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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

#151

Post by harrall »

skywhopper wrote: post #86
hankerapp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of these projects work on a business model where they open-source their core product, and provide advanced services, installation, maintenance or fully-managed services around their product. AWS was bypassing them by providing fully-managed services. On this, I am on the side of the people behind the projects. Basically AWS was eating their lunch. They had no choice but to change the licenses.

Just because they picked a bad business model doesn’t mean they deserve to avoid competition. Don’t give away your source code if you don’t want someone else to provide hosting.

You’re not wrong but if people didn’t, all our companies would be using Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server and paying Larry Ellison instead today.

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

#152

Post by jerhewet »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #30

These complaints are very weak. Lambda is incredibly simple to use, it just runs a function for you. Not sure how you could burn so much with dynamodb. It’s serverless and incredibly cheap. Must have been doing something insane like a huge dataset where you scan through it over and over. Being salty that Gary couldn’t sell enough of his paid service and AWS is competing with it isn’t a meaningful complaint. I want so…

I wish our Lambdas would spin up faster, but otherwise I've been very happy with them over the past six years. We seldom run over the free tier limits, and when we do we get a bill for a couple of dollars. Dead simple to code for, dead simple to spin up a new instance or scale an instance if we need to.

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

#154

Post by tcp_handshaker »

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…

>> 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.

This is false. The price shows up right away when you select a machine. I dont work for AWS...

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

#155

Post by sudosteph »

znpy wrote: post #34

> Of course I do not pay for premium support, so I have to wait the 24 hours that they said it would take them to reply. It's 3 days and AWS support has not replied. The writing has been on the wall for a few years now, and this is particularly evident to those thar have worked at AWS: Amazon is in its day-2 era. Amazon being in its day-2 era means that most of what has been written in the past twenty years about Ama…

I worked for AWS Premium Support over a decade ago. Waiting 3 days or more, for a non-premium support customer would have been not unusual back then either. But at least the quality of response was typically pretty good, haven't seen what it's like lately.

They've always struggled to hire for those roles. The people who are best at Engineering Support also tend to be the people who move on to other roles after a year or two.

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

#156

Post by sokoloff »

stavros wrote: post #117
jasonlotito wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there's plenty of room for people to object to the "had to change licenses" framing. They chose to change licenses, same as they chose the original license.

That original license probably helped them with goodwill and to gain a community; when those benefits no longer exceeded the downsides of using that license, they changed licenses to one that suited them better.

Naturally, this change costs them some amount of goodwill, a portion of the very goodwill that they harvested by choosing an open-source license in the first place.

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

#157

Post by aurareturn »

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…

Doesn't Amazon engineering culture have a very engineer-led product culture? Meaning, devs are often responsible for the UX and flow.

I remember many years ago we hired a junior developer who just finished his internship at AWS and he showed me the dashboard he shipped all by himself in the summer with no product or designer help. It looked horrible.

Some devs have a good product/UX sense but the vast majority are horrendously bad at UX.

My point is that maybe it was intentional, but just bad UX culture.

Edit: It wasn't intentional

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

#158

Post by parliament32 »

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…

That's one of the things I like about Azure, they don't overwhelm you with listing prices beside every individual item as you're creating it, but they seem to always present a price on things that could be expensive. It's a good balance, I have yet to be surprised by a charge.

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

#159

Post by faangguyindia »

stickfigure wrote: post #144
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.

>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.

what's bad about graphana? it's simply used for some alerts and monitoring, i've used it for really long time and it has never failed me not even once.

it's much simpler to query postgres or mongo compared to duplicating data dozens of times on datastore.

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

#160

Post by nullstyle »

tcp_handshaker wrote: post #154
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…

>> 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. This is false. The price shows up right away when you select a machine. I dont work for AWS...

Not back when i was using AWS
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