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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

#211

Post by tcp_handshaker »

parliament32 wrote: post #158
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.

Using Azure in 2026 should be a firing offense. How many cross-tenant incidents are enough for you? In 20 years of existence of AWS ( since 2006 and S3 ) show me ONE with AWS ... and I will publicly eat my hat here...

"Azure’s Security Vulnerabilities Are Out of Control" - https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/azures_vulnerabilities_ar...

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

#212

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

ipaddr wrote: post #56
rpdillon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Competition would mean Amazon creating their own software. Taking software others made and using your monopoly eco-system and scale to drive the original creator out of the game kills the product. Many support breaking up Amazon so others could compete not killing small entities and growing Amazon.

That's a risk they knowingly chose to accept when they opted for FOSS licensing. It's not as if people hadn't asked "Well, what if another party tries to fork our open source code for profit?" all the way back when FOSS was starting to gain traction in the 1990s.

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

#214

Post by mpyne »

harrall wrote: post #151
skywhopper wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PostgreSQL is doing fine even with AWS having a multitude of hosted offerings.

Maybe the business model / community-governance model does matter after all...

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

#215

Post by zdc1 »

xmcp123 wrote: post #61

Something that has always bothered me an outsized amount is Elasticache. I will bite the bullet and pay for RDS because it adds a lot of value - scalability, a reasonably optimized config, backups I don’t have to worry about. But Elasticache is exploitatively priced with almost no value add. It is slower, less optimized, less stable, and only supports one DB compared to a vanilla redis install with zero configuration…

Elasticache is definitely one of the services to consider self-hosting.

AWS doesn't add much in terms of APIs or polish. On the other hand, Redis/Valkey is one of the most simple services to self-host.

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

#216

Post by nostrebored »

te_chris wrote: post #137
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.

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

GCP has similar offerings to Lightsail, Fargate, EC2, Lambda, or other compute substrates. Nobody is forcing you to use more than “basic” offerings. AWS core services are often architected that way!

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

#217

Post by stavros »

sokoloff wrote: post #196
stavros wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It took the entire crate and paid nothing.

I think there's a massive difference between "paying what was required by the offer" and "paying less than was required by the offer" and only one of them makes you a thief.

I think there's a massive difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, and saying "but the letter of the law didn't say I couldn't!" doesn't make you any less of a thief.

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

#218

Post by evilduck »

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…

> I mean, pricing depends on so many factors like reserved/dedicated/spot/on-demand instances have all different prices.

If they know how to bill you then they obviously know how to consider and calculate all of these factors, they just choose not to show you up front.

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

#219

Post by xrd »

There is one fortunate result that will come from the SaaSpocalypse combining with Mythos (color me skeptical but let's assume it is as powerful as Anthropic tells CIOs).

If anyone can clone any SaaS, then there will be millions of SaaS that offer all the features you need.

How will you choose?

AWS and Microsoft (and all the big clouds) make it easy for their customers to get hacked, and Mythos makes it more likely the cadence will only intensify.

But, if I vibe code a hosting service which is pure rust and doesn't use any external libraries and never open sources my code, my attack surface is much smaller and I only have three customers anyway.

Hackers are lazy and will go for the pond where the most fish live. AWS will always have a lot of marks and a lot of holes.

AWS will be expensive because you are paying the tax they have to add to fend off the hordes. It'll be an intelligent choice to avoid working with Rome and find a little village in Bergen.

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

#220

Post by nijave »

alde wrote: post #77

The set of core services on AWS remains amazing: EC2, S3, IAM, EKS, Route53, RDS etc. AWS IAM is extremely well designed when you compare it with the spaghetti monster IAM systems of other clouds. Every time I try the new cool thing supposed to replace these services on some other provider - I understand how mature and polished the AWS ones are. With that said, the rest 90% of AWS services like WorkMail, Cognito, API…

>AWS IAM is extremely well designed

Agree, so is STS and SDKs generally just work. I don't miss on-prem companies with legacy Auth where you maintained 100 service accounts for everything with very careful password vaulting and credentials management policies. So much easier to use IAM policies.

>are absolute hot garbage

I kind of like Cognito but both Cognito and especially API Gateway are somewhat convoluted to configure. They seem to work fine once you have them setup right, tho.

Talking about hot garbage... Not a fan of Redshift and Lake Formation at all. We switched to Snowflake, saved money, got better performance, and had a simpler setup. Really there was nothing about Redshift that was better. We're billed through Marketplace so there's not even a consolidated billing upside.

Imo Redshift is a relic of the past and has failed to modernize.

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