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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

#301

Post by loloquwowndueo »

torginus wrote: post #270
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…

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 - conf…

Engineers are not entirely cost-oblivious entities.

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

#302

Post by jnovek »

andreashaerter wrote: post #261
bdangubic wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... :)

Regardless of whether the metaphor stands up, this is a horrible thing to say. Abuse victims are not responsible for the abuse they receive.

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

#303

Post by andoando »

sudosteph wrote: post #123

I'm surprised by the author's hate towards DynamoDB. It's probably one of my favorite AWS Services. Great availability and no operational overhead. Cost was pretty minimal too each time I've used it, but you do need to spend some time architecting your data model up front, and that requires reading service docs and understanding it.

We used DynamoDB pretty much exclusively at Tinder, cause it was the founders choice early on. Horrible horrible choice and after 4 years working on it I dont see why you would.

1. you have a limited number of global supported indexes, 5 iirc, which means your queries are very limited. If your use case ever expands beyond that you're pretty screwed. 2. You will have race conditions. Strong consistency is 2x the cost, and not supported on global indexes. 3. Data is split into 10GB partitions and all the read/write quotas are split evenly by the number of partitions. 100 reads you're paying for is actually 10 reads per partition if you have 10 partition. Hot sharding becomes a real problem.

Take your document data, stick it in a JSONB and you get the same performance way cheaper + query able/indexable columns. The only time Dynamo wins I think is it scales well globally, but you probably dont need it

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

#304

Post by noprocrasted »

cyberpunk wrote: post #249
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…

Another point is that while it can be more expensive than self hosting, the savings are dwarfed by the engineering costs. A decent infrastructure engineer working for 2 man months on your “money saving” ovh setup costs you more than you can possibly save by not just using fargate or rds whatever.

But unless you're on a PaaS, you have "infrastructure engineers" already. So why not at least let them make back their salary by making them built a cost-efficient infrastructure?

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

#305

Post by kikimora »

rembal wrote: post #42

+1 on the IAM over engineering, though to AWS credit, I suspect it was evolved rather than design, and that's what you get when evolution has to maintain some level of backward compatibility (think humans still having to be able to lay eggs). Another thing that happens occasionally for saas companies is AWS creating a copy of their product in a bit sus way - but it's not a technical problem, it's a business model pro…

This is unfortunately unavoidable for any system like IAM. All of them evolve into monstrosity because of so many conflicting requirements. Most importantly being simple and tractable on one end and being able to express any imaginable predicate on another.

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

#306

Post by e40 »

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.

You’ve got to be kidding. Azure is 10x the dumpster fire that AWS is. I have used both.

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

#307

Post by andoando »

ufmace wrote: post #136
sudosteph wrote: post #123

I'm surprised by the author's hate towards DynamoDB. It's probably one of my favorite AWS Services. Great availability and no operational overhead. Cost was pretty minimal too each time I've used it, but you do need to spend some time architecting your data model up front, and that requires reading service docs and understanding it.

That's pretty much what I came into this thread to say. The thing I'd add is, DynamoDB is pretty nice if you understand how it's meant to be used - a relatively dumb key-value store with good persistence and table-size scaling to the sky. Definitely don't attempt to use it as a SQL database. The best way I can come up with to rack up a $75 bill for some prototype code is to vibe-code a thing that attempts to treat it…

With AI now writing queries is a joke. But you can just create a two column table: key, JSONB and call it a day and you get your easy document store + indexes, json search, relationsl goodness, and atomicity, consistency for free

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

#308

Post by DANmode »

e40 wrote: post #306
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.

You’ve got to be kidding. Azure is 10x the dumpster fire that AWS is. I have used both.

They didn’t comment on the entirety, just the billing transparency.

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

#309

Post by wg0 »

I think one big decision AWS could have taken earlier is that of declarative medium for cloud resources. Cloud formation is not human friendly as JSON or YAML. Problem with terraform has been that it had to keep track of the state separately which AWS already had (like what resources have been provisioned against a particular account number) in their databases and further more, I NEVER liked HCL, it never made sense to me.

Otherwise, some things that are good about AWS are as under:

1. IAM is I think good, logical and granular enough.

2. Separation of compute and storage in EC2 is very good.

3. S3 is amazing.

4. SQS is heavily underrated.

5. RDS is expensive but too good. I do not know how to go about 1 TB+ database size with daily backups without RDS. Similar ZFS setup with file system snapshots is complicated.

Not good things about AWS:

1. Super expensive. About 10 times. With zero support.

2. Current geopolitical environment would suggest getting off AWS if you are not a US company. The fascist idiots at the helm of affairs have lower IQ than the big void's average temperature in outer space.

EDIT: Typo + Formatting

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

#310

Post by paulddraper »

stavros wrote: post #299
paulddraper wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

The donation example tracks.
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