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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

#291

Post by maccard »

4nonverbal-alit wrote: post #74
maccard wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my previous startup: because AWS gave us a bunch of credits and helped us design the infra. It meant we ran for free what they designed for free. At a previous bigger company, getting procurement to sign up to a new provider requires writing a business case, justifying the spend and then getting multiple competing quotes and speaking to their sales teams. Signing up to a new service takes _months_ even for $10/mo…

At my current team at a “bigcorp” I have noticed a similar pattern. We use aws not because it’s efficient in any way. We use it because we don’t want to deal with slow procurement process. It kills all the momentum.

Exactly. I want to set up elastic search - I can either have procurement go through their sales, or be up and running via the marketplace in less time than it would take me to fill in the RFQ form to send to procurement.

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

#292

Post by lukeschlather »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #265
nostrebored wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's very common for companies to have a $1M/year contract that depends on $100k/year in AWS resources. (and maybe they have 3+ such contracts.) They could lose a contract if their account gets shut down for nonpayment, it's hard to say how much of an overage they would prefer to having their account suspended, but AWS is optimized for these kinds of customers where every dollar spent on hosting drives some multiple of revenue.

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

#293

Post by temp8830 »

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

*AGPL

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

#294

Post by ipsento606 »

chuckadams wrote: post #11
jfengel wrote: post #7

I don't work in that area, so I only touch AWS once in a while for personal fun projects. And every time it's a nightmare. I'm just banging out a server for my experimental card game, not setting up an new financial institution. Everything looks as if I'm preparing to scale to infinity tomorrow, with a staff of a thousand and a budget backed by VCs. Fortunately there's Netlify and similar, who put a gloss on it so th…

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.

> You can just spin up a raw VPS on EC2 or Lightsail, give it a public IP, and call it a day

You could do this, but for the life of me I can't imagine why you do this over using a platform like DO, vultr, hetzner or any one of a hundred similar services that will give you a better developer experience for this kind of workflow, often at a fraction of the price

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

#295

Post by paulddraper »

stavros wrote: post #165
sokoloff wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's plenty of room for people to object to the "had to change licenses" framing. They chose to change licenses, same as they chose the original license. That original license probably helped them with goodwill and to gain a community; when those benefits no longer exceeded the downsides of using that license, they changed licenses to one that suited them better. Naturally, this change costs them some amou…

I don't see this as an issue with the company. They were happy to release their code as OSS, as long as that allowed them to make enough money to develop the software. It was a win/win, and them AWS came and took advantage of that. If you leave some apples at the side of the road, with a sign "$1 per apple" or whatever, and people largely pay enough for you to continue to pick apples, that's great. If someone starts…

This analogy falls apart because there wasn’t a price for the software.

It’s like someone said “free whole apples, or $2/lb for sliced apples.”

And someone came, took all the whole apples, cut them, and sold them themselves.

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

#296

Post by callmeal »

embedding-shape wrote: post #66
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.

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…

>Lightsail, it'll cost you a lot more than almost anything out there,

Lightsail is pretty competitive (price wise) with other providers. Been running s B2B app on it for a few years now - nothing much, just your basic crud app running on lightsail instance + lightsail db. Nice to have a "monthly" rate on each instead of the EC2 opaque (and "surprise!") pricing.

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

#297

Post by aurareturn »

voncheese wrote: post #246
aurareturn wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> My point is that maybe it was intentional, but just bad UX culture. This may be valid, but even if it is someone (or a group of people) at Amazon are violating one of their core leadership principles - Customer Obsession https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-... A useful (and hopefully delightful) UX is key to showing customer obsession. That being said, I personally feel the UX at Amazon suck…

Maybe their customer obsession culture did not extend to their AWS department?

AWS services names are notoriously bad at communicating what they actually do: https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/

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

#298

Post by kikimora »

torginus wrote: post #277

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.

I second that. I use lambda as on demand server with one lambda handling entire web app.

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

#299

Post by stavros »

paulddraper wrote: post #295
stavros wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see this as an issue with the company. They were happy to release their code as OSS, as long as that allowed them to make enough money to develop the software. It was a win/win, and them AWS came and took advantage of that. If you leave some apples at the side of the road, with a sign "$1 per apple" or whatever, and people largely pay enough for you to continue to pick apples, that's great. If someone starts…

This analogy falls apart because there wasn’t a price for the software. It’s like someone said “free whole apples, or $2/lb for sliced apples.” And someone came, took all the whole apples, cut them, and sold them themselves.

Sure, but presumably you can engage with the spirit of the analogy?

Let's be pedantic, and say someone gave apples away in exchange for donations, and when everyone only got a few apples and donated, things are fine, but then someone decided they can just take all the apples and sell them elsewhere.

Is it the fault of the first guy for not offering free apples any more, or is the second guy why we can't have nice things?

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

#300

Post by paulddraper »

Aperocky wrote: post #275
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 perfor…

> that's because you have a service principle in your IAM trust relationship that allowed us access

That’s why it’s so complicated!!!

I don’t understand how I should evaluate trust for your internal EBS org versus your internal ALB org.

I kinda just expect it to be all “AWS” trust.

And it’s all garbage anyway. There’s no way I can prevent the hypothetically untrustworthy EBS team from surreptitiously adding charges to my account if they want to. Right? This would maybe make some sense if I could top level turn off/on services, but that isn’t how it works.

—

I have no doubt this makes some sense from someone inside the machine, but from the outside it’s not helpful nor useful.

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