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Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

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Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#81
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, not sure where this perception of "nobody's using it" comes from but I have been using it in 2 different companies in the last 3 years as well with nothing but love. In fact, if it were the case that "nobody's using it for good reasons", maybe we should ought to know the reasons?

Been using opsworks for about a year now and while it has very significantly streamlined our provisioning/deployment tasks, "nothing but love" is not quite how I'd describe it. It does have some warts.

Biggest wart we have is that it randomly picks a machine to run migrations on, if it's a deploy with migrations.

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? I wish Amazon were just running a page like that themselves.

Which aspect of it do you find the most useful? * All of the instance types on one page? * All of the per-type facts in one row? * Sorting? Let me know and I will share it with the team.

* Everything on one page

* Doesn't take 30+ seconds to load

* Sortable and filterable

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#83

A 15-minute scan read of this - specifically the sections on the stuff I've worked with the most - suggests this is a very, very good addition to the official documentation. I would as a minimum recommend anybody/everybody considering AWS to read and think about the "When to use AWS" section. Whilst it is an excellent set of tools that have completely changed the economics of deploying software, there are times when…

This was exactly my reaction. The tips around Amazon Redshift were spot-on including a few obscure-but-critical ones e.g. the one about many small tables taking up a ton of disk space!

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#84
Great guide. I've been using AWS since there were only a handful of services and it's become increasingly hard to keep up with all the additional ones that have been added in the last few years.

EFS had completely passed me by. Does anyone have experience with it? I'm wondering what it would be like to use for Whisper / Graphite (just on a single machine). I'm less interested with concurrent access and more interested in not having to resize drives as data grows / overprovision drives all the time.

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#85
post #79

I recommend you also make the content available on a one-topic-per-page format ASAP before someone else does and takes credit for it. WHY: Google still doesn't handle anchor-links very well. You have 1000 amazing articles on a single page. Each section (e.g.: "High Availability on AWS") would be a great resource for someone searching on that topic in Google. But when you put it all on one page Google infers "1/1000th…

I understand the concern. We'll try doing something about that. That said, single page on GitHub for the moment means (1) discoverability directly on github.com, which helps everyone and (2) browser search on the whole guide (which actually is more helpful than you might think!).

As I'm sure you're aware, a lot of documentation is made available in several formats, such as 1) single page HTML, 2) multiple page HTML (e.g. one page per section), and 3) single PDF.

The different versions are automatically generated from a single common source but that would probably require a major change in how you create your guide and so may be more work than you want to take on.

To illustrate why this is useful, I'm a network engineer who primarily works with Cisco gear. Cisco has an absolute wealth of information -- product manuals, configuration guides, etc. -- accumulated over a couple of decades spread out across their web site(s). Unfortunately, their web site team likes to change things -- A LOT! -- and pages "move" frequently and it's often impossible to find them again. Because pretty much everything I'm interested in is available in PDF format, I save these versions locally where I can find them and refer to them later. Quite often, the times that I really need to look up some obscure feature are times when I am somewhere that either 1) I cannot connect my laptop to the network or 2) Internet access is unavailable, heavily filtered, or outright prohibited (of course, that's probably not going to apply for someone working with AWS.)

Regardless, you've put together a wonderful, comprehensive resource here. I'm a "minimal" user of AWS (primarily S3) but I am familiar with the different products and you're done an awesome job of summarizing Amazon's "dense" documentation down to its key points.

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#86
post #84

Great guide. I've been using AWS since there were only a handful of services and it's become increasingly hard to keep up with all the additional ones that have been added in the last few years. EFS had completely passed me by. Does anyone have experience with it? I'm wondering what it would be like to use for Whisper / Graphite (just on a single machine). I'm less interested with concurrent access and more intereste…

As I recall it's significantly more expensive than EBS, which kept me away. I've had a few use cases come up where shared access would be nice, but I was always able to use objects in s3 instead, which is far cheaper.

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#87
post #84

Great guide. I've been using AWS since there were only a handful of services and it's become increasingly hard to keep up with all the additional ones that have been added in the last few years. EFS had completely passed me by. Does anyone have experience with it? I'm wondering what it would be like to use for Whisper / Graphite (just on a single machine). I'm less interested with concurrent access and more intereste…

As I recall it's significantly more expensive than EBS, which kept me away. I've had a few use cases come up where shared access would be nice, but I was always able to use objects in s3 instead, which is far cheaper.

It's about 3x the price of EBS by the looks, but then again, I probably run 10x the size EBS drive required so I don't need to deal with scaling it often...!

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#88
post #34

Thanks, I like that Service Matrix[1] ! I've a few questions for AWS experts : The only container orchestration that is open source seems to be Kubernetes. Is it easy to run on AWS? What's the equivalent of Azure "Service Fabric" in the AWS world? (and in the Google Cloud?) [1] https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws#service-matrix

There are plenty of others which are open source. Nomad is one such example.

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#89
I think a better approach would be to use annotations on the current AWS docs so that additional information is inline with the official documentation so you have both in the same place. The Hypothesis project is working on such a browser plugin that does this for example and is having success with academic research already. https://hypothes.is/

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#90
post #79

I recommend you also make the content available on a one-topic-per-page format ASAP before someone else does and takes credit for it. WHY: Google still doesn't handle anchor-links very well. You have 1000 amazing articles on a single page. Each section (e.g.: "High Availability on AWS") would be a great resource for someone searching on that topic in Google. But when you put it all on one page Google infers "1/1000th…

I understand the concern. We'll try doing something about that. That said, single page on GitHub for the moment means (1) discoverability directly on github.com, which helps everyone and (2) browser search on the whole guide (which actually is more helpful than you might think!).

Completely agree, once I discover a guide like this, I bookmark it, come back to it, and really value the ctrl-f-ability.

I was recommending the one-topic-per-page idea for others who haven't yet found this nugget. I think a lot more people will discover it and benefit from it if they are finding it from specific google searches.

I know HN can be a source of a lot of unfounded flyby critiques, I dont want to contribute to that trend. I see you have a pretty good contributing guide, maybe I'll try and submit a PR with a solution in the spirit of Hacktoberfest!

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