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AWS Copilot

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Re: AWS Copilot

#21
post #20

What are the advantages of this over CDK? It's trivially easy to spin up a loadbalanced service https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/api/latest/docs/@aws-cdk_aws...

CDK is terrible on so many levels, it's possible that this is less so.

Re: AWS Copilot

#22
post #2

This really seems like it could be a future replacement for Elastic Beanstalk. Especially when they finalize the ability to provision storage infrastructure.

Hopefully. Elastic Beanstalk is a product that "works" and is "maintained", but when it fails it crashes hard. At least for the PHP environment, updating the environment variable configuration can take 2+ minutes, and non-immutable app deployments with 2 hosts can take over 10 minutes to pass health checks. And finally, if it fails to do something (eg. a deploy command fails on the instance), it will be stuck in the…

I should clarify that the app deploy itself can take under 5 minutes if non-immutable; immutable deployments are the ones that can take 15 minutes or more.

Re: AWS Copilot

#23
post #17

Hi!! I’m a developer on AWS Copilot! We’d love your feedback! Homebrew: brew install aws/tap/copilot-cli Docs: https://aws.github.io/copilot-cli/ Feedback & Requests: https://github.com/aws/copilot-cli/issues/new

Remove the emojis please

This. I almost stopped reading the docs after the first screenshot. Really, it gives a childish feel to the tool. I don't want my tools to have rocket or bear emojis. It makes me feel like the tool was written by teenagers. Of course that's is not the case, but that is the feeling that I have when I see this.

Re: AWS Copilot

#24
I wrote a blog post about this that did the rounds last year about the topic I believe Copilot is trying to solve:

https://leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2019/04/13/the-fargate-illusion...

Summary: the marketing spiel about how easy fargate is to use and get up and running isn't actually how the experience is. I'm hoping Copilot improves that experience.

Re: AWS Copilot

#25
post #21
post #20

What are the advantages of this over CDK? It's trivially easy to spin up a loadbalanced service https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/api/latest/docs/@aws-cdk_aws...

CDK is terrible on so many levels, it's possible that this is less so.

Expanding failures of CDK due to popular demand:

- It introduces an edit-test-debug cycle from hell, it doesn't do what you think from the mental model of a user-friendly CF template generator library (doesn't statically ensure stuff it emits actually works even superficially)

- It builds upon an already difficult and leaky abstraction (CloudFormation) so you just get additional failure modes and cognitive burden

- Glacially slow iteration, can easily take 10-30 mins to teardown/setup your app due to CloudFormation.

- fails to provide upsides from the costly tradeoff it makes to jump into turing complete programming languages, like 3rd party cdk components or iterating expressions at a repl

- don't even get me started on the npm dependency hell (you'll randomly be debugging mystic npm warnings already on the next day when installing a new submodule of cdk deps, when version mismatches appear), the other-languages-to-npm bridges, the "you can't use this without an IntelliSense style IDE" API design, buggy cli tools, etc

To summarize it doesn't manage complexity or give you a good abstraction. Probably because it tries to take on all of AWS functionality at once.

(Also the GP linked Fargate example is far from the functionality from the copilot example, like enabling you to actually dev and deploy the app - ecr, codebuild, codepipeline etc)

Re: AWS Copilot

#26

I wrote a blog post about this that did the rounds last year about the topic I believe Copilot is trying to solve: https://leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2019/04/13/the-fargate-illusion... Summary: the marketing spiel about how easy fargate is to use and get up and running isn't actually how the experience is. I'm hoping Copilot improves that experience.

Please give it a shot and let us know!

Re: AWS Copilot

#27
post #23
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remove the emojis please

This. I almost stopped reading the docs after the first screenshot. Really, it gives a childish feel to the tool. I don't want my tools to have rocket or bear emojis. It makes me feel like the tool was written by teenagers. Of course that's is not the case, but that is the feeling that I have when I see this.

I understand. It’s only on the help page :)

It’s written by some of the brightest people I’m AWS - so Don’t worry about that.

Re: AWS Copilot

#28
post #20

What are the advantages of this over CDK? It's trivially easy to spin up a loadbalanced service https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/api/latest/docs/@aws-cdk_aws...

Hiya! My team is also the team that writes and maintains the CDK construct you linked to.

I think it’s different approach - that’s all. Copilot Is more focused around a full developer experience including setting up CI/CD, deployment environments and operational tooling like logs, stats, etc.

Re: AWS Copilot

#29

Hi!! I’m a developer on AWS Copilot! We’d love your feedback! Homebrew: brew install aws/tap/copilot-cli Docs: https://aws.github.io/copilot-cli/ Feedback & Requests: https://github.com/aws/copilot-cli/issues/new

It's a pity you used "copilot", because that name is already used for Red Hat's admin product.

Do you mean cockpit?
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