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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

#371

Post by ricardobayes »

aurareturn wrote: post #157
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…

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…

It just goes to show if you are the first big player in a space, you can have whatever UX. No UX will override that first mover advantage. I could cite countless examples, where the first commonly known company rules the space and no newcomer with a flashy UX can come close, no matter how hard they try.

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

#372

Post by MSFT_Edging »

skywhopper wrote: post #86
hankerapp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of these projects work on a business model where they open-source their core product, and provide advanced services, installation, maintenance or fully-managed services around their product. AWS was bypassing them by providing fully-managed services. On this, I am on the side of the people behind the projects. Basically AWS was eating their lunch. They had no choice but to change the licenses.

Just because they picked a bad business model doesn’t mean they deserve to avoid competition. Don’t give away your source code if you don’t want someone else to provide hosting.

Don't take advantage of open source projects if you don't want to be targeted in their licensing.

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

#373

Post by silverwind »

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…

All those forks turned out to be inferior projects with substantially less contributions than the originals.

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

#374

Post by NewJazz »

jimbobimbo wrote: post #359
paulddraper wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

>I kinda just expect it to be all “AWS” trust. This would be very unwise from security standpoint. Internal access to customer stuff is granular and made hard for internal staff to gain, to minimize chances of screw up intentional or not.

I agree. Adding a service principal always raises an eyebrow for me, just a blanket "hey we're aws trust me bro" is a little bonkers.

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

#377

Post by vp4nkov »

bironran wrote: post #367

GCP has it's own share of issues. ... I was writing a long vent about GCP but the mix of issues we had, just in the last few weeks, was too identifying and I don't want to sour an already tremulous relationship, as much as I'd like to spill it all here. Let's just sum it up with resource crunch and degraded services because, apparently, when one customer signs a $200B deal [1] all the "just a few $10M" get thrown to…

Azure was affected by this already - small compute quota increases tickets I had opened last year took months to resolve, and they also took away ability to provision postgres in eastus entirely (we are under quota limit).

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

#378

Post by geoduck14 »

AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #322
temp8830 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rel…

Wow. Your story sounds like my company. Makes me feel less bad for the dysfunction I have to work with

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

#379

Post by tempest_ »

anymouse123456 wrote: post #338
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…

I agree, this is a common story and your point stands for some significant percentage of the complaints. It should be made clear though, that some of us helped spend many millions in obviously wasteful on-prem infra in the nineties, bought into AWS wholeheartedly when it came out, fought through the ignorance, developed the ability to deliver highly scaled applications on the platform over many years and at least som…

Prior to the RAM crunch you could buy 4 or 5 servers ~50k that would be more than capable to handle many enterprises needs. The thing is the industry has sorta lost the skill set to host and maintain them. The people who can do this still exist of course but they are outnumbered by the YAML jockeys 10 to 1.

There are also other things that the cloud hides in its price as well. Redundant networking, provisioning, rack space, internet connections, firewalls, UPS backup, power usage.

Still I think a lot of startups would benefit from hosting their own stuff if they intend to be a long term business instead of just shooting their shot and hoping to be acquired.

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

#380

Post by reactordev »

jnovek wrote: post #302
andreashaerter wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No but they have the power to remove themselves from the situation and should have a prudence to do so. We have places for women and children to go to escape abuse, so find your hideout and escape the abusive relationship.
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