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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

#261

Post by andreashaerter »

bdangubic wrote: post #254
tcp_handshaker wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> if you have a choice

I just read:

> If I had learned one thing from my past life was that if you see the signs of an abusive relationship, you have the option to walk out, and you don't, all that follows is your own fault.

so... :)

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

#262

Post by mlhpdx »

aljgz wrote: post #131
zsoltkacsandi wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you at some degree, but I would like to point out that AWS pricing is much more complicated that you can calculate how much will you pay from a static number showing up on the UI. If it bothers you that you need to open two tabs for cross-checking the costs, you may want to avoid every cloud provider, not just AWS. Once you have NAT gateways, CloudFront, S3, auto scaling, loadbalancers, etc, calculating…

Not showing the price was not "my problem". It was the sign of a product packed with traps, footguns and all kind of things that would go wrong and the blame goes to the user. No thank you

I’m not sure I understand. AWS has detailed pricing information for each service.

I’ve never felt surprised by pricing. Cost has been surprising, but that happens when usage is surprising in my experience.

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

#263

Post by Cyph0n »

mlhpdx wrote: post #243

I’m not sure how someone can be an “AWS Fanboy”, drink in all the promise, and think IAM is evil. As far as I can tell it is the one glorious thing that separates AWS from others. IAM is the core that makes it sane.

I may be biased, but I find that GCP’s IAM story is simply way better.

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

#264

Post by Capricorn2481 »

timr wrote: post #172
mikeyouse wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but providing estimated costs based on reasonable pricing buckets alongside the options to add the new machine is something that every other vendor manages to do..

...and AWS does it too. I can go right into an account and see an estimated cost per hour, and even pre-pay at a fixed discount for longer terms if I want to. They tell me right there what it will cost. They do this for everything that is reasonably a "fixed cost", like CPU time. They cannot predict what my bandwidth consumption will be, or other such variable costs. For those, they tell you rates.

No it's pretty bad. They show you the cost after all the resources are set up. Even setting up an ec2 instance, a really basic use case that has a fixed cost based on size, you have to go Google it and find their ec2 pricing table. It would take no space to just put the price per hour in the drop-down as you're picking an instance. But no, they obscure it on purpose.

That's just for ec2. Everything is like this. Super awesome when you're being brought onto a new project and trying to estimate costs for your client. And let's not forget the little tiny things that should cost nothing. A NAT gateway with no redundancy is $30/mo. That's a fun surprise.

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

#265

Post by Capricorn2481 »

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 don't think companies want their bill run up either.

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

#266

Post by mlhpdx »

bulletsvshumans wrote: post #95
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…

They absolutely could calculate and put the price in the UI if they wished to. Other cloud vendors do.

For which services?

Let’s look at Lambda for a second. Deploying a lambda function to AWS costs literally nothing. And yet, depending on how it’s used, it can cost an infinite amount of money. Which price should it show?

There are far more sevices like Lambda than EC2.

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

#267

Post by noprocrasted »

sandruso wrote: post #124
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…

100%. I'm not really sure why we all agreed that deployment is somehow the hardest thing that you need to outsource when setting the linux server is one the richest experience you can get and it will pay dividents forever.

There's a multibillion dollar industry that lives only because they managed to successfully convince an entire generation of "engineers" to become helpless and not be able to serve an HTTP response using their own hardware even if their life depended on it.

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

#268

Post by mlhpdx »

lambda wrote: post #145
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…

Tell me how I can easily determine the price from my IaC deployment as well. Heck, I even have a hard time telling the price I pay on an account by account basis; because we have savings plans, those get charged against the root account and then I see $0 spent on EC2 in the individual account because it's all covered with a savings plan. And when I'm putting together that IaC and trying to decide which new instance t…

In cost explore, on the right hand side where filters appear, click the “more” button at the bottom then the first option that appears (which is “charge type” or something like that) and select “usage”. That will give you a view of what you’re using regardless of the savings plan, etc.

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

#269

Post by jlokier »

andrepd wrote: post #227
ipaddr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a lesson there then, isn't there? Use GPL

The GPL has no effect on this issue. For service providers like AWS, who provide the service not the software, the GPL doesn't require them to do anything differently than with more permissive licenses.

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

#270

Post by torginus »

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…

Personally I think the UI flow is geared towards the idea that engineers don't really see the costs, they just build stuff and then management pays at the end of the month.

Often I see something that's supposed to be leaner - like Fargate is leaner than renting a whole server to run docker, right?

So it's cheaper as well? - Well, no.

Also if you reach any appreciable level of complexity, you should move to IaC - configuring all that stuff on the UI, and getting it right is torture.

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