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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

#161

Post by psanford »

> If you're using AWS Lambda then you have to work to keep convincing yourself this is better than your own web servers. Keep convincing yourself that using AWS Lambda is not a horrible mistake.

lol ok. I have ~50 lambdas running in my personal aws account. Some of them are webservers running behind an api gateway or using a lambda function url to expose them to the internet. Some are running on a schedule, some are triggered from s3 events. The cost to run these for me is less than the cost of the cheapest vps (my total requests per month stay under the free tier limit). There is also zero maintenance I need to do for these functions (ok, this year I did have to find-replace al2 to al.2023 in my terraform config). I don't have to worry about making sure the os is patched for the latest vulnerabilities. And I don't have to worry about the specific hardware my code is running on at any time. Doing maintenance for old projects sucks. It is great to have servers I deployed years ago continue to chug along without me needing to think about it.

Now, all of my lambdas are written in Go and I suspect if I was using one of the manged runtime libraries I would find the language upgrades to be quite annoying. Go also helps quite a lot with cold start times.

Then again maybe I have just drank the koolaid. In my quest to use lambdas for as much as I can as cheaply as I can, I made a library[0] to use sqlite on top of s3 (not just readonly). It uses the sqlite session extension plus s3 compare-and-swap to allow you to write updates safely to s3, even if you have concurrent writers.

[0]: https://github.com/psanford/s3db

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

#162

Post by faangguyindia »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #81
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…

This isn’t a like for like comparison though, is it. You removed all of their logging and all of their redundancy and reliability and replaced it with shitters that will all explode if the small providers one data centre goes down. And if someone penetrates this mega server, they’ll be able to wipe all your logs or tamper with them, to hide the attack. If your storage servers go down, everything they have is gone. An…

>You removed all of their logging and all of their redundancy and reliability and replaced it with shitters that will all explode if the small providers one data centre goes down.

they'll never need it, a misconfiguration on those service ends up costing several grands.

>If your storage servers go down, everything they have is gone

It’s just logs for an app server, not some banking critical info that will cause a panic if lost. Most of what they are using for logging is for finding some errors, not for mission-critical things which must not be lost.

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

#163

Post by sillyfluke »

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.

Now explain why they don't have a killswitch for a user defined spending limit.

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

#164

Post by Neikius »

psanford wrote: post #161

> If you're using AWS Lambda then you have to work to keep convincing yourself this is better than your own web servers. Keep convincing yourself that using AWS Lambda is not a horrible mistake. lol ok. I have ~50 lambdas running in my personal aws account. Some of them are webservers running behind an api gateway or using a lambda function url to expose them to the internet. Some are running on a schedule, some are…

As you yourself said. Your load is so light you keep it in free tier. Their entire business model is for them to capture you while your load is light and then when you scale the price goes up.

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

#165

Post by stavros »

sokoloff wrote: post #156
stavros wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 amou…

I don't see this as an issue with the company. They were happy to release their code as OSS, as long as that allowed them to make enough money to develop the software. It was a win/win, and them AWS came and took advantage of that.

If you leave some apples at the side of the road, with a sign "$1 per apple" or whatever, and people largely pay enough for you to continue to pick apples, that's great. If someone starts coming every day and taking the entire crate, I don't blame you for discontinuing the convenient apple sales, I blame the thief.

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

#166

Post by gobdovan »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #89
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.

Maybe it is for the consumer. When Aldi opened in my nearest town my food bill dropped by 20%.

That's the desired outcome of competition but the effects can go all over the place and the second-order effects in fragile towns can matter more than the price drop. As an extreme example, some people may lose their jobs, local spending may fall, some small shops may close and Aldi may pull out too, so everybody loses (here's [0] as an approximate example).

Usually a community can tolerate changes only when it's not already near the bottom. When you're near the bottom, almost any destabilisation can kill your little system.

[0] https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/aldi-closes-west-pullman-c...

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

#167

Post by swasheck »

rpdillon wrote: post #50
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.

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…

agreed. i’m no aws apologist but if you’re going to try to monetize open source and then complain when someone else does it more efficiently/effectively, it really feels disingenuous. “we were going to do that, but they got there first. it’s not fair.”

i’m only familiar with the postgres side, but it seems like a more nuanced view of this debate would be to discuss aws monetizing open source relative to their upstream, community-beneficial contributions.

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

#168

Post by tekla »

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?

How is this an issue in a world where load balancers exist? I was part of a Unicorn that ran prod on 8 boxes and literally never had customer facing outages due to infrastructure updates.

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

#169

Post by Y-bar »

aurareturn wrote: post #157
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 ho…

Judging by how much things jump around on the screen when I navigate from one view to another I agree.

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

#170

Post by esseph »

sudosteph wrote: post #128
Lucasoato wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 yo…

> I'm with you. Nobody serious uses the UI to make changes with AWS.

This is still hugely prevalent at some of the largest companies in the world

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