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AWS services explained in one line each

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Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#111

Post by wolco »

exhaze wrote: post #52
davedx wrote: post #26

Consider that your typical enterprise software project will use quite a lot of these, and that you pay for them all separately, and sometimes pay twice for them (e.g. S3 you pay for storage and for outbound bandwidth). It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print money. Bravo.

Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. > It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print money. Is applying separation of concerns to web services really that bad? Look, if you're a small company with a simple product, yo…

From where I stand as someone who isn't using Amazon figuring out what my costs will be is difficult, impossible and would require wasting money on various tests.

With something like digitalocean my costs are fixed. I might have misjudged how much I need but can scale up easily or down (with effort).

Will Amazon offer fixed pricing? Does Amazom offer fixed pricing?

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#112

Post by StreamBright »

davedx wrote: post #67
exhaze wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. > It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print money. Is applying separation of concerns to web services really that bad? Look, if you're a small company with a simple product, yo…

> Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. Yes, I use it extensively. > Is applying separation of concerns to web services really that bad? Look, if you're a small company with a simple product, you can just put your stuff on a few EC2 boxes and pay the monthly bill for that. At that size, your infra costs are going to be dwarfed by your other costs of doing bu…

>> Another problem is the days of "put your stuff on a few EC2 boxes" seem to have been overtaken by the cloud-native, microservices, k8s trends of the last few years.

I am not sure where you get the notion that any serious user goes with the "put your stuff on a few EC2 boxes" approach. Every single AWS project I worked on had a cost calculation phase when we investigated what combination of services could be the most cost-efficient for a certain problem.

>> cloud-native, microservices, k8s trends

It is kind of funny that you try to put on one end AWS the company that made cloud computing popular (and microservices with it) and the biggest player in the segment and "cloud-native, microservices, k8s" on the other. Trends come and go, AWS is here for the long run.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#113

Post by anaganisk »

wolco wrote: post #111
exhaze wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. > It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print money. Is applying separation of concerns to web services really that bad? Look, if you're a small company with a simple product, yo…

From where I stand as someone who isn't using Amazon figuring out what my costs will be is difficult, impossible and would require wasting money on various tests. With something like digitalocean my costs are fixed. I might have misjudged how much I need but can scale up easily or down (with effort). Will Amazon offer fixed pricing? Does Amazom offer fixed pricing?

Aws is definitely not for hobbyists, or small applications, its a replacement to a datacenter with a lot of variables, not a VM. Your better comparison would be DigitalOcean vs Lightsail (AWS). So yes.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#114

Post by drcongo »

callamdelaney wrote: post #84
drcongo wrote: post #50

It's sad that this is so necessary, but I'm still confused by the very first two lines of this list. > EC2 Virtual Private Servers > Lightsail Amazon’s hosting provider (vps, dns, storage) Both of these are VPS? EC2 has no storage? Absolutely not a criticism of your list, more a comment on how baffling AWS is these days. I stopped using AWS once they hit the point where I couldn't reasonably be expected to remember w…

I think pinned items are on a browser basis - because I logged into another account on the same browser and it had the same pins as my other account, without me setting them.

I only use Safari for any actual browsing, I've not noticed this happening, just that whatever I pin is gone next time I log in. Maybe it's short lived cookie.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#115

Post by wiremine »

speedgoose wrote: post #34
jaytaph wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole lot of IOT services are pretty confusing. Mostly because I have no experience with IOT/MQTT in general and it took a few days to actually figure out how to create and connect things (emulated). I actually bought some IOT devices (lamps, sensors) to try it out, but this turned out to be vendor-locked without any possibilities for MQTT. I reckon somebody with more experience in the IOT field could provide mor…

The IoT world is full of vendor locked solutions and platforms that you must avoid. And the joke "the S in IoT stands for Security" is very very true, though AWS Greengrass is actually pretty good for security, if you don't mind sending all your data to a USA company of course. I would recommend to go opensource and skip the platforms that try to lock you in. There is a lot of solutions depending on how low-level you…

Disclaimer: I'm VP of Engineering for software consultancy focused on IoT. We work with startups, midcap and several fortune 500s.

I agree vendor lock in must be avoided. I also disagree that Open Source is the best approach in all situations. Mosquito and Raspberry Pi are fine for smaller projects, but if you're going to push 100M or a billion messages, you're better off leveraging a IaaS solution like AWS IoT Core. At least, until you have a dedicated 24/7 opps team that can triage and support the solution.

The trick is to create the right abstractions and architectures to migrate your solutions off of AWS and onto another solution: Azure, your own, etc.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#116

Post by Spooky23 »

exhaze wrote: post #52
davedx wrote: post #26

Consider that your typical enterprise software project will use quite a lot of these, and that you pay for them all separately, and sometimes pay twice for them (e.g. S3 you pay for storage and for outbound bandwidth). It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print money. Bravo.

Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing and budgeting. > It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print money. Is applying separation of concerns to web services really that bad? Look, if you're a small company with a simple product, yo…

AWS (or GCP or Azure or ...) value proposition depends on you.

For a small/startup, the ability to execute quickly without sinking capital into a product that will likely pivot anyway is a superpower.

