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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

#251

Post by Insanity »

graemep wrote: post #224
embedding-shape wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is any single service I'd avoid on AWS it's Lightsail, it'll cost you a lot more than almost anything out there, is slow as molasses (even tiny services can need tens of minutes to deploy) and you'll experience random failures not even AWS reps can explain to you. Avoid at all costs. It's a ghost of its former self, but I'd probably still rather use Heroku today than being forced to use Lightsail even once a…

I have only use lightsail for one project with two VPSs, but it just works like a VPS (two, because we have another for staging). Price is competitive. Its not my favourite, but its not terrible.

Same experience here, hosting some small projects on LightSail. It was pretty smooth to set up and get running, and no real complaints so far.

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

#252

Post by le-mark »

raffraffraff wrote: post #248

I always smile at posts like this. They're right and wrong at the same time. Systems should be "as simple as possible, but no simpler". And thinking that you can gloss over the detail is just going to create more hassle later on. IAM is just complex. I can't think of any implementation of "users, groups, roles, policies, identity providers, oidc" that is truly simple. I'm reminded of a guy I worked with, who fought a…

> fought against X adoption because it was "too complex", only to slowly reinvent X badly

This is a surprisingly common pattern in technology and software. Some things are definitively the “standard” at this point yet so many people simply refuse to spend the time to properly learn them.

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

#253

Post by atemerev »

As if there's any alternative. Azure? That mess of everything smashed on top of each other that looks like it was vibecoded in a few month by hundreds of people at once, except that they looked like this from the very beginning where there was no AI? The one that makes you fill docx forms to enable quotas for some services? Or Google Cloud, which _looks_ like it might be simpler, but it has permissions for permissions to enable permissions, and endless micromanagement? I am trying things, but I always return to AWS :(

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

#254

Post by bdangubic »

tcp_handshaker wrote: post #211
parliament32 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It should 100% be fireable offense if you have a choice

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

#255

Post by goostavos »

stevepotter wrote: post #242

I was such a fan of it that I ended up working there for 4 years. Now I avoid it and encourage others to do the same. AWS used to have a nifty tool called "policy analyzer" or something that monitored for permissions used by a role so you could scope it down. The other day I had the need for it and when I went to use it, found out they charge something like $9/resource. So I would pay $45/month for metadata monitorin…

DDB has two use cases:

1. You need an "infinitely scalable" key/value store and have deep pockets[0]

2. you work at AWS and your deployment pipeline has so many stages and regions and fabrics that you can no longer even conceptualize what it means for there to be a "current version" of your software (the hell in which I live).

But for some awful reason it's sold as a general purpose "NoSQL Database." Pair that with the Pavlovian response developers have to the word "scale" and you've got an army of people using the worst possible tech for their usecase. Everyone eventually pairs DDB with Elastic whenever "Oh, wait, so we need to be able to query our data?" hits.

[0] And you ONLY need PK reads. Querying turns "infinite scale" into "infinite throttles."

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

#256

Post by atemerev »

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…

Credits. It wouldn't make sense without free credits. And when you are hooked, good luck in moving out.

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

#257

Post by pessimizer »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #98
embedding-shape wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But those license changes were a response to how AWS was monetizing their work in ways unsustainable for the upstream projects Or seen from the other side, these projects chose initial licenses that didn't fit with their wants for how others should use their project, in this mind. If you use a license that gives people the freedom to host your project as a service and make money that way, without paying you, and yo…

I’m not sure any open source license is going to help when you can ask Claude to clone an application in the language of your choice.

If Claude looks at the code when it does it, then you can still sue them. I don't think there's a "Claude Clean Room" product that trains on everything except the code you might be accused of copying.

I can't just translate Harry Potter to Spanish and sell it.

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

#258

Post by mlhpdx »

tomrod wrote: post #148
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.

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.

As I read through these comments I’m thinking about the dynamic range of AWS customers: from my little hobby account to my business account to some hyper-scaler’s account.

I think about the diversity in usage patterns: from generating giant video stream broadcast somebody trying to calculate yet another digit of pi. It’s wild.

Is true, probably, that AWS doesn’t know how much anyone’s use case will cost (even when it’s yet another version of something we’ve seen before). Too many variable.

If only there were some kind of software with a text based, natural language interface that we could ask a question like “how much would it cost to do XYNZ on AWS?”

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

#259

Post by rglover »

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?

Depending on the deployment and any SLAs, I either don't worry about it (just do a late night rollout when nobody is on the system) or rely on my deployment architecture's sibling checks (I can see when a given machine is still versioning and requeue subsequent rollouts to other machines).

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

#260

Post by pixl97 »

nostrebored wrote: post #202
sillyfluke wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, by the number of people that end up with 100,000 charges in a few hours posting on HN, I'd say a lot more than you're giving it credit for.
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