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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

#121

Post by lr1970 »

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…

> pricing depends on so many factors like reserved/dedicated/spot/on-demand instances have all different prices.

Or you can have your own negotiated private pricing which is a whole different story in itself.

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

#122

Post by whateverboat »

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 must disagree so heavily with you here. Prices can depend on so many factors, but.... when that particular account is choosing that particular machine, AWS knows what it will cost, and they can show it to them dynamically. It's very difficult to be convinced in this day and age that you cannot have a dynamic price chart right beside the machine sellector which is showing or calculating prices in real time for that particular product.

About using IaaC to set-up the infrastructure, sure, but sometimes you just need to browse stuff before actually writing code to get a feel.

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

#123

Post by sudosteph »

I'm surprised by the author's hate towards DynamoDB. It's probably one of my favorite AWS Services. Great availability and no operational overhead. Cost was pretty minimal too each time I've used it, but you do need to spend some time architecting your data model up front, and that requires reading service docs and understanding it.

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

#124

Post by sandruso »

rglover wrote: post #109

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 t…

100%. I'm not really sure why we all agreed that deployment is somehow the hardest thing that you need to outsource when setting the linux server is one the richest experience you can get and it will pay dividents forever.

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

#125

Post by flomo »

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…

Am I the only one who remembers how shady a lot of those VPS/hosting companies were? Seemed to be a race to the bottom, so a 'good' outfit might suck or completely disappear a couple years later. (Also, pricing was all over the map, I had a client who was paying $150/mo for a VPS.) Hetzner survived, but for a long time they had a reputation as spamfarm. So I get the initial appeal of AWS, used tactically. But for larger companies, its something like IBM or Oracle, if you are price-sensitive, it's not for you.

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

#128

Post by sudosteph »

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'm with you. Nobody serious uses the UI to make changes with AWS. At the very least, use the AWS CLI. IaaS is the norm though.

I'm tired of people acting like complex infrastructure tooling is adversarial because it's not completely intuitive. Infrastructure is hard. AWS can give you tooling and docs with patterns to follow, but they can't read your mind. Neither can the PaaS providers - they just make choices on your behalf and hope it won't matter to you.

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

#130

Post by hluska »

rkent wrote: post #115
somewhatgoated wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you would have read the article, you would know that the writer had DNS hosted at AWS, would have read why he made that choice and would know of his plans to migrate off.
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