When you get bigger, stuff gets dicey. Paying a premium for a "X as a Service" made sense when you had no people, but at some point the cost structure may not make sense or your needs are at odds with how the service delivery works.

When you work for a big company or government agency, things change again -- you don't hire a database guy for a project, you have a project team that builds stuff, and an ops team that exerts the minimum viable effort to keep your stuff running or an outsourced ops team that does the same, but worse. At that point, you start looking at how much it costs to pay AWS to provide and SLA vs hiring more competent (ie. more $$$) ops people to keep it running.

The long and short of it is that AWS is in a position to rake in cash up and down the spectrum -- all they need to do is be competent, which they are very good at.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#117

Post by wiremine »

jon-wood wrote: post #69
jaytaph wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole lot of IOT services are pretty confusing. Mostly because I have no experience with IOT/MQTT in general and it took a few days to actually figure out how to create and connect things (emulated). I actually bought some IOT devices (lamps, sensors) to try it out, but this turned out to be vendor-locked without any possibilities for MQTT. I reckon somebody with more experience in the IOT field could provide mor…

I'll give it a go: IoT Core: Managed MQTT broker, and state management for devices with intermittent connectivity FreeRTOS: RTOS operating system for microcontrollers to automatically connect to IOT-Core or greengrass. IoT 1-Click: Manage 1-click buttons that can be connected to other systems like Lambda IoT Analytics: Clean up and save messages from topics into a data-store for analytics IoT Device Defender: Automat…

This is a great list. I'd add a few things:

IoT Greengrass - Edge computing that can run Lambda functions and ML models on prem.

IoT Core - Managed MQTT broker, state management and rules engine for devices with intermittent connectivity

I'm not sure I'd call SiteWise a "automation platform" I think it's more of a data collection and visualization platform?

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#118

Post by exhaze »

coder543 wrote: post #100
exhaze wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You bring up a good point - it would be a good idea for AWS to set some sensible max budget defaults for new accounts to prevent surprises. Since they don't, if you are literally so concerned with your current costs for this month, you can set a budget and alerts for whatever you want, so that you don't exceed some cost. Also, they show you your current cost for this month, up until the moment, as well as a daily bre…

> You bring up a good point - it would be a good idea for AWS to set some sensible max budget defaults for new accounts to prevent surprises. I didn’t say anything about this at all. It would certainly be a nice feature, and one people have asked for since the very beginning of AWS. > Since they don't, if you are literally so concerned with your current costs for this month, you can set a budget and alerts for whatev…

> If you’re trying to understand how much a new deployment on AWS is costing you, and find ways to optimize that, you don’t care about the total budget of the account, or having some auto shutoff. You need detailed, real-time information from Amazon, which I’ve never seen in the console.

No one who is working on this cares about real-time by the second data - the daily cost is enough.

> Again, this is a strawman. This isn’t a response to anything I said.

OK, what are you trying to say? If my response above did not answer the question, can you give me a one sentence summary of the point?

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#119

Post by coder543 »

exhaze wrote: post #118
coder543 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You bring up a good point - it would be a good idea for AWS to set some sensible max budget defaults for new accounts to prevent surprises. I didn’t say anything about this at all. It would certainly be a nice feature, and one people have asked for since the very beginning of AWS. > Since they don't, if you are literally so concerned with your current costs for this month, you can set a budget and alerts for whatev…

> If you’re trying to understand how much a new deployment on AWS is costing you, and find ways to optimize that, you don’t care about the total budget of the account, or having some auto shutoff. You need detailed, real-time information from Amazon, which I’ve never seen in the console. No one who is working on this cares about real-time by the second data - the daily cost is enough. > Again, this is a strawman. Thi…

> can you give me a one sentence summary of the point?

>> I was just trying to clarify a comment you completely misunderstood.

Alternatively,

“The billing UI and billing infrastructure is a major weakness of AWS when it comes to helping people understand what their usage will cost.” You can clearly see this is true by the large number of people who complain about it.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#120

Post by SubuSS »

gonzo41 wrote: post #82
davedx wrote: post #26

Consider that your typical enterprise software project will use quite a lot of these, and that you pay for them all separately, and sometimes pay twice for them (e.g. S3 you pay for storage and for outbound bandwidth). It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print money. Bravo.

You're totally right. I look at the whole stack and aside from IAM and EC2, and ECS I think you could get by without a lot of those products.

Problem is they are all built up of many smaller pieces as well - you may need the information about them at different points. For ex. EC2 drives are from EBS. if you need a load balancer ELB. You probably use S3 for some or other reason (log exports etc at least). You want a db - RDS makes it easier. Dynamo is literally a button click away. Kubernetes? Well there is EKS.

Yes you can probably launch your own cache fleet using a bunch of ec2 boxes - but you don't get all the low level hooks Elasticache gets. You don't get the pricing discounts either (I remember cross zone replication or something being distinctly free for ec2 but you pay for network. Same with dynamo - access from all zones cost the same pretty much IIRC).

If you are going to make the dive, it is worth spending the time. I would do a small overview bootcamp somewhere so that you know what's available and then start digging in for each new service you take up.

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