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AWS mistakes to avoid

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Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#121

Post by larrymcp »

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…

Hmm. Well, somehow these heavy-hitters have presumably done their research and then chose AWS:

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/

I see your characterization of AWS above as "terrible", but I'm curious how that squares with the (probably very well-informed) decisions these people made to use AWS.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#122

Post by nzoschke »

tedmiston wrote: post #117
nzoschke wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used PagodaBox but it looks like a nice PaaS. Convox has the same goal of a PaaS: to give you and your team an easy way to focus on your code and never worry about your infrastructure. One big difference with Convox is that we accomplish this with single-tenant AWS things. You and your team's deployment target is an isolated VPC, ECS (EC2 container service), and ELB (load balancers). If you're asking for a…

So eventually Convox will have to make money, but I'm not sure I see the path... given that I have free access to the software and the infra is provided by AWS. Do you plan to eventually charge a monthly fee for using the command-line tool?

Thanks for your question. A much more thorough pricing page is in the works.

The most straightforward model, and where we are already making some money, is running a Convox as a managed service.

In this setup you and your team get Convox API keys. Convox installs, runs and updates everything for you in our accounts. You get a monthly bill that's your AWS resource costs plus a percentage to Convox for management.

We will be tweaking this model to sell packages so bills are really easy to understand.

Some other experiments we're doing...

We sell support packages and professional services for app setup, migration and custom feature development.

We have a per-seat model for productivity features. Private GitHub repos and Slack integrations are $19 / user / month. There are more closed SaaS tools like this coming.

Infra is trending to commodity prices industry wide.

We'll be selling SLAs, support, productivity tools on top of that infra.

You'll get a cutting edge private platform without hiring and managing your own devops team to build and maintain it.

Open source users will help grow the user base and make the platform better without us running a freemium platform.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#123

Post by sergiotapia »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #108
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.

There has to be some middle ground between AWS and Heroku though.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#124

Post by sciurus »

tomglindmeier wrote: post #93

I wonder if AWS is a good location to run a VoIP server. VoIP is a real time application that is very prone to jitter, latency and packet loss. I'm concerned about "noisy neighbors" and decreased network performance at AWS. Does anybody have experience with running a VoIP (e. g. Asterisk) on AWS?

Twilio runs on AWS.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#125

Post by jrochkind1 »

larrymcp wrote: post #121
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…

Hmm. Well, somehow these heavy-hitters have presumably done their research and then chose AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/ I see your characterization of AWS above as "terrible", but I'm curious how that squares with the (probably very well-informed) decisions these people made to use AWS.

I would not "do my research" on the sales site of one of the vendors, if that's what you're suggesting.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#126

Post by bobbyi_settv »

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…

Linode offers the equivalent of a tiny, tiny subset of AWS. I haven't looked recently, but do they have something equivalent to SQS? Autoscaling groups? DynamoDB? SES? Cloudwatch?

If you are going to end up re-building AWS's services from scratch on top of what are essentially naked linux machines (or doing your integration work between services from many vendors), you are doing a huge amount of work that isn't necessary and will be a lot more expensive than that $20k/ month you could have been paying to Amazon.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#127

Post by devonkim »

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…

Most of the reasons to go with AWS as a major strategic decision are to avoid paying for 3-4 (or perhaps... 40+) ops engineers to run and manage so many things that really don't add much business value in themselves and that you could hold to some form of an SLA (especially with enterprise support accounts) and recoup some costs if things came down to it. Furthermore, engineering a lot of AWS services would cost you developer time as well.

I consult / contract for a Fortune 50 customer that pays an insane amount of money to AWS per month and it seems ridiculous what they're paying for and what they get. But do you know what's even more ridiculous? Paying three times as much but getting even worse reliability and a massive amount of time wasted while waiting weeks to provision servers. One group internally used to have massive outages daily resulting in needing to hire a dedicated team of about 6 just to handle that load of production incidents (terrible reliability also resulting in loss of revenue too) and since migrating their software with even the most bone-headed SPF-everywhere AWS based software architecture haven't had more than one or two per week for outages now. The cost benefits get better the more incompetent / incapable your internal IT organization is. The amount of wasted resources due to internal bureaucracy, legacy, and working with companies that don't really practice any form of technology at scale has been an incredible amount of savings for my customer.

And knowing how much my customer relies upon AWS support for the most menial of tasks (primarily a cultural thing with how they treat their vendors as well as internal resources) I am sure that nobody but massive companies that deal with external bureaucracies effectively could deliver the size and kind of support team to handle the volume of support requests generated by my customer for the most ridiculous of tasks (I've seen executives file AWS support requests to reboot VMs at 3 am because the bureaucracy is extremely brittle here and reflects into the software systems reliability). We may throw millions / month at AWS, but Amazon has to hire at least a few dozen engineers and several account managers just to handle support alone which I might argue could be a net loss to handle the customer.

Most vendors that work with my customer have a very hard time working with them because they approach sourcing quite similar to how Walmart does and abuses them to the point where the vendors abuse their employees.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#128

Post by skwirl »

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…

This definitely reads like an ad for Linode to me and it really is turning me off from your company. Does the company know you are posting these comments on HN?

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#129

Post by imp »

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…

FWIW, I'm a current Linode customer that will be migrating to AWS soon. I like Linode as a basic provider, but I really need the better features such as ASGs, AMIs, and RDS. That's worth the higher cost per hour for me.

Re: AWS mistakes to avoid

#130

Post by seany »

tshtf wrote: post #105
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...

I was going to say the same thing. The amount of transparency in general from aws is DRAMATICALLY better than linode.
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