I am convinced that AWS is intentionally obtuse in order to promote job security for engineers and thus be the preferred platform
Libaws: A simpler way to declare AWS infrastructure
31–40 of 93 posts
Re: Libaws: A simpler way to declare AWS infrastructure
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why should it be? There exists a cohort of internal customers at medium-to-large sized software companies that need to ship new applications without being bogged down by the decisions of how to get that thing running and playing nicely with the rest of the ecosystem. For the same reason they don't give their end users CRUD APIs to use their products, it doesn't always make sense to give our developers the entire su…
as an indie dev who is NOT a DevOps person i'd love more tooling that enabled me to configure AWS and have good safe defaults preset for me. Right now you really need to be a pro or spend a lot of time learning the nitty gritty configuration stuff of services you need but don't actually care about.
Or make a ton of mistakes and scramble to recover from them...
Re: Libaws: A simpler way to declare AWS infrastructure
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why should it be? There exists a cohort of internal customers at medium-to-large sized software companies that need to ship new applications without being bogged down by the decisions of how to get that thing running and playing nicely with the rest of the ecosystem. For the same reason they don't give their end users CRUD APIs to use their products, it doesn't always make sense to give our developers the entire su…
That was sort of the idea with the various PaaS implementations out there. But invariably they either go complicated (basically transitioning to a Kubernetes-based container platform). Or they were missing some capabilities, making them less interesting to enterprises in particular.
Is there a PaaS out there that enables some guardrails? An example would be "we only want to use Fargate, don't manually provision EC2" and that option just doesn't show up as something you can self-serve.
Re: Libaws: A simpler way to declare AWS infrastructure
#34> X should be easy > proposes solution that involves YAML Am I crazy, ignorant, or is YAML the most tedious and error-prone format edit?
I'm really fascinated about why so many infrastructure-as-code tools are actually infrastructure-as-markup. Many of them seem to "evolve" until they're awkward attempts at bolting full programming language semantics onto that markup language. I imagine it started out as wanting to keep a simple configuration-style format for infrastructure but fell apart when people's stacks grew large and complex.
Projects like Pulumi and CDK seem to be much better approaches, but don't seem to have much traction compared to TF, Cloudformation, etc.
Re: Libaws: A simpler way to declare AWS infrastructure
#35> X should be easy > proposes solution that involves YAML Am I crazy, ignorant, or is YAML the most tedious and error-prone format edit?
Agreed, trial & error with YAML sucks. People hated it so much that Amazon created CDK, a tool that basically generates/executes Cloudformation templates.
Using a proper programming language seems to be the obvious end-game of configuration. Everything as code. Not quite sure why we keep trying and failing to use non-Turing complete configuration languages.
Re: Libaws: A simpler way to declare AWS infrastructure
#36I am convinced that AWS is intentionally obtuse in order to promote job security for engineers and thus be the preferred platform
As someone who has worked within AWS, and also used AWS as a customer at multiple companies, I totally understand that sentiment. But I wouldn't want to solve some of the problems myself, rather than using their services.
Re: Libaws: A simpler way to declare AWS infrastructure
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Piloting a passenger plane should be easy" > "Performing brain surgery should be easy" > None of that should be easy. Why shouldn't those things be easy? Wouldn't it be better if they were? It would mean more people could do it well (I'm not saying let anyone do it!) and it would presumably have come about as a result of better understanding and tooling. Imagine if people didn't die on the waitlist for the best ne…
If surgery was made "easy" then it would be a one size fits all and anyone with an outlier condition would not get medical care. We train doctors to have a very deep knowledge of their discipline because when they do encounter that edge case, they need to know immediately what to do. Medical care is sometimes extremely time sensitive and you don't want the doc to have to ask his superior how to stop your bleeding.
> If surgery was made "easy" then it would be a one size fits all and anyone with an outlier condition would not get medical care.
On the contrary, I think it would be a lot easier to treat an outlier condition because doctors would have a lot more time to expand their skills and study uncommon conditions.
Re: Libaws: A simpler way to declare AWS infrastructure
#38Why should it be? is Linux easy? Is Windows? AWS (as is GCP and Azure) can basically be thought of as an entire operating system, with extremely low level concepts (VPCs, EC2 machines), mid-level (Lambda, StepFunctions, EventBridge), and high-level (Translate, Comprehend, Rekognition, etc) I am not sure if this library helps. It presents its own opinionated flavour of AWS but doesn't really hide enough of the details…
Because they're literally wasting your existence making it overly-complicated to either justify their own egos, or, to steal your/your company's money for an inferior product.
Linux is easy/well-designed/well-documented. Windows is a hackjob mess. There's a difference.
Re: Libaws: A simpler way to declare AWS infrastructure
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a cohort of internal customers at medium-to-large sized software companies that need to ship new applications without being bogged down by the decisions Well, if it's a medium-to-large sized company they will be bogged down by governance processes anyway. Who approves the budget for this? Who signs off the cybersecurity and data protection compliance policies?
Right, and I think that strikes at the core of the issue; AWS allows you to configure things in insecure, poorly architected ways. Then they'll tell you "oh this is bad, you should fix that", as if they weren't the ones who built it to do that! The classic example is public-read S3 buckets. My favorite-er example is actually a security guidance which reads: nothing should use the default VPC (usually phrased from the…
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Re: Libaws: A simpler way to declare AWS infrastructure
#40As stated earlier this week, AWS's CF is your opportunity. Seriously, there is a business opportunity here. Make a multi-cloud interface that is easy to use, prevents lock-in, has reasonable defaults ... please?