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AWS services explained in one line each

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Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#341

Post by takeda »

edaemon wrote: post #289
ashtonkem wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I always chuckled at the "AWS Simple Monthly Calculator": https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html It isn't simple at all! Not only is it complex and fairly daunting, you also need pretty deep knowledge of AWS to fill it out correctly. They eventually introduced an improved calculator that dropped the "simple" branding: https://calculator.aws/

The simple calculator also didn't calculate all the cost (didn't try the new one) maybe by "simple" they meant incomplete?

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#342

Post by scarface74 »

takeda wrote: post #324
scarface74 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially since “EC2” is not just a VM. There are dozen services at least that come under EC2. Also if you start trying to use DynamoDB like you would Mongo, you’re going to be really upset. The use cases, design considerations and performance considerations of DynamoDB compared to Mongo is night and day.

Actually DynamoDB unlike MongoDB is truly a distributed store, and it actually is closer to Cassandra, Riak (RIP), Aerospike maybe some others.

Yes. But DynamoDB basically requires you to know your access patterns up front and isn’t that flexible when it comes to querying - yes I’ve watched all of the reInvent videos about how to properly model your DDB tables.

That being said, if I needed the flexibility and wanted to stay in the AWS ecosystem, I would use DocumentDB with Mongo compatibility. It uses the same storage engine as Aurora, it’s much more flexible and it doesn’t have any of the well known downsides of Mongo.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#343

Post by jonahx »

scarface74 wrote: post #320
jonahx wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would still take me just as long to ramp up on the equivalent Oracle offerings The claim isn't that better names help you ramp up faster. It's that they make it faster to figure out which service you need, or if a service is relevant to you. That said, per the point in my previous post, it's likely that if you can't even clearly describe or name your service, you can't write clear documentation either. I've foun…

Since some subset of people will invest time in learning technology even if it's complicated, therefore it doesn't matter if it's too complicated? If so, you'd have to show that the number of people using it wouldn't increase were it simpler, with clearer names, etc. Well, two points. 1. From a completely selfish standpoint, if people aren’t willing to learn about AWS, it helps me out a lot. I’m able to make more mon…

> Just like the obtuse clusterf%%% that is modern front end development doesn’t seem to be hurting the adoption by the $cool_kids.

This is true, and it may even help with adoption among "cool kids." But the adoption could be much, much higher if it weren't such a clusterf%%%. There is an almost infinite amount of marketshare from a wide spectrum of technologies ranging from Wordpress down to "vanilla jquery" that could be eaten into.

Again, you can't look at some successful thing S lacking quality X and conclude "quality X doesn't matter." You have to compare "S with X" to "S without X". Sometimes a direct experiment is possible, sometimes not.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#344

Post by sk5t »

koheripbal wrote: post #333
scarface74 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want it to be long term sustainable, you probably want at least 2 people that can handle it, so they can go on vacation. The fully allocated cost of two ops people in my neck of the woods is a little over $300K. That can buy a lot from AWS. I'm not sure why so many developers seem afraid of hardware I want to develop . Yes I’ve been around long before AWS was a thing, I had to manage servers, load balancers, a…

...but they aren't fully allocated. They're allocated at about 5% - maybe less. I manage a couple dozen servers and it's a small minority of my job.

What are those two ops-focused folks doing with the other 95% of their time? Are we talking about two developers who are willing to spend 5-10% time on non-promotable server chores--while yet being on the hook in the event of a hardware disaster--or people who consider operations their vocation and aren't interested in software development?

I agree that it's possible to do that kind of work on a 5-10% basis, but it requires just the right set of circumstances for sustainability. Like, maybe it is your own startup or family business, or one is not particular good at sysop'ing and wants to learn more.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#345

Post by [deleted] »

sk5t wrote: post #344
koheripbal wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...but they aren't fully allocated. They're allocated at about 5% - maybe less. I manage a couple dozen servers and it's a small minority of my job.

