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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

#321

Post by ovao »

aorloff wrote: post #230
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.

Dynamo, and a lot of the other services mentioned (Lambda) have very specific use cases. Do not use happy fun key value store as your database.

I'd say "use it as your database if you know your access patterns make it suitable/well-suited for its use as your database". Even then it will probably not be your only database — if it's part of your MSA/SOA.

I would not build in DynamoDB if you suspect your access patterns will drastically change over the lifetime of the application (or if you intend to, e.g., plan to build a data warehouse or something crazy with it).

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

#322

Post by AgentOrange1234 »

temp8830 wrote: post #231
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…

AWS UX isn't bad because engineers are bad at UX. It's because inside AWS it's every man for himself, and every team for itself. They don't collaborate, they don't talk, they compete to ship everything as quickly and cheaply as possible - quality, usability, and common sense be damned.

FWIW, my team in AWS had help from UI designers who were cool people that impressed me with their work. We definitely had to push through some needless organizational friction, e.g., they were in a different org and frequently got left out of meetings, whereas we should really have been acting as one team. I don't think we saw it as everyone for themselves, we really tried to make it work and had a good, trusting relationship.

In the end, our leadership changed what we were building so often that all of the UI work was scrapped long before we shipped. We ended up launching a janky console, quickly assembled by SDEs who were racing against deadlines. We skipped virtually all operational readiness work to meet the launch deadline. After claiming the launch win, the director, two managers, and the pm promptly left for other orgs.

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

#323

Post by hedora »

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…

IAM is unnecessarily bad. I recently had to set a trivial policy, and was doing it correctly.

The console kept warning me that I was giving root AWS access to my external application because they want people to use the locked in AWS path, and I was running off cloud.

On top of that, they break copy paste on the web console, so you can’t just ctrl-c ctrl-v and then ask Claude to explain their WTF-ery. Instead, you have to OCR or send a PNG.

I honestly did not think they could make IAM worse, yet here we are. Bastards.

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

#324

Post by Galanwe »

These arguments against AWS are boring. 99% of the negative comments are along the line of "so i have a dead simple product, I dont know anything about AWS, I logged in and it was super complicated and it seemed pricey".

Well guess what, if you have a CRUD website and 100 users you're just not the target. Move on.

Some days ago I wanted to sketch a 3D model of my TV remote. I opened blender and what a mess of complicated windows and panes. I closed it immediatly. Do I think Blender is an over complicated mess? No, I just think I'm not the target. And I'm not offended to be too noob to use it.

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

#325

Post by b40d-48b2-979e »

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…

    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.
This is needlessly victim blaming and reductive. You're ignoring the dynamics of a relationship and how victims of abuse are often financially dependent on their abuser.

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

#326

Post by [deleted] »

b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #325
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…

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. This is needlessly victim blaming and reductive. You're ignoring the dynamics of a relationship and how victims of abuse are often financially dependent on their abuser.

[deleted]

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

#327

Post by mlhpdx »

Cyph0n wrote: post #263
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.

I find it really difficult to discuss the two with people because of the overloaded terminology.

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

#328

Post by smallnix »

Galanwe wrote: post #324

These arguments against AWS are boring. 99% of the negative comments are along the line of "so i have a dead simple product, I dont know anything about AWS, I logged in and it was super complicated and it seemed pricey". Well guess what, if you have a CRUD website and 100 users you're just not the target. Move on. Some days ago I wanted to sketch a 3D model of my TV remote. I opened blender and what a mess of complic…

The main issue with account suspension is not boring to me.

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

#329

Post by aleksiy123 »

djyde wrote: post #33

I've transitioned between cloud services and self-hosting a few times: 1. Vercel Phase My first project used Vercel. Since my project was Next.js, the experience was decent. But as my project gained some users, I found that even for projects under 100 users, I needed to pay $20 per month. Since my service didn't require high performance, this cost felt steep. 2. Self-host Phase (Hetzner + Coolify) Later, I started se…

Went through a similar phase,

I think a mix of 2. and 3. is good for a small team or solo dev. Im throwing in a bit of homelab as well by adding some action runners and models on my desktop as well.

But cloudflare is great value for small teams. Not sure how it as at higher scale.

On the topic of env and config. It took me a while to get this write, and maybe overengineered.

But I invested a lot of time in trying to standardize env definitions, secrets manager, and per env config definition defined in my nx projects, and consumed by the commands or deployers. As well as pulumi for IaC.

I tried a couple of different approaches, but finally I just decided to use typescript as my config language. I use nx project.json but defined using typescript. And just define the env config as typescript functions to be injected to each command or deployment as a pure function of target env.

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

#330

Post by andoando »

da02 wrote: post #134
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…

How do you deal with the few minutes of downtime when you do kernel/OS/software upgrades?

You spin up a second host and load balance
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