Uh... what?
Have you tried the serverless tooling from GCP? doesn't hold a candle to AWS SAM.
AWS Tools Suck
21–30 of 73 posts
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#22I got bitten recently by AWS documentation. Several pages strongly imply something to be true, which in practise was 100% false. If I'd wanted to make a living reading text between the lines to work out how they're trying to fuck me, I'd have gone into law.
Please do give feedback if you see anything inaccurate on the documentation. I've submitted feedback many times and they would sometimes reply to my email that they have updated the documentation.
I've opened pull requests that haven't been touched by AWS for ~9 months (comments or other). Been told (through a back channel) that the team didn't have the capacity to review all the PRs.
So "it depends"
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#23Yes they might suck, but that's because of its success and the complexity of the problem - it'll get better over time. However aws-sdk doesn't need to be 70mb, the console doesn't need to be slow and they don't need over 10 unique services to deploy containers. We're working on a much improved dev ex for cloud providers and Kubernetes at https://northflank.com - with a fast real-time console, a well documented and us…
I don't find the console slow, but I find it pretty stupid. There are some things that I can't do via the console, only via the API, and some stuff just doesn't make sense. Like why does AWS WAF have its own region selection (that always defaults to us-east-1) separate from the console region selection?
>Like why does AWS WAF have its own region selection
Assuming you're talking about WAFv2, it seems that's because they chose to have a single set of api endpoints instead of regional-based endpoints. And that the CLI --region option is really only equipped to swap endpoints.
Doesn't explain why they chose that path though.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#24Long 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 the…
Shouldn't a company of that size and revenue be able to do both at the same time?
I have absolutely no evidence to back this but I think they are actually making money of the bad tooling.
Firstly, because it requires and also creates an army of cloud AWS consultants that works as free sales persons for AWS.
Secondly, this army creates overly complicated and expensive solutions which then only they can change, and they never do because it looks good on CV.
Maybe a bit too cynical.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#25I think there are a few things going on. First, it's tools designed by people who work at big companies. So the tools are insanely powerful, but there's high overhead to use them. Simplicity matters a lot less
Second, there's an arms race in cloud infra. So it's more about adding functionality, ticking the box, being ahead, than being simple and usable.
Finally, frankly, poor design. The AWS console is a usability nightmare.
That said, AWS is awesome. It's just infuriating to use if it's not your day job and you don't know it in and out and aren't willing to spend days reading their docs.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#26> 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…
I guess some people work for shitty companies because it makes their cv look "good"? And the pay is probably decent too.
But personally, never ever working for a big American tech company. They have no soul.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#27Actually they can't easily fix their mess of tools because they have so many customers vendor locked into them. Vendor lock-in is actually the primary reason for the tools sucking so much: it's a feature not a bug and it's intentional.
It prevents customers from leaving and it prevents customers from lowering their amazon bills by making more effective use of what's on offer. Amazon makes it really easy to spend money on their platform but very hard to save money by simplifying or more effective use of resources. That is their business model. They always offer an easy and expensive and slow/convoluted, slightly less expensive path for doing anything.
If it was easier, countless companies would be saving a lot of money and Amazon's profits would be decimated. Or worse, they might be tempted to jump ship to a competitor. The primary goal of complexity is to keep customers after they buy into that.
Of course, over time it has exposed them to companies trying to compete with them with a better developer experience. To mitigate that, they invest continuously to ensure those companies never quite catch up. And of course that keeps on adding complexity. Which is good for them.
Most big software companies work with the same business model. IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, etc. it's all about vendor lock-in through complexity with those companies. It's how they make money. Lure customers in with whatever they need, sell expensive stuff, consultancy, training, etc. and before you know it you are in a decades long relation ship with your customer where you basically cream off their revenue on a monthly basis. AWS is here to stay. However, that doesn't mean it is the smart thing to be using right now for small new companies.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#28It only has to be as good as it's competition. Haven't used GCP, but would pick AWS over Azure when it comes to tooling (and a few other categories). AWS documentation tends to be better - for example, Azure fails in giving quick example output for CLI commands. The AWS Console is better than the Azure Portal.
Same with GCP: their current maple makes AWS look like the pinnacle of fast web applications, they keep “accidentally” breaking it for non-Chrome browsers, and the CLI is full of ideas which you can see are kind of appealing but someone got distracted and moved on before finishing the hard parts. Then you get some of the default security policies you’ll be cleaning up for years…
This is not to saw AWS is perfect but it’s not like people are inexplicably using a bad option. We still have a lot of maturing to do as a field.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#29Yes they might suck, but that's because of its success and the complexity of the problem - it'll get better over time. However aws-sdk doesn't need to be 70mb, the console doesn't need to be slow and they don't need over 10 unique services to deploy containers. We're working on a much improved dev ex for cloud providers and Kubernetes at https://northflank.com - with a fast real-time console, a well documented and us…
Your product looks really cool, but just a heads up as a potential customer:
On your cloud >> talk to sales
Every SaaS firm on earth wants me to talk with their sales, I'm tired of that. From 2022 and beyond, if you can't give me some Databricks style onboarding, you're not getting my money.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#30> 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…
I guess some people work for shitty companies because it makes their cv look "good"? And the pay is probably decent too. But personally, never ever working for a big American tech company. They have no soul.
>But personally, never ever working for a big American tech company. They have no soul.
Bell Laboratory's was a thing....