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Show HN: Vantage – An alternative AWS console focused on developer experience

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Re: Show HN: Vantage – An alternative AWS console focused on developer experience

#51
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity - what else would you like to do? We're always open to feedback. The only write actions we have are around Route 53 detailed here but we're adding more soon: https://medium.com/@bensign/raising-the-bar-for-the-route53-...

I guess, I would like to do what I can do with the actual AWS console. Provision and update my resources. Otherwise it's, like I said, only another monitoring dashboard. I mean, that isn't bad, it's probably doing a good job at that. But I guess, I simply expected more interactivity from an AWS console replacement, haha

Isn't it supposed to be read only for security - that's at least a big benefit in my book. Ideally without dynamodb query permission either. etc

Re: Show HN: Vantage – An alternative AWS console focused on developer experience

#52

I've always wondered why AWS doesn't just open source their console. it's such a usability disaster and there's so many developers that would love to contribute improvements to it. Wouldn't that make financial sense to Amazon?

Does the dashboard use non-public APIs?

Re: Show HN: Vantage – An alternative AWS console focused on developer experience

#53
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess, I would like to do what I can do with the actual AWS console. Provision and update my resources. Otherwise it's, like I said, only another monitoring dashboard. I mean, that isn't bad, it's probably doing a good job at that. But I guess, I simply expected more interactivity from an AWS console replacement, haha

Isn't it supposed to be read only for security - that's at least a big benefit in my book. Ideally without dynamodb query permission either. etc

Sure, totally understand that. It's just not what I think about when I read AWS console replacement.

Re: Show HN: Vantage – An alternative AWS console focused on developer experience

#54
post #30

Congratulations on the launch. This looks fantastic! AWS's release cadence is absolutely crazy - I can barely keep up with all the new releases. Are you planning on supporting all AWS services? If so, how are you planning on keeping up?

Thanks so much! We are letting our users dictate what services we support. We can typically add support for a new AWS service in a few hours at best or ~2 days at worst. The nice thing about Vantage is that its essentially a personalized console just for you - so even if we add support for a bunch of AWS services you'll have a console just for what services you're using. Also at one point we hope to hire some more en…

That kind of timeline is incredible. Are you able to share anything about your development processes that enable this?

Re: Show HN: Vantage – An alternative AWS console focused on developer experience

#55

I've always wondered why AWS doesn't just open source their console. it's such a usability disaster and there's so many developers that would love to contribute improvements to it. Wouldn't that make financial sense to Amazon?

I think that's a good idea and I wish they would do something like this. FWIW I disagree that the console is a usability disaster. We're very prone to hyperbole in this industry. It's definitely got a ton of room to improve but it's not the worst and it's usable. Hundreds of thousands of people use it all the time.

I can give some background that might be helpful on why the UIs might not be open sourced.

Each service team builds their own console. Most of the original AWS consoles were written in Java with GWT. Some eventually moved to Angular. There's a big push internally to use a more consistent and familiar UX experience across services. There's an internal UI/UX platform called Polaris (I'm not leaking anything here, you can see this in the source of some consoles and in the console.log statements that leak to prod) that most of the new services use.

Most new services are built with React + Polaris. The console API for many new services is not the same API that is exposed to the SDKs/CLIs. These APIs aren't public or documented. If they open source every console, and people build on that, they're tied to supporting those APIs in perpetuity. That slows their pace of iteration on the console.

If consoles are open source it could be another potential vector for service updates to leak through.

Another concern is that releasing the UI kit for the AWS console is going to make it way easier for phishers to build out convincing lures. TBH I'm not super concerned about that.

If I were AWS I'd open source the UI toolkit and give various service teams the option of open sourcing their console. From there I'd release a theme/color scheme for people who want to build extensions.

AWS is very customer feedback driven. However, most of the customers providing feedback are not the ones using the console day-in-day out. The people actually using the console are not the ones talking to AWS. If you hit a UX issue then use that feedback button on the bottom left of the console and let them know.

Re: Show HN: Vantage – An alternative AWS console focused on developer experience

#56
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it handle credentials? What's the potential for Vantage being hacked and the hackers gaining admin access to your users' AWS accounts?

The provided CloudFormation stack creates a Cross Account IAM Role with a list of read only permissions. We don't accept access keys or secrets. - A permissions overview is here (most aren't used for now). This list was made from the AWS-managed IAM policy of "ReadOnlyAccess" but whittled down to remove things like our ability to read from S3 Buckets or Databases: https://docs.vantage.sh/permissions/ - The latest Clo…

It appears the current CF stack is not valid JSON file:

$ http https://vantage-public.s3.amazonaws.com/x-account-role-creat... | jq '.' parse error: Expected another key-value pair at line 420, column 17

(Haven't tried to execute it with CF)

Re: Show HN: Vantage – An alternative AWS console focused on developer experience

#57
post #9

Looks good, congrats! Open source alternative https://github.com/cloudquery/cloudquery

Hey, don’t take the shine off StratusBen’s Show HN :)

This is good to know, but I’m really curious how you found out about the OSS project? You are a contributor? Found out on Twitter?

Re: Show HN: Vantage – An alternative AWS console focused on developer experience

#58

I've always wondered why AWS doesn't just open source their console. it's such a usability disaster and there's so many developers that would love to contribute improvements to it. Wouldn't that make financial sense to Amazon?

Its not one console held in a single repository. AWS has teams built around individual features, and each individual team is responsible for creating its own UI, which is why its not a particularly coherent standard. Open-Sourcing it would involve releasing thousands of repositories built on many different types of internal architectures, and would be largely infeasible to change/build upon without a solution like Vantage that sets up it's own IAM role.

Re: Show HN: Vantage – An alternative AWS console focused on developer experience

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The provided CloudFormation stack creates a Cross Account IAM Role with a list of read only permissions. We don't accept access keys or secrets. - A permissions overview is here (most aren't used for now). This list was made from the AWS-managed IAM policy of "ReadOnlyAccess" but whittled down to remove things like our ability to read from S3 Buckets or Databases: https://docs.vantage.sh/permissions/ - The latest Clo…

It appears the current CF stack is not valid JSON file: $ http https://vantage-public.s3.amazonaws.com/x-account-role-creat... | jq '.' parse error: Expected another key-value pair at line 420, column 17 (Haven't tried to execute it with CF)

There's a trailing comma after the last kv pair in a dict. One of those things that some json parsers will accept and some won't.

Re: Show HN: Vantage – An alternative AWS console focused on developer experience

#60
post #55

I've always wondered why AWS doesn't just open source their console. it's such a usability disaster and there's so many developers that would love to contribute improvements to it. Wouldn't that make financial sense to Amazon?

I think that's a good idea and I wish they would do something like this. FWIW I disagree that the console is a usability disaster. We're very prone to hyperbole in this industry. It's definitely got a ton of room to improve but it's not the worst and it's usable. Hundreds of thousands of people use it all the time. I can give some background that might be helpful on why the UIs might not be open sourced. Each service…

People who think that the AWS UI is a disaster probably didn't have to deal with IBM SoftLayer in the past :)
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