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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

#311

Post by aurareturn »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #301
torginus wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're not but if they don't talk to the pricing team, and most devs don't want to talk to business people, they'd never coordinate on where it makes sense to show pricing to customers.

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

#312

Post by cyanydeez »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #89
cyanydeez wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmart pulling up top a small town, opening a single business, paying everyone minimum wage is not 'competition is good'. Just try a little bit of understanding.

Maybe it is for the consumer. When Aldi opened in my nearest town my food bill dropped by 20%.

Aldi is a grwat example of a socially discipled capitalism.

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

#313

Post by cyanydeez »

surajrmal wrote: post #97
cyanydeez wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmart pulling up top a small town, opening a single business, paying everyone minimum wage is not 'competition is good'. Just try a little bit of understanding.

Arguably the town is at fault for choosing to permit Walmart to open in their town in that analogy. If you want to control the negative externalities of capitalism you can't just expect to not provide regulations and hope things will work out. Even if it weren't AWS, someone else with enough determination could use the same open source code to create a compelling alternative taking away business from the original aut…

the grift economy is demonstrating that throwing money is all you need to do to get a permit.

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

#314

Post by tailscaler2026 »

Anyone considering leaving AWS and thinking they'll transfer all their data for free [1], I've got news for you: It's a lie.

AWS takes as long as possible (for me it was a month) to respond to the initial DTO request, then require you to submit a multi-page form answering a barrage of questions about why you're leaving, where you're going to, what services you used, and estimated data egress. A week or so later, if they approve the request, you're not allowed to begin DTO until 60 days after the approval.

By the time you can egress your data for "free", you've been stuck on AWS for 3-4 months since you first made the decision to leave.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-i...

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

#315

Post by jeremyjh »

ipaddr wrote: post #56
rpdillon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a problem with their business model, then. License changes to a formerly open source project are costly. The community reacts very strongly when license terms change after they've come to depend on a product, and they should. Why do we apply this standard to MongoDB but not to Apache, Linux, Postgres, or MariaDB? One purpose of an open source license is to allow many providers to provide the service. As I'v…

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.

They knew what they were doing. They released OSS to build traction and a community. In some cases, the community contributed quite a lot to the quality of the software - even if not a lot of code. It never would have gained any traction or interest from enterprise buyers without that. Then that valuable software they had already given away was used to build a business that couldn’t create enough value on top of it.

The only people with any justification for hurt feelings are the community contributors.

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

#316

Post by ceejayoz »

pessimizer wrote: post #257
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet: https://github.com/ultraworkers/claw-code

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

#317

Post by brentcrude »

grogenaut wrote: post #241
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…

I get why it's like this. Some background. I work at an Amazon sub. This is a good UI for the way we work. We don't spin up a single machine pretty much ever unless it's a cloud dev machine, at which point the price is listed at startup on a custom internal UI. They should consider putting that UI in the ec2 console. When I spin up machines I pick an instance class by looking through specs and the price chart and set…

[dead]

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

#318

Post by izacus »

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.

This is rarely actually true but it's a common falsehood told by people who have financial interest of keeping everyone on AWS.

And that includes engkneers that only know how to use AWS and are terrified at having to learn something else.

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

#319

Post by hedora »

tedivm wrote: post #13

> AWS stomped on open source projects - despite the clear desire of projects like Elasticsearch, Redis, and MongoDB not to be cloned and monetized, AWS pushed ahead with OpenSearch, Valkey, and DocumentDB anyway, capturing the hosted-service money after those communities and companies had built the markets; the result was a wave of defensive licenses like SSPL, Elastic License, RSAL, and other source-available models…

First amazon was abusive. They abused their monopoly position to gain market dominance over upstream and didn’t contribute back monetarily or with code.

Next, upstream responded with a license change, then amazon escalated with the fork.

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

#320

Post by chuckadams »

ipsento606 wrote: post #294
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.

> 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

I never said it would be cheaper. I did say it wasn't complicated.
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