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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

#481

Post by layoric »

cryo32 wrote: post #396
tailscaler2026 wrote: post #314

Anyone considering leaving AWS and thinking they'll transfer all their data for free [1], I've got news for you: It's a lie. AWS takes as long as possible (for me it was a month) to respond to the initial DTO request, then require you to submit a multi-page form answering a barrage of questions about why you're leaving, where you're going to, what services you used, and estimated data egress. A week or so later, if t…

If you have a lot of data it's cheaper to lease a Direct Connect line into an AWS zone and suck it out through that.

I might be reading the pricing wrong but you have to pay per hour for the port plus per GB transfer? And looks like the cheapest is $0.02 per GB? Is that really the 'cheap' option? That looks fine for a TB or two, but still crazy when getting closer to PBs.

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

#482

Post by waterTanuki »

anyone building with AWS or any cloud provider should be setting up a forked pipeline for their data production: one goes to the cloud provider DB used for production, the other is a local-on prem DB you regularly backup and always have on hand should you need to leave the cloud.

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

#483

Post by nemothekid »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #435
nemothekid wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> They aren't important in the same way a F1 car doesn't think families are important enough to add a back row seat I don't know of anyone saying you should buy an F1 car for your family, do you? I do see people in this very thread with very different ideas of when AWS makes sense for you.

>I don't know of anyone saying you should buy an F1 car for your family, do you?

It's a metaphor. Your clients telling you they need you to deploy on AWS are the kind of people I believe are telling you to buy an F1 car to daily drive to whole foods. You said it yourself: "AWS is being pushed on everyone".

>I do see people in this very thread with very different ideas of when AWS makes sense for you.

Naturally. However, 99% of, what I believe are illegitimate complaints of AWS (AWS has tons of legitimate complaints), are from people who were probably better served by a using a simple VPS provider than a cloud provider. A VPS provider is simpler, easier to understand wrt to pricing, and cheaper. Most of the complexity in AWS comes from the fact that AWS itself is a very complex tool targeted to large organizations and deployments where people aren't using EC2 instances, or are using 100s of them. The complaint that the UI doesn't have enough affordances when trying to create a single EC2 instance is kind of ridiculous when you consider it's a tool designed for people launching 100s of instances. Nobody is reasonably launching 100 instances through the dashboard. Furthermore, if vendor lock-in is a concern you have AWS is the wrong tool.

Likewise for IAM. People complain a lot about IAM. But AWS has thousand different user types, and a 1000 different services. I've written my fair share of permission systems with a fraction of the amount of permutations. They always become complex due to the combinatorial nature. GCP manages to somehow be even worse. But you wouldn't need to deal with something like IAM if you just stuck with a VPS.

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

#484

Post by wodenokoto »

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…

Almost every organization I’ve worked for has setup their cloud such that:

A) they are receiving massive discounts off of list prices, and

B) they’ve setup everything such that no-one working on the cloud can see the spend.

Companies just really don’t want employees to know what their spend is.

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

#485

Post by rowanG077 »

torginus wrote: post #478
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think a lot of formal education places teach AWS's resource pricing structure, which can be incredibly confusing, but can be boiled down to: if you want to be as cheap as possible, just use EC2 for everything and maybe S3 for storage.

I'm very surprised you expect any formal education to teach any specific pricing structure. You teach how to evaluate solutions for their price impact. No one was claiming any curriculum includes AWS's resource pricing structure.

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

#486

Post by jabwd »

ceejayoz wrote: post #67
embedding-shape wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But those license changes were a response to how AWS was monetizing their work in ways unsustainable for the upstream projects Or seen from the other side, these projects chose initial licenses that didn't fit with their wants for how others should use their project, in this mind. If you use a license that gives people the freedom to host your project as a service and make money that way, without paying you, and yo…

The situation changed. A license that's the right choice at one point may not be the right license a decade later.

I hate Amazon and monopolies, but I hate companies that think opensourcing their code as a marketing stunt gives them more rights or whatever. If you don't want to opensource, then don't?!

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

#487

Post by tacticus »

cryo32 wrote: post #401
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…

Nope. We have an incredibly complicated product, a bunch of actual experts and paid up high level enterprise support. It is about 8x more expensive to run it on AWS than it was on actual hardware. And that's using their reference architecture and designs. And the sprawling nature of AWS services and uptake makes it pretty damn hard to get out. We are slowly and quietly migrating everyting to IaaS / kubernetes so we c…

> Edit: also fuck things like Lambda. It's literally the most horrible experience that the universe can muster. Moved most of our lambdas to simple boring http services on top of Go and just leave 20 instances running. Just not having to deal with CloudWatch saved us more money than Lambda could have.

imagine if instead of being a tied in to aws special interfaces lambda had shown up as closer to cloud run!

Though hopefully not the knative style that azure first went with and the LOOOOONG start times.

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

#488

Post by tonymet »

BirAdam wrote: post #375
tonymet wrote: post #331

Every single complaint has a simple fix: “just use EC2”

That’s what all of AWS’s inf is anyway. Each instance of a thing is just a premade EC2 instance (I am exaggerating but not by too much).

Ec2 + open source app = 5x vcpu and iops billing

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

#489

Post by jph00 »

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…

There's always someone making this claim when negative comments about AWS come up.

They almost always come from people that don't have experience running substantive infra at scale without AWS, so they can't make an informed comparison. The complexity of doing so, for a lot of infra, turns out to be lower than using AWS. Also, you end up with transferable skills and a deeper understanding of the foundational protocols and systems. And you save a lot of money, both because you don't have to pay to manage that complexity, and the systems themselves are cheaper.

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