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Does anyone else finds AWS and other Amazon services overly complicated?

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Re: Does anyone else finds AWS and other Amazon services overly complicated?

#22
post #20
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse. We use presigned URLs (from the SDK) and S3 for file uploads. That's one fresh hell you don't want to get involved with. One of those seemed like a good idea at the time things...

May I ask you why? I use and have used both PUT presigned urls and POST signed policies for uploading file to S3 without too many problems, but your remark worries me a bit. Am I missing something?

We get our customers to upload to S3 directly so we don't have to handle their ingress traffic through our infra. Problems involve mostly when the client cocks up as it's near impossible to distinguish between broken files and good ones. This leads to the assumption that the clients have uploaded a file and they haven't.

Re: Does anyone else finds AWS and other Amazon services overly complicated?

#23
post #22
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask you why? I use and have used both PUT presigned urls and POST signed policies for uploading file to S3 without too many problems, but your remark worries me a bit. Am I missing something?

We get our customers to upload to S3 directly so we don't have to handle their ingress traffic through our infra. Problems involve mostly when the client cocks up as it's near impossible to distinguish between broken files and good ones. This leads to the assumption that the clients have uploaded a file and they haven't.

Do you mean that you cannot synchronously validate the file and return an error to the client? For async validations a lambda on an s3 trigger works well enough. For sync validation I've found you are limited in what you can encode in an upload policy

Re: Does anyone else finds AWS and other Amazon services overly complicated?

#24

I did AWS training at the Amazon offices in Seattle for data science. I was blown away by the configuration... I have recompiled linux kernels and configured iptables as a teenager, and this was an entire galaxy of more complexity. It took us 6 hours to the point where some of us had a Jupyter Notebook running. Many people didn't make it though.

Artificial complexity to justify lock-in and artificial salaries.

Re: Does anyone else finds AWS and other Amazon services overly complicated?

#26
post #23
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We get our customers to upload to S3 directly so we don't have to handle their ingress traffic through our infra. Problems involve mostly when the client cocks up as it's near impossible to distinguish between broken files and good ones. This leads to the assumption that the clients have uploaded a file and they haven't.

Do you mean that you cannot synchronously validate the file and return an error to the client? For async validations a lambda on an s3 trigger works well enough. For sync validation I've found you are limited in what you can encode in an upload policy

Can't do that. The clients own the S3 buckets not us.

The whole idea we had was stupid.

Re: Does anyone else finds AWS and other Amazon services overly complicated?

#27
Absolutely, there's so many services and permissions that getting them to all work together happily can be complex. I work at a company where we have both AWS certified engineers and some very smart people in general, and there's been times when we spend ages trying to figure out why one particular service can't read data from an S3 bucket (or a particular folder in bucket).

Re: Does anyone else finds AWS and other Amazon services overly complicated?

#28
Can confirm this was a intense 12 hours of work to get it working properly. Their example and explanation in the docs is also very vague and borderline misleading at points.

Another example is Google cloud run vs elastic container service. Cloud run is dead easy to get up and running. ECS is a mess of confusing terminology and unnecessary complexity. I literally do not care what class of machine you will use to run my container. If I cared that much I would have used a proper EC2 instance.

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