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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

#101

Post by richwater »

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…

The faster people realize AWS hates the need for a UI, the better.

It should really be a read-only layer for metadata and logs.

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

#103

Post by rpdillon »

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.

This feels close to "felony contempt of business model".

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...

We are supportive of 3rd party ink cartridges, and there's little concern for the business model of the printer manufacturers. We instead care about the rights of the folks using the printers.

With Postgres, no one bats an eye that there are thousands of hosting companies providing Postgres as an offering, and they give nothing back to the project. Same with Apache, Nextcloud, Linux, Nginx, Sqlite, and thousands of other pieces of open-source software. Are folks against hosting companies like https://yunohost.org/?

It's only when (1) the software is open-source, and (2) the entity behind it doesn't know how to sustain itself with open-source, that we suddenly change positions and view the project as a victim. This doesn't happen with printers, it doesn't happen with other open source software. I'm not even against a change in the license, but claiming that AWS is evil for doing this doesn't track.

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

#104

Post by panny »

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…

>new servers would be online somewhere else within hours of it going down

Yeah, no that's not how it works with email. You have to build reputation for weeks or receivers throttle you.

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

#105

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#106

Post by ncruces »

ceejayoz wrote: post #67
embedding-shape wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The situation changed. A license that's the right choice at one point may not be the right license a decade later.

That's fair, but forking the FOSS version is also an adequate response.

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

#107

Post by richwater »

2ndorderthought wrote: post #71
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…

Sometimes I wonder how much it would hurt Amazon to pay the creators and maintainers of OSS software they sell 1 cent per billing period of use(1 hr?). I also wonder how much money that would offer an oss team. To contribute risk free to improving the product

I think you would be surprised how many commits in OSS comes from paid workers of the various cloud companies and tech companies out there.

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

#108

Post by hibikir »

maccard wrote: post #41
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…

Many a big company migrated because they have those very same slow procurement problems with internal data centers. I saw multiple cloud migrations because internal friction was at a level that the price didn't matter: 6 months for the smallest VM kind of thing. Very adversarial relationships, often with very poor incentives, as the service setup costs for other business units were way inflated, but then the maintenance costs didn't pay enough. Paying 3x-4x more a year for just a semblance of reliability was seen as a big plus.

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

#109

Post by rglover »

You can accomplish a lot by just having a basic knowledge of Linux sysadmin. I was clueless and then learned some systemd-and-curl-fu. Will never forget the "holy sh*t, this is deceptively simple" moment. A bit more research and I found that beyond convenience and specialty APIs, you really just don't need a lot of this stuff to run a healthy system (since reducing absolute cloud dependence, my reliability has gone through the roof).

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

#110

Post by PLenz »

zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #100
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…

If they can charge me for it then they can calculate it and show it to me. Anything else is obfuscation.
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