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I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

fourlightyears.blogspot.com

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

#21

Post by djyde »

jfengel wrote: 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…

I switched to Cloudflare and it's been a breath of fresh air - everything I need and the pricing is reasonable.

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

#22

Post by DaanDL »

chuckadams wrote: post #11
jfengel wrote: 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.

But that's costly. Speaking of my own experience: going from a webapp fully hosted on an EC2 instance to a railway and vercel setup reduced my costs 10x.

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

#23

Post by cube00 »

h4kunamata wrote: post #5

AWS AIM is hot garbage, GCP might not be the coolest kid of the block but its AIM rocks. AWS CLI??? Holy guacamole, what a mess. AWS CLI looks what is now the digital identification to get the basics done. While GCP CLI is like "sure, here"!

It's a shame GCP's console and their CLI are both so painfully slow.

You're also putting your business at risk with Google randomly banning accounts and not providing timely appeals. [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798827

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

#24

Post by chuckadams »

DaanDL wrote: post #22
chuckadams wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that's costly. Speaking of my own experience: going from a webapp fully hosted on an EC2 instance to a railway and vercel setup reduced my costs 10x.

Maybe so, but it's still not the complexity nightmare that some would have us believe it is.

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

#25

Post by ceejayoz »

tedivm wrote: 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…

> it's really weird to say that the forks "resulted" in the license changes when those forks where a response to the license changes

But those license changes were a response to how AWS was monetizing their work in ways unsustainable for the upstream projects.

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

#26

Post by the__alchemist »

ChrisBland wrote: post #17
benoau wrote: 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.

Why? It is still up, and working just as it used to.

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

#27

Post by andrewstuart »

andai wrote: 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.

>> 192 cores What are you doing with all them cores?

The ancient forgotten art of Vertical Scaling.

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

#28

Post by cube00 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #10
faangguyindia wrote: post #8

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 worked for a startup company - the founders were really nice people and had put their own money in - quite a lot of money - to get the software built for the vision they had. By the time I joined, 18 months after development had started, a giant, complex, hideously tentacled software beast had been built that used every possible AWS service that the massive offshore team of developers could find to use. It should h…

> hideously tentacled software beast had been built that used every possible AWS service that the massive offshore team of developers could find to use

To be fair, if they had a AWS Solution Architect involved they heavily push you down this road and if they manage to get in management's ear they'll push the idea that server-less AWS features is vastly cheaper.

If you're only responding to a handful of requests that's true, but once things ramp up you get "nickel and dimed" for everything: API Gateway requests, lambda execution time, DynamoDB read/write units, CloudWatch logs, outgoing data, step function transitions, S3 requests.

I understand all those services cost money and they shouldn't be free, but I question if paying all those micro-transactions is worse then paying for your own VMs, especially once your customers complain about the cold starts and you think you can fix it with "lambda warming"

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

#29

Post by jgalt212 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #25
tedivm wrote: 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…

> it's really weird to say that the forks "resulted" in the license changes when those forks where a response to the license changes But those license changes were a response to how AWS was monetizing their work in ways unsustainable for the upstream projects.

Yes, this was my impression as well.

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

#30

Post by MagicMoonlight »

These complaints are very weak.

Lambda is incredibly simple to use, it just runs a function for you.

Not sure how you could burn so much with dynamodb. It’s serverless and incredibly cheap. Must have been doing something insane like a huge dataset where you scan through it over and over.

Being salty that Gary couldn’t sell enough of his paid service and AWS is competing with it isn’t a meaningful complaint. I want something in AWS, not on Gary’s servers.

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