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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

#141

Post by swasheck »

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 pricing “API” is also a joke so it’s not like they have tried pushing people to apis and away from the console.

i just use vantage (https://instances.vantage.sh/) now. their api is functional and reasonable.

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

#142

Post by gobdovan »

rpdillon wrote: post #103
cyanydeez wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

A lot of those projects are not companies selling software. They're effectively public infrastructure projects, often governed by non-profit foundations or community institutions.

Also, many of them predate hyperscalers and developed governance/economic structures that make them harder for AWS to capture or destabilize, whereas AWS free-riding a vendor-controlled project can destroy the economic engine sustaining the project itself.

Quite ironically, the only example from your list that doesn't predate hyperscalers (Nextcloud) is fundamentally a self-hosting/federation product. It exists largely as an alternative to hyperscaler-native platforms, not as a cloud primitive AWS can easily commoditise into its own stack.

So, treating PostgreSQL, Linux, Elasticsearch and Nextcloud as interchangeable "open source projects" ignores the completely different institutional and economic realities behind the projects.

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

#144

Post by stickfigure »

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…

Grafana (and especially Loki) is hot garbage compared to what you get out of the box in GCP. I'm in a Grafana organization today and the sheer amount of developer and devops time it wastes is mind boggling.

You moved something from a single datastore to three different database technologies? I don't know your domain, but that sure doesn't sound like a complexity reduction.

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

#145

Post by lambda »

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…

Tell me how I can easily determine the price from my IaC deployment as well.

Heck, I even have a hard time telling the price I pay on an account by account basis; because we have savings plans, those get charged against the root account and then I see $0 spent on EC2 in the individual account because it's all covered with a savings plan.

And when I'm putting together that IaC and trying to decide which new instance type to upgrade to, I have to dig through multiple confusing interfaces to figure out that what I want is to upgrade from m8a.4xlarge to c8a.8xlarge and how much that is going to cost me.

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

#146

Post by mikeyouse »

zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #119
PLenz wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but providing estimated costs based on reasonable pricing buckets alongside the options to add the new machine is something that every other vendor manages to do..

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

#147

Post by xmcp123 »

maccard wrote: post #112
xmcp123 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Yeah, they had an impossible to use number of credits (YC) until they expired, so every problem became a AWS solution.

As an example, they needed a lot of proxy servers. Instead of just using a proxy service, there was a fleet of ec2 instances.

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

#148

Post by tomrod »

zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #119
PLenz wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Price simulators are fine. They also know the distribution of use. They can do cost plus pricing (many cloud providers do). You're defending deliberately obfuscated pricing when it need not be obfuscated.

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

#149

Post by amluto »

My current favorites on AWS, in no particular order:

1. IAM and policies. I’m not convinced that anyone knows how IAM rules and policy rules interact. There’s a flow chart that appears to be incomplete. There is not obviously a complete enough spec that one could, say, write a test suite to confirm that the actual behavior follows the spec. LLMs, of course, don’t know either because the training data does not exist.

2. Utter nonsense pricing. The cost of listing an S3 bucket goes up by an order of magnitude if you set the default storage class to archive despite this having nothing whatsoever to do with the operation in question. (But GCS adds two orders of magnitude for the same offense.) Conclusion: NEVER EVER set your default storage class to an archive tier.

3. Boto. It’s an Unbelievable Piece Of Crap. It’s not a library at all — it’s a meta-library that generates itself at runtime because someone had fun doing that and because Python didn’t stop them. Python type checkers, of course, just give up. And Boto is, um, a community project that AWS claims not to care about. Which is, of course, why its maintainers refused to fix an interop bug with GCS (I fully documented the entire bug for them, and the fix would have been the removal of a bit of pointless code).

4. Egress pricing. And the way it multiplies if you use any advanced VPC features. Why on Earth is it cheaper to sent an object to S3 from my own machine than to send the same object to the same endpoint from within a different AWS region nearby?

5. Authentication. It’s so bad that they invented Identity Center to try to unsuck it. But if you use Identity Center you get logged out even while actively using the console, and you get a helpful link to the WRONG PLACE to sign back in. Because of course core AWS isn’t even aware that Identity Center exists.

I don’t even use AWS very much. I’m sure I would fall in love with more of it if I did.

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

#150

Post by juahan »

da02 wrote: post #134
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?

I’m pretty sure for most systems that does not matter in the slightest.
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