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I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
491–500 of 684 posts
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
What amazes me is how Heroku absolutely nailed what most web apps need nearly 20 years ago.
I miss heroku dearly. somewhere at Salesforce there is an exec who killed the product and shifted it to enterprise and is now looking at the vibe coding revolution seeing their opportunity missed.
I've been enjoying railway!
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#493Earlier 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 can't recall cost ever coming up as a consideration during my years of formal computer science studies in school. Big-O efficiency, sure, but the cost of compute, storage, bandwidth, nope, not once. It was absolutely hammered into me in the years of working for startups that followed, though.
Just noticed you did say computer science, not computer engineering. Two very different things.
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#494> 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…
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.
A lot of these projects started as community driven and funded open source efforts that eventually the creators decided to make a professional services company as a sponsor -> that company takes over nearly all of the development -> they relicense when they realize the funding they raised isn't going to be paid back.
They're all just rug pulls when the creators want to get rich off of their open product and realize they can't after raising tens of millions.
I'd have a lot more sympathy if the story wasn't "closing an open project so we can pay investors"
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this allegory, did AWS take all the apples in the crate while paying them $1 for every apple, thus becoming the bad guy?
No. It took the entire crate and paid nothing.
Most of the companies behind Valkey were writing significant code for Redis. It was certainly not a case of them paying nothing.
Valkey has some of the (formerly) most prolific Redis contributors for the era in which it was forked.
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
Congrats, your raw EC2-hosted 500MB WebGL experimental card game went to the HN Front Page! You now owe AWS $30k in egress costs.
Well this is the dream right ? You build something, well enough that it can handle the traffic, and people come, and it does. Welcome to the gaming industry
> Well this is the dream right ?
Yes it is, we call these dreams a nightmare
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
PostgreSQL doesn't have a pro/officially supported version though.
Sure they do. AWS RDS, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, etc. are all "pro" / "officially supported" deployments of PostgreSQL. On top of that the PostgreSQL official website even lists a whole table full of vendors from whom you can get commercial support at https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/nort... Bringing faux open source into the world isn't a justification for adopting an infeasible business…
Enjoy all new OpenSource projects being open in name only then.
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 t…
Understand the argument. No one is forcing anyone to make OSS. They do it because they want to. It’s like they are own worst enemy
"It’s like they are own worst enemy"
No, you are your own worst enemy. Because of your attitude, OSS is going to go away as will all those economic benefits you are enjoying. But keep up with the its OK to pee in the pool type ethics of yours. Let's see where that gets you in the long run.
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#499I was such a fan of it that I ended up working there for 4 years. Now I avoid it and encourage others to do the same. AWS used to have a nifty tool called "policy analyzer" or something that monitored for permissions used by a role so you could scope it down. The other day I had the need for it and when I went to use it, found out they charge something like $9/resource. So I would pay $45/month for metadata monitorin…
DDB has two use cases: 1. You need an "infinitely scalable" key/value store and have deep pockets[0] 2. you work at AWS and your deployment pipeline has so many stages and regions and fabrics that you can no longer even conceptualize what it means for there to be a "current version" of your software (the hell in which I live). But for some awful reason it's sold as a general purpose "NoSQL Database." Pair that with t…
Agree. I didn’t like being forced to use it. There was some edict based on some different past problems. My service was a devops thing and didn’t really have a data plane. A regular db would have been perfect but would have required some silly high level approval we weren’t willing to get. All that despite being told service teams are free to build how they want
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#500I am curious the effect AI will have on these cloud offerings.
On the one hand, they bust through a bunch of the pain points of setting it up and configuring it. Especially if you are trying to do it using something like Terraform etc. So they make it more accessible.
But on the other hand, they equally reduce the pain of building all the premium part of the offering yourself. Why do I need AWS ECS / ALB / autoscaling etc etc services if I can get all that configured on bare metal just as easy now?
So in a different scenario all the lock in and premium services wither away and it all reduces to commodity compute - in some sense, where it should never have left. Initially experienced joy as the bitter battles I fought with Terraform became smooth prompts I issued to have Claude deal with all my problems. Life has gotten much better. But I'm now definitely moving into frustration because it's clear that AWS is mostly a middleman causing friction now across a whole set of infra that I could be managing directly. So I'm paying for the privilege of all this frustration. Why?
I don't know at the moment which way this will go, but I'm quite curious about it.