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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

#131

Post by aljgz »

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…

Not showing the price was not "my problem". It was the sign of a product packed with traps, footguns and all kind of things that would go wrong and the blame goes to the user.

No thank you

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

#133

Post by causal »

djyde wrote: post #33

I've transitioned between cloud services and self-hosting a few times: 1. Vercel Phase My first project used Vercel. Since my project was Next.js, the experience was decent. But as my project gained some users, I found that even for projects under 100 users, I needed to pay $20 per month. Since my service didn't require high performance, this cost felt steep. 2. Self-host Phase (Hetzner + Coolify) Later, I started se…

Yeah Cloudflare offering has become everything I wanted from AWS. So much simpler to deploy a basic full stack app + files. AWS has become considerably more difficult than self hosting.

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

#134

Post by da02 »

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…

How do you deal with the few minutes of downtime when you do kernel/OS/software upgrades?

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

#135

Post by fatata123 »

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…

[dead]

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

#136

Post by ufmace »

sudosteph wrote: post #123

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.

That's pretty much what I came into this thread to say. The thing I'd add is, DynamoDB is pretty nice if you understand how it's meant to be used - a relatively dumb key-value store with good persistence and table-size scaling to the sky. Definitely don't attempt to use it as a SQL database.

The best way I can come up with to rack up a $75 bill for some prototype code is to vibe-code a thing that attempts to treat it like a SQL database with JOINs and GROUP BYs etc. Or similarly write code against it absent-mindedly with about as much understanding as a 2-year-old free AI tool.

Where it really shines is use-cases like I need like 1 or 2 simple relatively small tables of persistent storage and don't want to deal with a full RDBMS. Or I need 1 ridiculously huge table to be queried in a relatively simple way, and don't want to deal with fitting that data into a RDBMS.

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

#137

Post by te_chris »

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.

“EC2 or Lightsail”. And this right here is why I use GCP. Google got VMs right.

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

#138

Post by ceejayoz »

ncruces wrote: post #106
ceejayoz wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. But so would financially contributing to the folks who did the work.

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

#139

Post by te_chris »

eluded7 wrote: post #90

I'd tend to agree with the author. If forced to choose a cloud platform though (and that often is the case) then AWS is probably the best of the bunch in terms of reliability. Have heard and experienced some real horror stories with Azure & GCP by comparison.

GCP is miles better. Their IAM is at least understandable, for a start.
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