Does anyone else finds AWS and other Amazon services overly complicated? • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by irjustin » Sun, Nov 06, 2022, 1:20 PM UTC

Hawxy wrote: post #60

gw98 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. CDK is just another way of expressing the same things as terraform and cloudfront but using a framework which is opaque. Plus it's slow as fuck, buggy and difficult to debug when it goes wrong. Every attempt keeps trying to solve the same problems with a new abstraction but the problem is the underlying abstraction not the tools.

> CDK is just another way of expressing the same things as terraform and cloudfront but using a framework which is opaque. It also involves writing many, many less lines of code than Cloudformation/Terraform thanks to the excellent abstractions it bundles in. Your example of writing "2 days' worth of YAML" is less than 120 lines of Typescript in CDK. You could even skip that and just npm install the AWS solutions con…

To be absolutely fair the CDK is non-trivial.

If you know CloudFormation, you do _not_ know the CDK. The CDK is split in 3 versions, ver 1, ver 2 and v2-alpha. Knowing the difference between L1, L2 missing options between the two.

Don't even get me started on docs. Docs in CloudFormation is KING. CDK's docs are a simplification at BEST. Most of the time I have to drop down into CF's docs to see what the actual constraints on a key are.

Given all my complaints, I'm not going back to CloudFormation. It is wayyyyy less code. Separated files. And, it's too hard to do complex stuff in CF. CDK has a lot of nice magic that takes away so much complexity esp dealing with cross region work.

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

#82

Post by stblack » Sun, Nov 06, 2022, 1:20 PM UTC

gw98 wrote: post #7

Ah that's nothing. Simple problem from a high level: static web site on apex domain. What you should be able to do: Click click done. Upload files to S3. Point CNAME at AWS. What you have to do: Create an S3 bucket and stick the files in it. Create a zone in Route 53 and import your old zone file. Change your nameservers at the registrar. Wait a bit. Go to ACM in the correct region and create a cert. Tell it to add t…

I envy you.

I am using a simple S3 bucket to serve image files.

We’re getting close to busting the free tier web traffic limit.

I can’t figure out where, or how, to enter my boss’s credit card so we can start paying for the service.

I’m not kidding. I’ve looked everywhere. Several times. I’ve probably spent two hours on this.

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

#83

Post by gw98 » Sun, Nov 06, 2022, 1:22 PM UTC

indymike wrote: post #66

gw98 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t know typescript. So we’d have to learn that first.

Do you know JavaScript?

Nope!

Edit: not strictly true. I know JavaScript quite well but I wish to have nothing whatsoever to do with it and the ecosystem around it due to a number of reasons I would have to write a whole essay on.

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

#84

Post by laputan_machine » Sun, Nov 06, 2022, 1:23 PM UTC

philliphaydon wrote: post #80

gw98 wrote: post #7

Ah that's nothing. Simple problem from a high level: static web site on apex domain. What you should be able to do: Click click done. Upload files to S3. Point CNAME at AWS. What you have to do: Create an S3 bucket and stick the files in it. Create a zone in Route 53 and import your old zone file. Change your nameservers at the registrar. Wait a bit. Go to ACM in the correct region and create a cert. Tell it to add t…

I learned cloudformation in a day. Everyone on HN said use terraforms. Tried to learn terraforms and it made things complicated. Went back to CF.

I'm currently in the middle of converting my team to straight CF instead of CDK/Terraform/Serverless. To me it's needlessly complicated, CF is simple, configurable, importantly it's _declarative_, which is the 'correct' way to approach infra (imho, of course).

Deploying it? `aws cloudformation package -> aws cloudformation deploy`. That's it. No need for third party tooling or other madness.

I think the lack of understanding the fundamentals leads people to picking up tools that abstract the fundamentals away (but then leads to more complex solutions).

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

#85

Post by MarcoSanto » Sun, Nov 06, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

Yes, I do, but that's probably because I am not the target audience of their product. My gut feeling is that the target customer are devops teams in scaleups

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

#86

Post by e40 » Sun, Nov 06, 2022, 1:25 PM UTC

stblack wrote: post #82

gw98 wrote: post #7

Ah that's nothing. Simple problem from a high level: static web site on apex domain. What you should be able to do: Click click done. Upload files to S3. Point CNAME at AWS. What you have to do: Create an S3 bucket and stick the files in it. Create a zone in Route 53 and import your old zone file. Change your nameservers at the registrar. Wait a bit. Go to ACM in the correct region and create a cert. Tell it to add t…

I envy you. I am using a simple S3 bucket to serve image files. We’re getting close to busting the free tier web traffic limit. I can’t figure out where, or how, to enter my boss’s credit card so we can start paying for the service. I’m not kidding. I’ve looked everywhere. Several times. I’ve probably spent two hours on this.

Sounds like you don’t have billing credentials for your iams user.

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

#87

Post by lifebeyondfife » Sun, Nov 06, 2022, 1:25 PM UTC

gw98 wrote: post #7

Ah that's nothing. Simple problem from a high level: static web site on apex domain. What you should be able to do: Click click done. Upload files to S3. Point CNAME at AWS. What you have to do: Create an S3 bucket and stick the files in it. Create a zone in Route 53 and import your old zone file. Change your nameservers at the registrar. Wait a bit. Go to ACM in the correct region and create a cert. Tell it to add t…

I created a CloudFormation script specifically to do this (including CloudFront for CDN). Yes, there's reasonable complexity, but it's a trade-off of security and configuration. As others noted, the documentation is good, and this took me a weekend to write including learning CloudFormation from scratch.

https://github.com/lifebeyondfife/simple-static-website

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

#88

Post by vitorfhc » Sun, Nov 06, 2022, 1:25 PM UTC

stblack wrote: post #82

gw98 wrote: post #7

Ah that's nothing. Simple problem from a high level: static web site on apex domain. What you should be able to do: Click click done. Upload files to S3. Point CNAME at AWS. What you have to do: Create an S3 bucket and stick the files in it. Create a zone in Route 53 and import your old zone file. Change your nameservers at the registrar. Wait a bit. Go to ACM in the correct region and create a cert. Tell it to add t…

I envy you. I am using a simple S3 bucket to serve image files. We’re getting close to busting the free tier web traffic limit. I can’t figure out where, or how, to enter my boss’s credit card so we can start paying for the service. I’m not kidding. I’ve looked everywhere. Several times. I’ve probably spent two hours on this.

Hey, is the AWS account you are using inside an organization? If it's then all the billing information should go into the management account. Hope this is the issue and I could help you.

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

#89

Post by pooper » Sun, Nov 06, 2022, 1:26 PM UTC

stblack wrote: post #82

gw98 wrote: post #7

Ah that's nothing. Simple problem from a high level: static web site on apex domain. What you should be able to do: Click click done. Upload files to S3. Point CNAME at AWS. What you have to do: Create an S3 bucket and stick the files in it. Create a zone in Route 53 and import your old zone file. Change your nameservers at the registrar. Wait a bit. Go to ACM in the correct region and create a cert. Tell it to add t…

I envy you. I am using a simple S3 bucket to serve image files. We’re getting close to busting the free tier web traffic limit. I can’t figure out where, or how, to enter my boss’s credit card so we can start paying for the service. I’m not kidding. I’ve looked everywhere. Several times. I’ve probably spent two hours on this.

How can you even get started with AWS without entering payment details? I would love to use AWS for personal projects if I could guarantee it will just stop service outright I stead of charging me.

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

#90

Post by zeroxp » Sun, Nov 06, 2022, 1:27 PM UTC

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #43

goodpoint wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because heroku has limitations.