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I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

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11–20 of 684 posts

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#11
post #7

I don't work in that area, so I only touch AWS once in a while for personal fun projects. And every time it's a nightmare. I'm just banging out a server for my experimental card game, not setting up an new financial institution. Everything looks as if I'm preparing to scale to infinity tomorrow, with a staff of a thousand and a budget backed by VCs. Fortunately there's Netlify and similar, who put a gloss on it so th…

You can just spin up a raw VPS on EC2 or Lightsail, give it a public IP, and call it a day. You aren't required to implement every enterprise pattern in the book.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#12
post #7

I don't work in that area, so I only touch AWS once in a while for personal fun projects. And every time it's a nightmare. I'm just banging out a server for my experimental card game, not setting up an new financial institution. Everything looks as if I'm preparing to scale to infinity tomorrow, with a staff of a thousand and a budget backed by VCs. Fortunately there's Netlify and similar, who put a gloss on it so th…

What amazes me is how Heroku absolutely nailed what most web apps need nearly 20 years ago.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#13
> AWS stomped on open source projects - despite the clear desire of projects like Elasticsearch, Redis, and MongoDB not to be cloned and monetized, AWS pushed ahead with OpenSearch, Valkey, and DocumentDB anyway, capturing the hosted-service money after those communities and companies had built the markets; the result was a wave of defensive licenses like SSPL, Elastic License, RSAL, and other source-available models designed less to stop ordinary users than to stop AWS from stripping open-source infrastructure for parts, owning the customer relationship.

This is completely backwards, at least with OpenSearch and Valkey. AWS didn't create the forks until after the upstream projects changed their license, so it's really weird to say that the forks "resulted" in the license changes when those forks where a response to the license changes. With Valkey in particular it was members of the former redis core development team that created Valkey.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#14

Why do people even bother with cloud? I’ve a couple of apps doing a few million a day. I am using Hetzner and before that used DigitalOcean. Mind you, for close to a decade. People are unnecessarily complicating stuff, and these clouds can go very expensive very quickly. Recently, I came across a company and they were spending $20k a month on GCP. I am like, are you kidding me, $20K for the kind of stuff you do??? It…

I think AWS is liked is because when AWS started, being able to get a new VPS up in minutes was still quite unusual. Many hosts would require about 24hr, I suspect, for getting a new VM up. At least those are some experiences I had. But nowaways, they are probably many options for getting a VM instantly.

I agree that it's overcomplicated. Although having the self-service portal also for assigning IPs is useful. But most of it seems overkill. Although, being able to detach storage from VMs and such is also quite flexible. But still.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#15
post #13

> AWS stomped on open source projects - despite the clear desire of projects like Elasticsearch, Redis, and MongoDB not to be cloned and monetized, AWS pushed ahead with OpenSearch, Valkey, and DocumentDB anyway, capturing the hosted-service money after those communities and companies had built the markets; the result was a wave of defensive licenses like SSPL, Elastic License, RSAL, and other source-available models…

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Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#16
post #3

At last my quest to find the stooge has come to a bitter end! I saw some 192 core instances on Vultr, but I haven't tried them yet. What are you doing with all them cores? I often fantasized about spinning up hundreds of nodes for various projects that needed number crunching. Then realized "wait I can just rent one big box for an hour" haha. It's really cool that we can do that now.

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Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#17
post #12
post #7

I don't work in that area, so I only touch AWS once in a while for personal fun projects. And every time it's a nightmare. I'm just banging out a server for my experimental card game, not setting up an new financial institution. Everything looks as if I'm preparing to scale to infinity tomorrow, with a staff of a thousand and a budget backed by VCs. Fortunately there's Netlify and similar, who put a gloss on it so th…

What amazes me is how Heroku absolutely nailed what most web apps need nearly 20 years ago.

I miss heroku dearly. somewhere at Salesforce there is an exec who killed the product and shifted it to enterprise and is now looking at the vibe coding revolution seeing their opportunity missed.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#18
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What amazes me is how Heroku absolutely nailed what most web apps need nearly 20 years ago.

I miss heroku dearly. somewhere at Salesforce there is an exec who killed the product and shifted it to enterprise and is now looking at the vibe coding revolution seeing their opportunity missed.

Render has been excellent replacement, in my experience.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#19
post #13

> AWS stomped on open source projects - despite the clear desire of projects like Elasticsearch, Redis, and MongoDB not to be cloned and monetized, AWS pushed ahead with OpenSearch, Valkey, and DocumentDB anyway, capturing the hosted-service money after those communities and companies had built the markets; the result was a wave of defensive licenses like SSPL, Elastic License, RSAL, and other source-available models…

A lot of these projects work on a business model where they open-source their core product, and provide advanced services, installation, maintenance or fully-managed services around their product. AWS was bypassing them by providing fully-managed services. On this, I am on the side of the people behind the projects. Basically AWS was eating their lunch. They had no choice but to change the licenses.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#20
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What amazes me is how Heroku absolutely nailed what most web apps need nearly 20 years ago.

I miss heroku dearly. somewhere at Salesforce there is an exec who killed the product and shifted it to enterprise and is now looking at the vibe coding revolution seeing their opportunity missed.

Fly and Render are what heroku would be if they didn’t stop innovating. And neon db for Postgres.
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