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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

#111

Post by jasonlotito »

stavros wrote: post #32
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…

Of course AWS didn't create the forks until the projects changed their license to disallow AWS from making money from their code! That's the whole point here.

When they changed their license, they were no longer open source. They could have chosen open source licenses such as the AGPL, but they did not. They were a non-open source company at that point, and AWS was putting out a product build on open source. Simple as that.

Redis was not an open source company when AWS moved to Valkey.

Companies are free to license under the AGPL if they want. Or other open source licenses.

Sorry, but non-open source companies aren't getting sympathy from me because they are hating on open source projects.

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

#112

Post by maccard »

xmcp123 wrote: post #55
maccard wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have seen this repeatedly also. Watched one company end up with a $250k AWS bill when their credits expired (which they could not pay).

If you let it go that far then you were going to blow it one way or another - it’s not an excuse to totally ignore the cloud spend but it’s a n excuse to defer it to a later date. If your successful, fix it, if your not then AWS aren’t getting paid anyway!

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

#113

Post by sudosteph »

geoffbp wrote: post #39

Slightly different but related topic - for people who work with people vibe coding, what is the easiest way to allow that for non tech users (and reducing risk)? AWS or something like vercel? Coolify?

I'm old and bitter about this, but you're not reducing risk by going with PaaS, you're just outsourcing it. That recent "My AI Agent deleted my prod DB" story was only possible because the PaaS they were using allowed for 1-click permanent delete. At least AWS has a "prevent accidental termination" checkbox.

Nobody wants to hear this, but as things stand, there's no escaping risk for vibe coders right now. Personally, I think AWS is still a good choice for the long run, but don't make the mistake of thinking current LLMs will actually be able to manage the environment on par with a decent infra engineer. That's one of their weaker areas right now. Good news is there are million managed service providers and AWS-competent humans still in existence. Also Premium Support is a good resource.

Whatever you do, make a lot of backups and store them on a different service somewhere. Then if you get to a situation where you need to do something with sensitive data, or need to raise money, engage with someone who can do a proper review.

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

#114

Post by owebmaster »

dzonga wrote: post #54

the A.I (LLM) merchants will tell you - that AI is now writing software (agentic coding they call it ) - yet one they can't bill you properly or have a broken billing mechanism. their dashboards are trash & don't work - Google Cloud, AWS Console, Google Ads, Meta Ad manager I won't even mention the hyped up LLM vendors. but here we r - people being laid off due to A.I - money being funneled into Gigawatt datacenters

The billing "problems" these companies have are working fine for them as they are there to increase revenue, not to improve user experience.

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

#115

Post by rkent »

somewhatgoated wrote: post #94
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?

The only way that email is down for days for a competent sysadmin is if their DNS is also with AWS, so I assumed that was the case. Assuming that is true, what is weird to me is that, after deciding he hated AWS and left it, that he still kept his business DNS (the most important service there is) with AWS.

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

#116

Post by [deleted] »

tiffanyh wrote: post #9
joefourier wrote: post #4

> Cloud computing was an absolutely mind blowing revolution - suddenly your startup could run its own computer systems in minutes without need to install and run your own systems in a data center. This was an absolute game changer, and I really drank the AWS Kool Aid down to every last drop then I licked out the cup. I was all in on AWS in a big way. Am I the only one who remembers that VPSes and dedicated hosting se…

> suddenly your startup could run its own computer systems in minutes without need to install and run your own systems in a data center. The “in minutes” is doing a lot of the work in that sentence above. I also used dedicated servers in the late ’90s (and they still offer great value today). But before AWS, provisioning new hardware typically took days , not minutes. AWS changed that, and the rest of the industry ev…

[deleted]

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

#117

Post by stavros »

jasonlotito wrote: post #111
stavros wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course AWS didn't create the forks until the projects changed their license to disallow AWS from making money from their code! That's the whole point here.

When they changed their license, they were no longer open source. They could have chosen open source licenses such as the AGPL, but they did not. They were a non-open source company at that point, and AWS was putting out a product build on open source. Simple as that. Redis was not an open source company when AWS moved to Valkey. Companies are free to license under the AGPL if they want. Or other open source licenses…

These were open source projects that had to change licenses away from open source because of AWS. I'm not sure how the OSS companies are the bad guy here.

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

#118

Post by [deleted] »

ipaddr wrote: post #56
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…

Competition would mean Amazon creating their own software. Taking software others made and using your monopoly eco-system and scale to drive the original creator out of the game kills the product. Many support breaking up Amazon so others could compete not killing small entities and growing Amazon.

[deleted]

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

#119

Post by zsoltkacsandi »

PLenz wrote: post #110
zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They don't know in advance how much bandwidth will you use, how much traffic will you have, what auto-scaling rule will it trigger, etc. It's not obfuscation, it's billing based on your usage. And as with everything in life, there are tradeoffs.

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

#120

Post by skinfaxi »

ipaddr wrote: post #56
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…

Competition would mean Amazon creating their own software. Taking software others made and using your monopoly eco-system and scale to drive the original creator out of the game kills the product. Many support breaking up Amazon so others could compete not killing small entities and growing Amazon.

> Taking software others made and using your monopoly eco-system and scale to drive the original creator out of the game kills the product

They took software that others gave away for free without restriction and did what they wanted with it. It took time but the community figured out this exploit path and patched it in subsequent license versions.

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