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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

#41

Post by maccard »

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…

At my previous startup: because AWS gave us a bunch of credits and helped us design the infra. It meant we ran for free what they designed for free.

At a previous bigger company, getting procurement to sign up to a new provider requires writing a business case, justifying the spend and then getting multiple competing quotes and speaking to their sales teams. Signing up to a new service takes _months_ even for $10/mo as they’ll negotiate for bulk discounts and the best possible terms for something that will literally cost less per year than one of meetings they hold to discuss the “value”. Meanwhile on AWS I can click a button in the marketplace and it gets thrown in the AWS account which is pre approved spending.

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

#42

Post by rembal »

+1 on the IAM over engineering, though to AWS credit, I suspect it was evolved rather than design, and that's what you get when evolution has to maintain some level of backward compatibility (think humans still having to be able to lay eggs). Another thing that happens occasionally for saas companies is AWS creating a copy of their product in a bit sus way - but it's not a technical problem, it's a business model problem.

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

#43

Post by liveoneggs »

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 funny how being used to something makes it easier to use

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

#44

Post by ceejayoz »

the__alchemist wrote: post #26
ChrisBland wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That won't last. https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/

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

#45

Post by maccard »

edg5000 wrote: post #14
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 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 m…

It’s flexible but slow. we ran our C++ CI/CD on AWS at a previous company, and we used spot instances with volumes attached and detached dynamically. The performance was absolutely abysmal because in effect you’re running compilation across a networked file system, no matter what AWS says your throughput is.

Our 64 core spot instances on windows were taking 8-10x longer than our developer machines with the same core count, and there was a bunch of engineering went into the scaling, queue management, etc. if we’d just had a single bare metal machine from hetzner we could have saved money _and_ reduced our iteration times.

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

#46

Post by maccard »

cube00 wrote: post #28
andrewstuart wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

To be fair that’s an AWS problem not a lambda problem. If you replace lambda with EC2 the only thing you save in is lambda and step functions(and maybe api gateway but now you need to pay for a load balancer or a public IP), the rest you need to pay for anyway.

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

#47

Post by themgt »

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.

Congrats, your raw EC2-hosted 500MB WebGL experimental card game went to the HN Front Page! You now owe AWS $30k in egress costs.

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

#48

Post by KptMarchewa »

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…

it's only a nightmare if you had not to deal with Azure

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

#49

Post by aljgz »

Years ago, I joined a company, took over a dev team and was asked to launch the product in 3 months.

They were using AWS, so I logged in the account to add a few more machines. Right there, in front of my eyes, were the signs of an adversarial, abusive relationship.

The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs.

I had to have the two tables open, cross check the specs and price.

If I had learned one thing from my past life was that if you see the signs of an abusive relationship, you have the option to walk out, and you don't, all that follows is your own fault.

Created a DigitalOcean account, moved everything over. Set up our CI/CDs to deploy there, and spent the next two months on the product, launching one month earlier than promised.

Some years before that I saw a video online where a person digs a hole near a river and puts a pipe connecting the river and the hole. The fishes push themselves hard in the pipe to get to their trap. Choosing the path of least resistance, and never backing off from a mistake: recipes to end up like those fishes. The video left a big impression on me.

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

#50

Post by rpdillon »

hankerapp wrote: post #19
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…

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.

They have a problem with their business model, then. License changes to a formerly open source project are costly. The community reacts very strongly when license terms change after they've come to depend on a product, and they should.

Why do we apply this standard to MongoDB but not to Apache, Linux, Postgres, or MariaDB? One purpose of an open source license is to allow many providers to provide the service. As I've talked about here previously, Elasticsearch wasn't able to provide the service I needed, so I had to move to AWS.

It's weird to me that the Hacker News community doesn't think that sort of competition is good. The narrative seems to be that all these businesses are somehow victims of AWS, when it seems the truth is much more straightforward: they provided open source software and people used it. The fact that their business had no working plan to actually monetize that foundation should not be taken out on the community.

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