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I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

fourlightyears.blogspot.com

341–350 of 684 posts

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

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> [if] you have the option to walk out, and you don’t Ignores nothing, and blames no victim. It advises people to avoid becoming one when possible.

"all that follows is your own fault" does blame the victim. The abuse is definitely NOT the victim's fault, it's 100% the fault of the abuser. (Most of the time; I won't say there are never mutually-abusive relationships, but most of the time it's one way).

Thing about abusive relationships is, though, many (I would go so far as to say "most" but I'm no expert on the numbers) people in one have lots of options to walk out... but they either don't know they can walk out, or they don't feel that they can.

So telling them it's their own fault for leaving, when they didn't really understand that leaving was an option, does blame them unfairly.

Now, when the analogy is employee-employer, the "don't feel that they can" so often doesn't apply: the psychological reason for not leaving ("but I love him!") is almost never something the employee feels. But the "I feel trapped" reason (it's the only job I could find that makes nearly the money I need for my mortgage, if I leave then we might lose the house, etc.) VERY often applies.

EDIT to add this P.S.: I understand the intent of saying that was to advise people "Hey, walk away when you get the chance, otherwise everything that happens to you was 100% avoidable". But saying "it's your fault" is going too far. I've seen people claim that statements purely intended as advice (like "Hey, if you park your car in THAT neighborhood, you might wanna lock your doors and not leave any valuables in sight so nobody smashes your window") are victim-blaming. But it's really, really about the phrasing. The example I gave was definitely NOT victim blaming. Saying "Well, you were asking for it by parking your car there" WOULD be victim-blaming. The way it's phrased is very important. And saying "all that follows is your fault" is most definitely wrongly blaming the victim.

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

#342
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Respectfully, I think this is more of a use case where you aren't the target audience for a service like AWS.

I've been working with AWS for nearly 10 years. Many people I know, both small and large, just don't even use the console. If I need to figure out how much a project costs I use the AWS pricing calculator. Having an ec2 pricing on the pricing page is meaningless once you spend any meaningful amount of time in AWS. Once you add discounts and reserved instances, that number is going to be inaccurate anyways.

If you just need a VPS provider, there are better, less complex options. I find these complaints kind of like stepping into an F1 car and complaining that the F1 car is deceiving you because theres no fuel gauge.

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

#344
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…

When I log into AWS there is a big graph saying "Cost savings" and offers all the different ways to save money.

The idea that AWS is abusive seems a bit much to me. There is Amazon Lightsail for people who prefer pay-monthly upfront costs.

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

#345

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…

If you want to design TV remotes, you better learn Blender.

If you want to host something complex enough to warrant AWS, you should also understand how to run it yourself.

These arguments for AWS are boring and sound like uninspired regurgitation of their sales pitch. I recall hearing the same about IIS and Windows a few decades back.

Turns out, they both have pretty good marketing departments!

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

#346

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…

> but presumably you can engage with the spirit of the analogy?

What you’re calling “the spirit of” the analogy, others are seeing as “the bias embedded in” the analogy and you seem annoyed that people aren’t accepting your proposed analogy as a valid analog to the topic under discussion.

You think they’re changing the subject; others, including me, experience you as the one doing that.

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

#347
post #133
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…

Yeah Cloudflare offering has become everything I wanted from AWS. So much simpler to deploy a basic full stack app + files. AWS has become considerably more difficult than self hosting.

I've really enjoyed using CloudFlare and I've been impressed, but I'm afraid it will descend into a broken mess as they enthusiastically use more and more vibe-coding.

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

#348
post #323

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 hav…

I guess I should also point out that I’ve used AWS at extremely large scale in the past, which is why I’m running this subproject on another cloud.

As for simple permissions, go read the UNIX paper. It spends a page or two on their approach and is all you need.

Then, read the paper on mapping between NTFS SMB ACLs and NFS. It’s either impossible or undecidable, depending on the deployment. IAM is from the windows acl lineage which is known pessimal from a usability and security perspective.

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

#349
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pedantry: You’re having a smooth UX (or DX) by not using the UI.

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

#350
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…

I've been using CF Workers since 2020 or so. The biggest con is that your app will be coupled to their infra. It's less coupled than eg Firebase but still.

For the past 10 years or so I've mostly used Heroku end then Fly. Last year I invested time into switching to self hosting with dokku for new projects. After the initial learning curve it's been great. Honestly don't see the point of using anything else except if I need to run something at the edge.

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