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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

#411

Post by pokot0 »

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…

Honestly UX became irrelevant in the last years (infra as code) and even more in the last year (coding agents). What you need is well structured API and a CLI that does not limit you. You can call it UX if you want, but the skillset is different.

When I started my latest project my first rule was: I never have to login to AWS console. I didn’t achieve ‘never’ but I am pretty close and the experience is a lot better

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

#412

Post by loloquwowndueo »

aurareturn wrote: post #311
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You didn’t read the comment I replied to, did you? The premise was :

> 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.

So this is about the engineers consuming AWS, not the ones who designed and implemented AWS

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

#413

Post by loloquwowndueo »

rowanG077 wrote: post #337
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…

A core part of an engineers job is including thinking about cost in what they do.

Right - nobody who’s had a formal education in engineering would think that way, because cost considerations are part of the curriculum from the start.

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

#414

Post by Chris2048 »

stavros wrote: post #217
sokoloff wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a massive difference between "paying what was required by the offer" and "paying less than was required by the offer" and only one of them makes you a thief.

I think there's a massive difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, and saying "but the letter of the law didn't say I couldn't!" doesn't make you any less of a thief.

> "but the letter of the law didn't say I couldn't!" doesn't make you any less of a thief.

Yes it does. And it's moot because the apples were offered for free, no restriction on usage.

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

#415

Post by calmbonsai »

The AWS UI should be, effectively, read-only for any infrastructure aside from setting up some initial roles and perms to manage all of it through an IAC system.

Put more bluntly, if you're using the AWS Console to spin-up/spin-down service instances you're doing it wrong.

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

#416

Post by ray_v »

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…

Did blender charge you thousands of dollars when you touched it wrong when you tried to learn to use it? /s

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

#417

Post by Chris2048 »

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…

Why is an analogy needed? Just engage with what actually happened.

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

#418

Post by VerifiedReports »

I left because of their shitty or nonexistent documentation AND absurd complexity.

After wrestling with their garbage for weeks, we started over and built a VPS from scratch. Development and deployment proceeded without a hitch after that. The only vestige remaining was S3.

I'm in the midst of a new project now, and I'm not even considering Amazon, even for S3 this time. I'm going to use an S3-compatible layer just in case, but I don't want to give Amazon a dime anymore.

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

#419

Post by joquarky »

reactordev wrote: post #380
jnovek wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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

#420

Post by oneneptune »

anymouse123456 wrote: post #332

Like OP, I was an AWS booster for many years (also a Heroku lover), but fell out of love about 10 years ago for the same reasons. - It felt like far too much complexity just to do simple things. - The obvious attempts to trap customers with slightly incompatible, higher level services felt gross - The inability to run AWS trash on a dev machine had a MASSIVE hit on productivity - Pricing didn't fall as fast as I felt…

The value in paying someone is if you have enterprise requirements for physical data security. Then after that if you go the Hetzner route, you have to micromanage your underlying OS, Redis, DB, etc... and it's just more work.. and if you're in enterprise business it reduces friction a lot to just pay someone a trivial amount like $10,000 a month.
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