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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

#91

Post by chuckadams »

aljgz wrote: post #49

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…

AWS actually has a pretty good price calculator with some decent presets (but FFS, can I have an "uncheck all" button?) but of course it's an entirely separate app. Amazon naturally wants some friction to having this pricing information handy, though I suspect the main reason has to do with Conway's Law: AWS still ships their org chart.

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

#92

Post by goosejuice »

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…

> spending $20k a month on GCP

> burning money in cloud

I suspect there's two reasons why this happens.

One is just the disassociation with opex that seems ever present in the VC model. The other is that many startups settle in on a ops solution before hiring ops and the cost of switching isn't that attractive until they're faced with a dwindling runway and a down round.

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

#93

Post by squirrellous »

dangoodmanUT wrote: post #63

GCP would be perfect if they didn't have a history of randomly dropping quotas on startups, causing them downtime

What do you find appealing about GCP? I occasionally hear positive sentiment like this but don’t entirely understand the reason, mostly because I haven’t used non-GCP clouds professionally. Is it just the least bad of all the big clouds?

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

#94

Post by somewhatgoated »

finaard wrote: post #84

> My business email system still does not work. This is always the weird things in those rants. He's complaining that after 4 days his mails are offline. Now I'm doing a mix of physical servers in rented rackspace, and rented servers - but even there I can have billing mixups where they deactivate servers for no good reason. And to get email working again the limiting factor would be the DNS TTL - new servers would b…

I don’t get your point, what is the weird thing?

That he is complaining about his email being down or that he trusted AWS at all with email?

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

#95

Post by bulletsvshumans »

Lucasoato wrote: post #82
aljgz wrote: post #49

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…

> 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 don’t want to be the one defending AWS, but I don’t think that this is a valid reason not to like them. I mean, pric…

They absolutely could calculate and put the price in the UI if they wished to. Other cloud vendors do.

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

#97

Post by surajrmal »

cyanydeez wrote: post #58
rpdillon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'v…

Walmart pulling up top a small town, opening a single business, paying everyone minimum wage is not 'competition is good'. Just try a little bit of understanding.

Arguably the town is at fault for choosing to permit Walmart to open in their town in that analogy. If you want to control the negative externalities of capitalism you can't just expect to not provide regulations and hope things will work out.

Even if it weren't AWS, someone else with enough determination could use the same open source code to create a compelling alternative taking away business from the original authors. Trying to use social norms to make people not do that is not effective. You need mechanisms that can be enforced via legal procedures to be effective.

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

#98

Post by tonyedgecombe »

embedding-shape wrote: post #62
ceejayoz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> But those license changes were a response to how AWS was monetizing their work in ways unsustainable for the upstream projects Or seen from the other side, these projects chose initial licenses that didn't fit with their wants for how others should use their project, in this mind. If you use a license that gives people the freedom to host your project as a service and make money that way, without paying you, and yo…

I’m not sure any open source license is going to help when you can ask Claude to clone an application in the language of your choice.

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

#99

Post by finaard »

Lucasoato wrote: post #82
aljgz wrote: post #49

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…

> 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 don’t want to be the one defending AWS, but I don’t think that this is a valid reason not to like them. I mean, pric…

I've been in a similar situation - a surprising amount of companies really just click to create instances. Last time I've encountered that at a customer I improved things a bit by creating templates, and scripting instance creation based on those templates - but ideally we'd have had the templates themselves as well as the network side generated by ansible.

But that's the problem: The complexity of doing that properly is pretty much the same as just doing your own hardware (which is what I'm working with most of the time - handling stuff on physical servers). And at that point the question should be why you're paying AWS so much money and pay your people to automate AWS workflows when you could just pay them to automate workflows on physical hardware, which would be way cheaper to run than the AWS instances.

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

#100

Post by zsoltkacsandi »

aljgz wrote: post #49

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…

I agree with you at some degree, but I would like to point out that AWS pricing is much more complicated that you can calculate how much will you pay from a static number showing up on the UI.

If it bothers you that you need to open two tabs for cross-checking the costs, you may want to avoid every cloud provider, not just AWS.

Once you have NAT gateways, CloudFront, S3, auto scaling, loadbalancers, etc, calculating the cost becomes an art rather than an exact science. And if you don't use these, there is no point of using AWS, there are plenty of "cheap" VPS providers.

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