Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

fourlightyears.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 684 posts

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

#421

Post by joquarky »

lukan wrote: post #356
rmunn wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 wal…

If the victim had the option to walk, but did not, then it is his fault for not doing that. If I know a dog is dangerous, but try to touch it anyway and get bitten - then yes the evil dog bit me, but it was my fault for not reacting to danger. Same way with a abusive company, if you know they are, but still make a contract because it seems convenient, then it is still a abusive company, but your fault for getting int…

[flagged]

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

#422

Post by ninjagoo »

richwater wrote: post #107
2ndorderthought wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I wonder how much it would hurt Amazon to pay the creators and maintainers of OSS software they sell 1 cent per billing period of use(1 hr?). I also wonder how much money that would offer an oss team. To contribute risk free to improving the product

I think you would be surprised how many commits in OSS comes from paid workers of the various cloud companies and tech companies out there.

> I think you would be surprised how many commits in OSS comes from paid workers of the various cloud companies and tech companies out there.

And I think the value that various cloud companies and tech companies derive from open source by far exceeds their contributions to it. When you add in the economic contribution, those OSS value-adds are an order of magnitude higher.

According this Harvard paper [1], the cost to create wide used open-source software once is about $4 Billion. The replacement value to firms that use OSS, if they had to build or buy the equivalents themselves, is about $8.8 Trillion. The Software spending effect (how much firms would need to spend on software without OSS) is 3.5x.

According to this EU study [2], EU companies invested about €1B in OSS in 2018, but in return the impact on the European economy was estimated €65B–€95B.

[1] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=65230 [2] https://opencommons.org/images/c/c1/The_impact_of_open_sourc...

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

#423

Post by bigstrat2003 »

stavros wrote: post #117
jasonlotito wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they changed their license, they were no longer open source. They could have chosen open source licenses such as the AGPL, but they did not. They were a non-open source company at that point, and AWS was putting out a product build on open source. Simple as that. Redis was not an open source company when AWS moved to Valkey. Companies are free to license under the AGPL if they want. Or other open source licenses…

These were open source projects that had to change licenses away from open source because of AWS. I'm not sure how the OSS companies are the bad guy here.

There is no bad guy. The OSS license meant that AWS was perfectly free to do as they did. If the companies who licensed their software as OSS didn't want that, then they shouldn't have used an OSS license.

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

#424

Post by jnovek »

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.

Here’s a cool fact: in America only 35% of DV survivors retain full custody of their children and only 45% retain primary custody.

If you flee domestic violence you are more likely than not to lose custody of your children to your abuser.

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

#426

Post by DANmode »

rmunn wrote: post #341
DANmode wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [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 wal…

> The abuse is definitely NOT the victim's fault, it's 100% the fault of the abuser.

At some stage, (regardless of law or what’s right), standing in a pedestrian-crossing on a busy thoroughfare is foolish.

Keep hanging out in the crosswalk hoping Bezos will stop for you,

if you want,

but don’t chastise those warning others to move.

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

#427

Post by rowanseymour »

andoando wrote: post #303
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.

We used DynamoDB pretty much exclusively at Tinder, cause it was the founders choice early on. Horrible horrible choice and after 4 years working on it I dont see why you would. 1. you have a limited number of global supported indexes, 5 iirc, which means your queries are very limited. If your use case ever expands beyond that you're pretty screwed. 2. You will have race conditions. Strong consistency is 2x the cost,…

IMO if you've got a use case that requires querying in so many ways that you need several indexes, then DynamoDB is probably the wrong choice. It excels at stuff like user specific histories that are well partitioned, read back in one way, and ideally can be written asynchronously by a separate writer process.

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

#428

Post by gchamonlive »

> AWS Lambda - yeah I really bought the sell on this - "its scalable!!!!", and I ignored the slow startup times, the MASSIVE development complexity.

I don't know... Maybe I spent too much time studying how to tame AWS using IaC and gitops reproducible deployments, but AWS lambda seemed to me the most impressively simple and inexpensive product. Once I did an complete project, from end to end, designing the architecture and flow of multiple lambdas communicating with each other through SQS queues to search, extract and load info from geotiff files from S3 into a PostgreSQL database, and it was really straightforward.

If you leverage docker images for deployment and separate the interface for treating lambda requests from the core logic, it doesn't have much space for surprises.

If the author went with the cliché that lambda scalability can harm your budget, it wouldn't be original, but at least it would have been plausible, but complex? I don't know, maybe someone could present the case with more deails for why it's so complex.

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

#429

Post by nemothekid »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #399
nemothekid wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm a contractor, so my deployment complexity is whatever my current client's complexity is. > 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 That's fine if you feel that way. The article and following discussion is clearly about the smaller audience, and…

AWS is being pushed on everyone the same way Hadoop was pushed on everyone in the 2010s and IBM in the 90s. Everyone sees themselves as webscale, when their data can reasonable fit in Excel. If the only product on AWS you are using in EC2 and S3, you are choosing the wrong tool.

The complexity of AWS is because a service like AWS is complex. Neither Azure or GCP has any less complexity. DigitalOcean offers way less services and as a result is way less complex.

>And I find the cavalier attitude that these companies aren't important enough to add the distinction to be exhausting

They aren't important in the same way a F1 car doesn't think families are important enough to add a back row seat. No company is going to have fidelity to serve a perfect product to every market. The frustration comes from the misplaced belief that a product should serve every kind of user in the market.

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

#430

Post by gbear605 »

voncheese wrote: post #246
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…

> My point is that maybe it was intentional, but just bad UX culture. This may be valid, but even if it is someone (or a group of people) at Amazon are violating one of their core leadership principles - Customer Obsession https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-... A useful (and hopefully delightful) UX is key to showing customer obsession. That being said, I personally feel the UX at Amazon suck…

Everywhere on Amazon.com has bad UI/UX. For one example, the flow on checking out as a non-Prime member (not sure about Prime members) is janky and feels straight out of 2005. Like it reloads the page, taking ten+ seconds, every time you enter new data (address, credit card, personal info, etc.). I would be laughed out of the room if I tried to deliver this at work, but Amazon delivers it for millions of people.

So no, they care zero about their customers, except maybe for getting as much money as possible out of it.

Post reply on HN