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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

#271

Post by noprocrasted »

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…

You can also put these lambdas on a shared hosting provider as CGIs and get the exact same experience.

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

#272

Post by Capricorn2481 »

mlhpdx wrote: post #262
aljgz wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In completely unrelated pages to where you setup resources, yes. Ec2 pricing is in a random doc disconnected from the AWS console.

They absolutely could to you a base price on the ec2 setup page, but they don't. And I have been absolutely surprised by pricing. Services that do almost nothing could cost more than your ec2.

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

#273

Post by mlhpdx »

richwater wrote: post #101
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…

The faster people realize AWS hates the need for a UI, the better. It should really be a read-only layer for metadata and logs.

At this point I’m not using the UX much if ever. Everything I’m doing is via IaC or the CLI. It’s made working with AWS really smooth.

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

#274

Post by Capricorn2481 »

tcp_handshaker wrote: post #154
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…

>> 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. This is false. The price shows up right away when you select a machine. I dont work for AWS...

You can upload an image to imgur and show us. I don't see this.

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

#275

Post by Aperocky »

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…

Some internal perspective - IAM has maybe thousands of options but fundamentally it is "what does this role have access to doing (action + resource)" + "who has access to this role". That is really it from a 10k foot level.

IAM is great because it applies internally just like it does externally. The internal AWS team don't get more access than you do, and if we get access to do certain thing on your account to perform specific service that's because you have a service principle in your IAM trust relationship that allowed us access, that you can see, and audit. For instance, lambdas have lambda role because you don't want lambda service just reading your S3 buckets because "we're AWS we automatically get access", you can absolutely see and control access, even if it is internal to AWS.

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

#276

Post by noprocrasted »

nijave wrote: post #238
esseph wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many startups settle in on a ops solution before hiring ops Sounds expensive

Not really. It's cheaper than hiring an IT admin and sysadmin for a while. Those tend to be tricky hires on the small end since you tend to want jack-of-all-trades who either demands a premium salary or doesn't exist. When you have 10 software engineers, having 1 dedicate 10-20% of their time is cheaper than hiring 1-2 FTEs that aren't writing code.

Unless we're talking actual PaaS (Heroku, Render, Railway, etc), the cloud also needs a dedicated skillset, so "cloud" doesn't remove the need from a sysadmin.

If you can get (and trust they do it right) developers to do AWS or Kubernetes, you should be able to trust them to do conventional Linux sysadmin on a bunch of dedicated boxes.

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

#277

Post by torginus »

Imo lambdas are super cool, and the best way to have a no-headache fast-iteration time deployment service.

What most people realize, that you don't have to go microservice or fragment your code to a billion little repos, you could take a standard webserver, and move it to lambda, as long as you don't expect requests to be able to share on-server state.

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

#278

Post by whs »

PLenz wrote: post #110
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…

If they can charge me for it then they can calculate it and show it to me. Anything else is obfuscation.

I think AWS billing is quite complicated that they probably don't even know what did you get charged specifically for this machine.

You might have leftover reserve instance that applies, which make the listed price inaccurate. That reservation might even be in a different AWS account in the same organization that you don't have access to. That reservation might not even be there between the time you quote and the time you actually launch it if someone/something did launch before you.

Your organization might also have discounts. I believe some discount may also be very confidential. For example, my reseller policy is that the customer must not be able to see AWS Billing in the organization root account as supposedly the price in that console are the price AWS charged the reseller, while we pay listed price minus any discount we negotiated ourselves.

Finally, I suppose they don't want to have prices shown in multiple places as they will need to update it when prices changes. Doesn't want to risk forgetting one place and getting sued for it. You can see that AWS documentations often do not want to mention the price at all, even if that price is currently free.

Chinese clouds kinda make this simple by making reservation part of the buying machine itself - you have to mark that particular machine as monthly/yearly committed when you start it (or convert it later). The complicated part is recycling instances - if you delete a server before its reservation ends it ends up in a recycle bin that you need to look before making new reservations.

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

#279

Post by mlhpdx »

esseph wrote: post #170
sudosteph wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not hugely, perhaps not even prevalent, but present, yes.

I get to see how a lot of companies use AWS. The console does make its appearances, but less and less often these days.

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

#280

Post by raverbashing »

> IAM - the hideously complex auth and access rules system - this was invented by Lucifer sitting on his burning throne in the ninth level of Hell as the worst possible torment for those who have been sent below for using AWS.

Perfect explanation - no notes

I don't think I remember anything so over-engineered and confusing in recent times (probably SELinux now that I think of it).

And I understand - we kinda need the complexity for what they intend to do but they do need a Come To Jesus moment here to make the Insane Asylum Machine make a bit more sense for mortals

2nd most annoying thing? Boto3 lib, where conventions don't matter and Pythonic is just a suggestion and the thing works more like a REST wrapper than anything else over a not-great API (please why tell me there's an S3 API and an S3Obj API)

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