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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

#201

Post by sambellll »

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.

Here to say the same thing.

I built an app a few years ago and needed some sort of DB to store around 50 million records that had ~10k reads+writes per month with 1 index. It cost me something like $50 to load it up initially, and then something stupid like 10 cents/month to maintain.

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

#202

Post by nostrebored »

sillyfluke wrote: post #163
zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many real applications actually want this behavior? AWS is not built around hobbyist needs. It’s built around being a platform to run most shapes of production use cases.

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

#203

Post by epistasis »

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…

I would argue that the intentions don't matter at all, the end result is all that matters both for the buyer and seller. In systems design, it is often said that The Purpose of a System Is What It Does. Good intentions can produce very bad systems with bad outcomes, and neutral/bad intentions can create good systems that benefit everyone.

I think that applies both to Amazon's dev system and pricing system. From what I hear about the insides, alignment is chaotic neutral inside of Amazon, but that shouldn't affect how we judge the system itself.

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

#204

Post by ceejayoz »

ipaddr wrote: post #183
ceejayoz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the things to be upset about, mandatory 2FA doesn't seem like one.

2FA has been in place for years through email but this new requirement forces a phone.

Good. E-mail based 2FA is bad, and they appear to support TOTP too as an option, as they should. Wish they supported U2F though.

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

#205

Post by nostrebored »

themgt wrote: post #47
chuckadams wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Congrats, your raw EC2-hosted 500MB WebGL experimental card game went to the HN Front Page! You now owe AWS $30k in egress costs.

Egress costs have substantially reduced (thankfully)

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

#206

Post by esseph »

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…

> How do you know all of those drives aren’t from the same batch?

Because it's explicitly something you can request when doing your server order from your vendor. In this particular case several years ago, Nutanix did good.

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

#207

Post by chii »

ceejayoz wrote: post #138
ncruces wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If those folks wanted money for their work, they should be charging a price for it.

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

#208

Post by finaard »

hluska wrote: post #130
rkent wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I assumed he just had DNS at AWS, but after re-reading I guess he has DNS _and_ domain registrations at AWS, which would be a special kind of stupid. That's something we were advising customers against already back when cloud wasn't a thing yet to enable fast transfers when stuff goes south

(to clarify: DNS+domain at the same service can be OK, as long as you have nothing else there. As soon as you start having other stuff, keep the DNS there, but move the domain registration away. Depending on which domain make sure you have auth keys, access to the admin domain or whatever would enable moving the domain without registrar cooperation. In my hosting days I did my fair share of emergency transfers and infrastructure to help companies get their basics online again after a SNAFU - totally doable to have first mail coming in again within a working day)

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

#209

Post by mpyne »

hankerapp wrote: post #19
tedivm wrote: post #13

> AWS stomped on open source projects - despite the clear desire of projects like Elasticsearch, Redis, and MongoDB not to be cloned and monetized, AWS pushed ahead with OpenSearch, Valkey, and DocumentDB anyway, capturing the hosted-service money after those communities and companies had built the markets; the result was a wave of defensive licenses like SSPL, Elastic License, RSAL, and other source-available models…

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 had no choice but to change the licenses.

Then why did they advertise themselves as open-source efforts when they weren't? They should have been the best possible providers of managed service offerings given they wrote the software they'd be managing, no?

Why are monopolies OK here but not elsewhere? Choosing a hard-to-win business model is not supposed to be a choice that guarantees you business income.

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

#210

Post by sofixa »

Neikius wrote: post #164
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.

But the price per unit of measurement goes down, so no, it's not "their entire business model".
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