Live data from Hacker News

Awless: A Mighty CLI for AWS

github.com

91–100 of 120 posts

Re: Awless: A Mighty CLI for AWS

#91
To all those complaining about collection of stats: Pretty much _every_ SaaS company is collecting stats about your behavior. It seems a bit off that there is so much rage about a project whose code is out their in the open to collect stats.

Point me to atleast a single popular SaaS product that does not have analytics in it's page.

Re: Awless: A Mighty CLI for AWS

#92

I hate to pile on to the complaints about sending usage metrics to a server, but this is pretty funky. The metrics include the instance id, account id, a list of the commands run with timestamps, the region, a bunch of metadata about the number of VPCs, Subnets, IAM users and policies, etc. Which is kind of a lot to get, and definitely isn't anonymous. Why do they need to know how many VPCs, Subnets, IAM users, and I…

This is kinda why I avoid so many packages, even probably-safe stuff like iterm. I try to go vanilla as much as possible and avoid having to think hard of which service or app may be transmitting my data.

Re: Awless: A Mighty CLI for AWS

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks all for the feedback. We understood that the data collection could be done with much care. As a result, until we design a better way to send truly anonymous data, we have disabled the data collection (cf. https://github.com/wallix/awless/commit/f6389e75787390bd7797... ). We will let you know when we have something better, keeping everything transparent, as we will always do.

How about you just... not collect data from people? Or, at the very least, have it be an opt-in option? I'll probably never use this just on principle.

Yeah, this is a huge trust violation. I'm glad people caught on to it quickly. You should not be phoning home with _anything_ from a tool like this without it being 100% opt-in and with huge warnings and alerts. Even if you do it with the most care and best of intentions, a bug could easily compromise security of the people using your tool by uploading too much or the wrong information to your servers. This is not a risk worth taking for you or any potential users of the software.

Re: Awless: A Mighty CLI for AWS

#94
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downloaded the release tarball, so why would I also use "go get" to get the source I just downloaded ?

"go get" will download dependencies. You can also cd to the source as run "go get ."

I can fetch the dependencies myself as well. Is there documentation on which packages are depended-on, including release version ranges ?

Re: Awless: A Mighty CLI for AWS

#95

To all those complaining about collection of stats: Pretty much _every_ SaaS company is collecting stats about your behavior. It seems a bit off that there is so much rage about a project whose code is out their in the open to collect stats. Point me to atleast a single popular SaaS product that does not have analytics in it's page.

What part of "Awsless: A Mighty CLI for AWS" sounds like SaaS?

"SaaS" means software as a service, something someone else runs, generally web based where metrics are relevant, not a command line tool on your own machine talking to your own infra.

From read me:

Install

Choose one of the following options:

- Download the latest awless binaries (Windows/Linux/macOS) from Github

- If you have Golang already installed, build the source with: go get github.com/wallix/awless

- On macOS, use homebrew: brew tap wallix/awless; brew install awless

Which of those sounds like SaaS?

Re: Awless: A Mighty CLI for AWS

#96

To all those complaining about collection of stats: Pretty much _every_ SaaS company is collecting stats about your behavior. It seems a bit off that there is so much rage about a project whose code is out their in the open to collect stats. Point me to atleast a single popular SaaS product that does not have analytics in it's page.

What part of "Awsless: A Mighty CLI for AWS" sounds like SaaS? "SaaS" means software as a service, something someone else runs, generally web based where metrics are relevant, not a command line tool on your own machine talking to your own infra. From read me: Install Choose one of the following options: - Download the latest awless binaries (Windows/Linux/macOS) from Github - If you have Golang already installed, bu…

Not sure how to respond. I wasn't comparing awsless to a SaaS at all. I was saying that SaaS collects info about you all the time and I don't see anyone going up in arms about that.

According to you, it's OK to collect data if the software is on another person's infra.

Re: Awless: A Mighty CLI for AWS

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of "Awsless: A Mighty CLI for AWS" sounds like SaaS? "SaaS" means software as a service, something someone else runs, generally web based where metrics are relevant, not a command line tool on your own machine talking to your own infra. From read me: Install Choose one of the following options: - Download the latest awless binaries (Windows/Linux/macOS) from Github - If you have Golang already installed, bu…

Not sure how to respond. I wasn't comparing awsless to a SaaS at all. I was saying that SaaS collects info about you all the time and I don't see anyone going up in arms about that. According to you, it's OK to collect data if the software is on another person's infra.

Yes, you compared them, or rather, compared the reactions of people to them. If you aren't implying by extension that SaaS and awsless are comparable then your argument makes no sense.

Re: Awless: A Mighty CLI for AWS

#98
post #13

> We also collect a few anonymous data (CLI errors, most frequently used commands and count of resources). Looks cool, but this is an instant no for me. Sorry guys.

Project creator here (but obviously not the OP). Yes, we do collect minimal anonymised statistics in the sole goal of improving awless. All the statistics code is here: https://github.com/wallix/awless/blob/master/stats/stats.go As the project is Apache licensed, you're free to modify it if you don't want this. Also, if you're conscious about privacy you should use application firewalls on your client side like Littl…

How bout you NOT collect this information. It's just creepy that this is turned on by default.

Re: Awless: A Mighty CLI for AWS

#99

Just wondering here, but why would you use this vs terraform? Given that I can define most of the stuff I need from AWS in terraform and check the state of the infra via plan command, what would be the use case for CLI? I'm actively trying to break the habit of modifying infra without first writing terraform document for it. This way I can always be sure that I have no surprises when creating a new environment.

Terraform can't tell you about the stuff it doesn't know about.
Post reply on HN