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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#31

Post by PartiallyTyped »

KaiserPro wrote: post #30

Yeah this is normally why you'd use the SDK, because its just horrific when you're outside. However, having said that, compared to FAANG internal tools, its actually not that bad. It's at least vaguely consistent

> compared to FAANG internal tools, its actually not that bad

It's because it is an "internal tool". All services are built on top of aws native.

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

#32

Post by mcqueenjordan »

You HMAC the region so that in case a region is compromised, other regions aren't as well. You HMAC the service so that in case a service is compromised, other services aren't as well, you HMAC the timestamp for obvious reasons (time bound the signature), the outer "aws4_request" HMAC, I'm sure there's a good reason for. Maybe just versioning? Not sure.

Also: All of this is handled in the SDKs. Anyone implementing this themselves either isn't using the right libraries or has a very special use case.

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

#33

Post by themoonisachees »

goodpoint wrote: post #24
carabiner wrote: post #5

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.

The microsoft model of "if sysadmins are spending much more time debugging windows, then they put windows first on their CV and gradually management forgets linux exists"

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

#35

Post by darrenf »

kureikain wrote: post #6

I though its just me who find it overly complicated. With people who use AWS SDK its all abstracted out. But there is time I just want to send a damn `curl` to download a S3 file and yes, doing the dance in bash isn't easy. There is time I wrote a Lua plugin for openresty to fetch s3 and. I have to trial and error with lot of debugging. The ordering. the timestamp format...all of that...

> But there is time I just want to send a damn `curl` to download a S3 file

You can use curl's `--aws-sigv4` option, then: https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html#--aws-sigv4

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

#36

Post by damacaner »

KaiserPro wrote: post #30

Yeah this is normally why you'd use the SDK, because its just horrific when you're outside. However, having said that, compared to FAANG internal tools, its actually not that bad. It's at least vaguely consistent

I am trying to work with MWS, and AWS SDK of GoLang horribly fails when tried to use standalone (I only need the signer part), but oh my oh my.

https://github.com/canercetin-randomguy/club-noira/blob/main...

This is only the auth&sign part. and it doesnt work. and it is already 150 LoC. god.

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

#37

Post by alserio »

gw98 wrote: post #26
alserio wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You still can use POST policies, they don't need to be defined on the bucket but only signed. But you are limited on what you can check. Other than that, yeah, the approach might not have been adequate.

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

#38

Post by orf »

Your complaint isn’t about AWS, it’s about the authentication scheme. I find it to be pretty neat, especially when it’s flexible enough to create signed URLs for any method and send them to third parties. We use that as a basis for service-to-service auth. It’s cool and flexible. But overall this complaint seems pretty shallow. You’d just use the client SDKs they publish, or if you want to really go off the beaten path you could just use the signing methods from those SDKs with your own request/response calls.

And if you’re building your own SDK (why?), well there is a lot more complexity down the line once you get past authentication.

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