What are those two ops-focused folks doing with the other 95% of their time? Are we talking about two developers who are willing to spend 5-10% time on non-promotable server chores--while yet being on the hook in the event of a hardware disaster--or people who consider operations their vocation and aren't interested in software development? I agree that it's possible to do that kind of work on a 5-10% basis, but it r…

[deleted]

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#346

Post by boublepop »

elchief wrote: post #253

I made this list for my buddy a while back. It's meant to be more humorous than exactly correct Route 53 - Holy shit! It's NSD WAF - Holy shit! It's modsecurity SES - Holy shit! It's Postfix Inspector - Holy shit! It's OSSEC GuardDuty - Holy shit! It's Snort Data Pipeline - Holy shit! It's Cron and Bash Athena - Holy shit! It's Prestodb Glue - Holy shit! It's Hive Metastore and Spark OpsWorks - Holy shit! It's Chef V…

Thank you! This is absolute gold.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#347

Post by scarface74 »

sk5t wrote: post #344
koheripbal wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...but they aren't fully allocated. They're allocated at about 5% - maybe less. I manage a couple dozen servers and it's a small minority of my job.

What are those two ops-focused folks doing with the other 95% of their time? Are we talking about two developers who are willing to spend 5-10% time on non-promotable server chores--while yet being on the hook in the event of a hardware disaster--or people who consider operations their vocation and aren't interested in software development? I agree that it's possible to do that kind of work on a 5-10% basis, but it r…

When I first started working at my current company, my manager wanted a highly available SFTP solution that would automatically sync with S3. I designed a relatively straightforward solution on paper involving a network load balancer, autoscaling group [1] with two instances and a SMB share (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/latest/userguide/...) and gave him an estimated cost.

He said okay go for it.

But then I said, or we can just throw some money at AWS and use the more expensive (on paper excluding babysitting time), AWS SFTP service. I gave him both solutions as a test to see where his head was at.

He chose AWS SFTP. We are a small high margin B2B company and sign long term contracts that are worth yearly in the six figures. We are very much focused on outsourcing the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” so we can focus on development and sales.

[1] Autoscaling would not have been used to scale on demand. We set a min/max of two so if one server fails a health check, another instance will be brought up.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#348

Post by FridgeSeal »

lucianf wrote: post #294
FridgeSeal wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with Azure causes me physical pain. AWS you can poke around and figure it out, Azure is a Kafkaesque nightmare of infinitely confusing UI/UX, a permission system that is like trying to hit a moving target in a dark room, being moved by someone that hates you, doing anything seems needlessly complex, and trying to replicate/test anything locally is horrible (looking at you Azure functions).

Semi-shameless plug (I work for Oracle) but have you tried OCI? You might find both the console UI/UX and the cloud calculator pretty decent. That's just my personal feel, coming over to work as an Oracle cloud consultant with previous AWS/Azure experience. I'd argue it's normal those two are where they are; AWS is now a spaghetti of products, while Microsoft are anti-KISS by DNA.

AWS might be a spaghetti of products, but they get out of my way and they’re straightforward enough to use/ignore; and that’s pretty much what I want.

Honestly, I wouldn’t touch something from Oracle with a 10 foot pole, sorry. I’m sure the UX is probably pretty good, but I’m staying away from that company if I can avoid it-too many horror stories, way too “enterprise”.

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#349

Post by mikorym »

elchief wrote: post #253

I made this list for my buddy a while back. It's meant to be more humorous than exactly correct Route 53 - Holy shit! It's NSD WAF - Holy shit! It's modsecurity SES - Holy shit! It's Postfix Inspector - Holy shit! It's OSSEC GuardDuty - Holy shit! It's Snort Data Pipeline - Holy shit! It's Cron and Bash Athena - Holy shit! It's Prestodb Glue - Holy shit! It's Hive Metastore and Spark OpsWorks - Holy shit! It's Chef V…

> DynamoDB - Holy shit! It's MongoDB

DynamoDB - Holy shit! It's broken MongoDB

Re: AWS services explained in one line each

#350

Post by kookoopuffs »

elchief wrote: post #253

I made this list for my buddy a while back. It's meant to be more humorous than exactly correct Route 53 - Holy shit! It's NSD WAF - Holy shit! It's modsecurity SES - Holy shit! It's Postfix Inspector - Holy shit! It's OSSEC GuardDuty - Holy shit! It's Snort Data Pipeline - Holy shit! It's Cron and Bash Athena - Holy shit! It's Prestodb Glue - Holy shit! It's Hive Metastore and Spark OpsWorks - Holy shit! It's Chef V…

so this is why they make the wording on the proejcts so difficult or non-existent. they don't even know wtf they are doing themselves
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