaCrush, a now-defunct media hosting website, on AWS. After a while, we switched to dedicated hosting (really sexy servers). We were looking at $250 a month and scaled up to millions of visitors per day! I ran our bandwidth and CPU usage and such numbers through the AWS price calculator a while ago - over $20,000 per month. AWS is a racket. It seems to me like the easiest way to burn through your new startup's seed money real fast.

Edit: not trying to sell you on Linode, just disclosing that I work there. There are lots of options, just do the research before you reach for AWS.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#104

Post by thebigjc »

narsil wrote: post #92

> There is no reason - beside manually managed infrastructure - to not decrease the instance size (number of machines or c3.xlarge to c3.large) if you realize that your EC2 instances are underutilized. CPU/Memory aren't the only measures of underutilization. If you require high instantaneous bandwidth throughput, then the networking capacity available to your instance roughly increases with the size of your instance.…

This is super important - I've run a number of 'oversized' instances just to get better networking. AFAIK none of the cloud providers offer a way to create a 'network' optimized instance, though containerized deployments should help with under utilizing the rest of the instance.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#105

Post by tshtf »

ddevault wrote: post #103

Full disclosure: I work for Linode and I am super biased. This is my own opinion etc etc Perhaps the first AWS mistake you might make is... using AWS? Even before I started at Linode, I thought it was terrible. It's extremely, unreasonably pricey. The UI is terrible. Their offerings are availble elsewhere. I started MediaCrush, a now-defunct media hosting website, on AWS. After a while, we switched to dedicated hosti…

In the past during security incidents (and there have been more three than major ones in as many years), there has been absolutely no transparency from Linode management.

That's more than enough reason for serious customers to avoid Linode...

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#106

Post by CharlesW »

ddevault wrote: post #103

Full disclosure: I work for Linode and I am super biased. This is my own opinion etc etc Perhaps the first AWS mistake you might make is... using AWS? Even before I started at Linode, I thought it was terrible. It's extremely, unreasonably pricey. The UI is terrible. Their offerings are availble elsewhere. I started MediaCrush, a now-defunct media hosting website, on AWS. After a while, we switched to dedicated hosti…

I feel like you wouldn't be too pleased if a super-biased Amazon employee posted a similarly anecdata-filled post about Linode. Is it really a smart idea to bad-mouth AWS in a post that really doesn't intersect with what Linode provides in any substantive way?

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#107

Post by cle »

ddevault wrote: post #103

Full disclosure: I work for Linode and I am super biased. This is my own opinion etc etc Perhaps the first AWS mistake you might make is... using AWS? Even before I started at Linode, I thought it was terrible. It's extremely, unreasonably pricey. The UI is terrible. Their offerings are availble elsewhere. I started MediaCrush, a now-defunct media hosting website, on AWS. After a while, we switched to dedicated hosti…

There's a lot more that goes into the decision than service costs. There are lots of other costs that must be considered. E.g. if using AWS can save you one employee, that alone might make it worth the extra service costs.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that your analysis is incomplete.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#108

Post by mattbillenstein »

sergiotapia wrote: post #102

I wonder when Amazon is going to invest their ungodly earnings into UX. Their UI is absolutely terrible and I shudder every time I have to log into it. Is it purposely built that way to confuse people who don't belong in there?

I've heard this a few times -- AWS is a very complex product that gives you a lot of freedom in how you build your product using it. I think the web UI works about as well as it could given that complexity.

If you want something simpler, you have Heroku and a bunch of similar things which make a bunch of decisions for you -- but you don't have the flexibility there that you do with AWS of course.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#109

Post by late2part »

cle wrote: post #107
ddevault wrote: post #103

Full disclosure: I work for Linode and I am super biased. This is my own opinion etc etc Perhaps the first AWS mistake you might make is... using AWS? Even before I started at Linode, I thought it was terrible. It's extremely, unreasonably pricey. The UI is terrible. Their offerings are availble elsewhere. I started MediaCrush, a now-defunct media hosting website, on AWS. After a while, we switched to dedicated hosti…

There's a lot more that goes into the decision than service costs. There are lots of other costs that must be considered. E.g. if using AWS can save you one employee, that alone might make it worth the extra service costs. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that your analysis is incomplete.

I'm sure there's a situation where AWS saves money on TCO. If you ever find it, please let us know.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#110

Post by [deleted] »

cle wrote: post #107
ddevault wrote: post #103

Full disclosure: I work for Linode and I am super biased. This is my own opinion etc etc Perhaps the first AWS mistake you might make is... using AWS? Even before I started at Linode, I thought it was terrible. It's extremely, unreasonably pricey. The UI is terrible. Their offerings are availble elsewhere. I started MediaCrush, a now-defunct media hosting website, on AWS. After a while, we switched to dedicated hosti…

There's a lot more that goes into the decision than service costs. There are lots of other costs that must be considered. E.g. if using AWS can save you one employee, that alone might make it worth the extra service costs. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that your analysis is incomplete.

[deleted]
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