AWS Tools Suck
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AWS Tools Suck
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Re: AWS Tools Suck
#2They do suck.
They also have everything.
As long as there are other companies building on top of AWS, I’m pretty happy with them.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#3Was just playing with Amplify
Studio and have no clue who it's targetting and who will be happy and for what use cases.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#4Long ago AWS reached the point where feature prioritization was discussed in terms of millions of $$ in revenue. When you have CTOs at Fortune 500 companies waving 10s of millions of dollars in front of your face to build a feature, it's much much easier to prioritize building that over one that is requested by smaller developers with uncertain revenue impact.
> The only conclusion is: bad tooling isn't affecting their sales.
I actually think bad tooling does affect their sales and long-term growth, but that they're blind to it because they can't easily measure it, and they have an obsession with data-driven decision making.
I suspect this is also exacerbated by hiring problems due to their reputation as an employer, forcing them to make tradeoffs that sacrifice dev UX more often than they'd like.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#5Even their console has really basic bits of weirdness and friction. Like if you want to view the logs from a fargate container running in ECS (possibly one of the most boring things you can do on AWS):
* For some reason, the log viewer within the ECS console has worse filtering capabilities than the Cloudwatch one
* Attempting to view logs for an instance which crashed more than a few minutes ago is very risky - sometimes the last ones are either missing completely or very hard to find in the UI (Cloudwatch will have them though!)
* They tried removing it in their ECS console revamp briefly
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#6> This is not a case of “not enough resources'', this is a case of the project not getting the internal priority to invest in improvement.
This is only partly true. Fun fact: Amazon is so big and the churn so high, that hiring talent has become the bottleneck.
So yes, parts of Amazon have prioritised new/more features over improving existing ones, and some are drowning in a sea of legacy. But also parts simply don't have the number of experienced engineers they need to deliver all their goals.
Disclaimer: I work for Amazon.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#7And still the and miles ahaead of "user experience" than their competitor (they are pretty much unworkable for developers, it's insane how bad that ux is).
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#8My favourite example is that if you have insufficient permissions the CLI may just give you a detailed but completely random and incorrect error. Eg if you are setting MFA Delete but you are not root, the error message it displays is the one for Dev Pay which is a nice way to waste users' time.
Eg https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45602558/devpay-and-mfa-...
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#9> This is not a case of “not enough resources'', this is a case of the project not getting the internal priority to invest in improvement. This is only partly true. Fun fact: Amazon is so big and the churn so high, that hiring talent has become the bottleneck. So yes, parts of Amazon have prioritised new/more features over improving existing ones, and some are drowning in a sea of legacy. But also parts simply don't…
> churn so high, that hiring talent has become the bottleneck.
It was a matter of time for that to happen. Amazon is infamous for having a firing quota, and infamous for Hiring managers to hire people, to fulfill said quota.
As long as these practices remain, the situation will only worsen for Amazon
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#10So how does this work? Features are delivered then another team adds capabilities to the cli/console?
Say the eks team responsible to deliver a cli/console tooling?
It's an interesting problem to solve. Any insight on how to go about managing this is greatly appreciated.