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AWS services explained in one line each

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Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#131

Post by davedx »

exhaze wrote: post #76
davedx wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think we are probably 90% in agreement on things, just talking about it in different terms. I think AWS/GCP have both gotten overwhelming in terms of how many different services they provide. Many people fall for it and end up playing AWS service golf ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23274668 ). Maybe a good analogy is to think of AWS as C. It's flexible and powerful, but it's easy to shoot yourself in the fo…

Yeah indeed. And I think often the perception of AWS is that it's more like Ruby. "It's what everyone uses, so it's a no brainer right?"

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#132

Post by notyourwork »

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.

When every company workload and footprint is entirely different what alternative do you propose? Different companies have different needs and different cloud services suffice those needs in really different ways. You can run your database on relational, non-relational or flat text file backends. They all have different performances characteristics and different costs associated with running them.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#134

Post by jaytaph »

erwincaco wrote: post #126

> Amazon Connect AWS version of ZenDesk Wrong. That should be "Amazon's Cloud-based Contact Center" > Pinpoint Create transactional emails based on templates. Pinpoint can do SMS and voice too.

Isn't that what ZenDesk is too?

Yes, pinpoint can do more.. Will update

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#135

Post by pas »

scarface74 wrote: post #80
pdyck wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Services like S3 are referred to as „object storage“. AWS Lambda is a service for „serverless compute“ or „function as a service“ (although it‘s debatable if these are good names for the concept). My point is that definitely are named for these concepts but AWS uses brand names which is quite confusing for people who are new to AWS.

It makes it a lot easier to search for on Google though...

Why? They could have simply named them with AWS Serverless, or AWS Compute, or whatever.

Using these brand names might make it easier to evolve them later, or they really wanted nice sounding names because eventually you'd have to write out long phrases with the AWS prefix, and that's probably harder to market.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#137

Post by derision »

jaytaph wrote: post #134
erwincaco wrote: post #126

> Amazon Connect AWS version of ZenDesk Wrong. That should be "Amazon's Cloud-based Contact Center" > Pinpoint Create transactional emails based on templates. Pinpoint can do SMS and voice too.

Isn't that what ZenDesk is too? Yes, pinpoint can do more.. Will update

and if I don't know what ZenDesk is, then you're just exchanging one confusing name for another

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#138

Post by 013a »

> Lightsail: Amazon’s hosting provider (vps, dns, storage)

Doesn't feel like accurate description for Lightsail, nor a useful one. Maybe something like "simplified deployment and billing for some AWS resources, including VPS, databases, DNS, and load balancers"

(listing "storage" as something Lightsail does is kind of weird; of course, it does instance-attached block storage, you couldn't have a VPS without that. critically, it has no S3-like blob storage product, and I think that's what most people would associate the general word "storage" with, but maybe I'm wrong about that).

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#139

Post by ashtonkem »

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.

I'm always amazed at the complexity of AWS billing. "Why does this cost so much" turns out to be an incredibly hard problem to answer the moment you don't have 100% perfect discipline when it comes to resource tagging.

The fact that there are consultants who specialize in figuring out AWS billing was, in retrospect, a warning sign.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#140

Post by brodouevencode »

StreamBright wrote: post #108
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.

I am not sure what you are talking about. We have many millions of yearly AWS cost and it is both predictable and understandable down to the last cent. One additional thing, I am not sure it occurred to you but some infrastructures operate on AWS are not sending any significant traffic outwards. S3 is used as a cheap and reliable data warehouse storage layer for exabytes of data just fine.

Came here to say exactly this.

There's a level of complexity and nuance in AWS that casual users or those on the outside do not quite comprehend. And honestly it takes quite of bit of experience and interaction to fully understand some of these things. It's not that you're getting charged "twice" for S3, it's that there are separately line items in the CUR for S3 data transfer, S3 storage (and S3 API, S3 inventory, etc.). It's confusing to a layperson but this level of detail is actually quite powerful. You can tune your application to use just what's needed.

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