Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 148 posts

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

#41

Post by orf »

gw98 wrote: post #22
alserio wrote: 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.

If you know the file hash beforehand, you can encode that into the signed URL.

But if you’re saying clients will upload the wrong file, then that’s not really AWS’s fault is it?

If you’re saying the file itself is corrupted, I’m not sure how? The upload should fail if the content length is incorrect, and s3 doesn’t make the contents visible unless the upload completes.

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

#42

Post by damacaner »

jen20 wrote: post #40

Not remotely. Every aspect of request signing has a purpose, and I appreciate that security is actually a concern at AWS. Plus, signing is implemented as a library almost everywhere you can think of.

Yeah, at least getting used to signings might come useful in the future.

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

#43

Post by Traubenfuchs »

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.

Obviously! Just like devops as a whole. Why do we have this current mess instead of just pushing stuff to heroku?

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

#45

Post by asah »

brunooliv wrote: post #19

If you don't use the SDK, how can you judge anything as being "overly complicated"? I mean, I don't know about you, but, last time I checked, signatures, certificates, security and all that stuff IS SUPPOSED to be super complicated because it's a subject with a very high inherent complexity in and of itself. The SDK exists and is well designed to precisely shield you from said complexity. If you deliberately choose n…

Curl is my preferred SDK.

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

#46

Post by Gigachad »

brunooliv wrote: post #19

If you don't use the SDK, how can you judge anything as being "overly complicated"? I mean, I don't know about you, but, last time I checked, signatures, certificates, security and all that stuff IS SUPPOSED to be super complicated because it's a subject with a very high inherent complexity in and of itself. The SDK exists and is well designed to precisely shield you from said complexity. If you deliberately choose n…

HN users routinely try to do things the obtuse way and then complain when its hard. Throw in something about the SDK being spyware or not following the unix philosophy.

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

#47

Post by throwaway894345 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #44

Well, if you bill by the resources used, you really have no incentive to run an operation where building clean and resource-effective applications is easy, or where migrating to another platform is painless.

I mean, Amazon does a pretty good job of helping you write reasonably resource-efficient applications, and I’ve migrated from AWS to GCP and there wasn’t any particular lock-in that one wouldn’t have experienced in moving between a cloud provider and on prem or vice versa. Moreover, as it pertains to this post, AWS provides dozens of high-quality SDKs so you never actually have to know about this stuff. I’ve been using AWS for a decade and I’ve never known about how requests are formed.

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

#48

Post by numbsafari »

asah wrote: post #45
brunooliv wrote: post #19

If you don't use the SDK, how can you judge anything as being "overly complicated"? I mean, I don't know about you, but, last time I checked, signatures, certificates, security and all that stuff IS SUPPOSED to be super complicated because it's a subject with a very high inherent complexity in and of itself. The SDK exists and is well designed to precisely shield you from said complexity. If you deliberately choose n…

Curl is my preferred SDK.

Well, here you go then…

https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html#--aws-sigv4

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

#49

Post by rippercushions »

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.

Were you doing things the hard way on purpose? It's literally one click to spin up a Jupyter notebook on GCP, arguably less if you use Colab (instant access to shared instances), and I'm sure AWS has a similar service.

https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai-workbench

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

#50

Post by arielcostas »

My main problem with AWS has always been the console UI being horrendous and inconsistent, the poor documentation and having far too many services.

Also, AWS not having something like Azure's resource groups or GCP's projects and instead telling you to create accounts for different projects and environments, and using AWS Organizations or however they call it sounds like a huge PITA.

Post reply on HN