what a stupid rant
AWS Tools Suck
51–60 of 73 posts
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#52Have been an AWS user by default since launch. Basically try to muddle through, have had some good experiences (RDS, S3, EC2, Amplify hosting) and some frustrating moments where I threw up my hands (other parts of Amplify, doing custom stuff with Route 53).
Now I'm using Firebase and Google Cloud Storage on a new project, and I've generally found the UIs to be clearer and better-organized than AWS, and the documentation more accessible and easier to understand.
These GCloud tools really do feel tailored with the average hacker in mind, something I often don't find at AWS.
UI/docwise, AWS kind of expects you to to come to the mountain, not the other way around.
As an example, getting Firebase Auth up and running was worlds easier than Amplify Auth, which I flailed helplessly at and gave up on.
Curious to learn more about GCloud, see if the rest of it is this good.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#53AWS once tried/looked at/toyed with buying my company, mostly on the basis of the 'developer experience' we had created.
In the end they didn't buy us and the aped everything they learned and launched a carbon copy product 18 months later. rages
... but...
one thing that caught me off guard during the process was that their teams had no idea about developer experience, didn't understand workflows outside their own domain, and didn't pretend to understand any of it.
Honestly the only card they really had to play was being aloof and condescending. Of course we were very deferential to them the entire time, because AWS.
This was one group within what is a massive organization, so YMMV, but if they come knocking my suggestion is to be aloof, kind of a jerk, and don't share anything that isn't on your www. My guess is that would really be what gets their juices flowing.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
There is no firing quota.
> There is no firing quota.
It's called planned attrition.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#55> 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
Top performers leave the company voluntarily, most often to get a promotion and pay rise elsewhere. This is commonplace in tech. The problem is (particularly during the last few months) the intake of talent has struggled to keep up.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#56> 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…
> Fun fact: Amazon is so big and the churn so high, that hiring talent has become the bottleneck. This is only true because Amazon refuses to pay market rates for talent. E.g. for the folks who write their technical documentation, they require that they have the technical skills of senior engineers, but pay them closer to what you would pay a recent college grad to churn out SEO blogspam. If they actually payed their…
I can only talk for Software Engineers. Amazon pay for engineers is by no means low, definitely above the median. But it doesn't pay top dollar either. We are constantly losing good candidates to other companies for a higher pay. That's not counting those that don't even bother applying, for which we don't have visibility.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#57> Reason 2: AWS doesn't sell based on Dev Ex AWS's core is developer experience. AWS is an API. Anybody who does not realize or can not exploit this fact this pays massive premiums for using it (probably a lot of businesses which should have no business using AWS directly). The application tooling is extra. And as far as I can tell, AWS is the only major public cloud that has decent coverage by tools of any flavour a…
> AWS is an API.
Exactly.
Most of my grief is wrestling with the misc tools which obfuscate the underlying API. Bad or good design aside, I just need to see what's on the wire. Once I kinda grok the mechanics, I can map whatever tool's (terrible) UX to the reality.
It's my mental quirk. Maybe the inability to suspend disbelief. It's always slowed me down. But once I have a mental model, I can move pretty fast.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#58> 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…
If that’s true, perhaps they should reconsider a) their non-compete agreement b) their equity vesting schedule.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#59Catchy title that's sure to gain interest with the hate-everything-Amazon-does crowd. But the only tool they point out is IaC.
CloudFormation works in both YAML and JSON. Don't like that? Use the CDK to write in your favorite language and that will be transformed into CloudFormation template. I'm not seeing what sucks here.
The reason most people use Terraform or Pulumi is because they want something that's cloud agnostic. That doesn't mean CloudFormation itself sucks -- it means that people have a different usecase.
Re: AWS Tools Suck
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think even WAF v1 had stupid region selections on the console.