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Troubles with the AWS web console

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Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#11

Post by mk89 »

kristiandupont wrote: post #8

It seems to me that there is a quite profitable business case in a thin abstraction over AWS/Azure/Google App Engine (or whatever it's called now). There are lots of services like Zeit Now and Heroku that supply a complex abstraction to the point where it feels like an entirely different product. What I would want is something that allows me to host docker images/K8s on one of the big three (I guess others as well) a…

Indeed! That's exactly the point. AWS or other cloud providers are hard to use because they are about managing a data center - that you can replicate across different regions (so, multiple data centers). That's it. People confuse that with a VPS, where you start your vm and everything works out of the box.

If you need abstractions, use Heroku and that's it, you don't have to know how DNS works, or which subnet to choose for your VMs etc.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#12

Post by mk89 »

steve19 wrote: post #7
drchewbacca wrote: post #4

I hate AWS so much. I spent 3 hours trying to get a bucket to host a static single page of html and failed completely. I use amazon polly. I wanted to know how many characters I was using each month. I spent 2 hours searching through hundreds of pages and literally couldn't find that information. I thought of trying to start a little text to speech service for dyslexics to make it easy to use Polly but one of the mai…

I completely agree. I feel stupid everything I try use AWS. I have a pile of credits in my account that I am not using because I cannot bear to try (and fail... Again). It's maddening and they clearly do not care.

What's your level of experience with ops/networking etc.? Because it all boils down to that. If you need a simpler service, maybe you could use digital ocean etc...

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#13

Post by wikibob »

mk89 wrote: post #10
jrockway wrote: post #2

I am pretty sure the AWS business model is to get you to write your own code that interacts with the API so that when you think about switching to another provider, you realize that you're throwing away months of work and decide not to. They also make the API requests take so many parameters that are specific to your particular use case that nobody will ever be able to write a generic tool that does what you want. Ev…

> I am pretty sure the AWS business model is to get you to write your own code that interacts with the API so that when you think about switching to another provider, you realize that you're throwing away months of work and decide not to. Same applies to all other cloud providers. Typically, you solve this problem partially with tools like Terraform, etc. However, of course there is never a one-size-fits-all solution…

While Terraform the tool can be used across cloud providers, Terraform configurations cannot.

Each terraform file uses modules that are quite specific to the individual services provided by a given cloud. These cannot be simply swapped out without rewriting the config.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#14

Post by mnm1 »

People pay for an awful product. What incentive do they have to improve? None. It's not just aws. All Amazon products are this way. Two day shipping comes a week later if it comes at all. Products are cheap knockoffs that break and when you return them they close your account. Aws is aws: you know you're getting ripped off but someone else is paying the bill and aws has convinced them that the service is worth it. It's not but it'll take a week to migrate away to another provider and we can't afford that. Never mind that we're losing an hour each day in productivity. Perception is everything and perception is on their side.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#15

Post by mk89 »

wikibob wrote: post #13
mk89 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am pretty sure the AWS business model is to get you to write your own code that interacts with the API so that when you think about switching to another provider, you realize that you're throwing away months of work and decide not to. Same applies to all other cloud providers. Typically, you solve this problem partially with tools like Terraform, etc. However, of course there is never a one-size-fits-all solution…

While Terraform the tool can be used across cloud providers, Terraform configurations cannot. Each terraform file uses modules that are quite specific to the individual services provided by a given cloud. These cannot be simply swapped out without rewriting the config.

Unfortunately that's true.

In general, that's something that should be known in advance when someone chooses a cloud provider. As I mentioned, there is no one-site-fits-all solution. :/ Vendor lock-in is a serious issue for some enterprise companies, and in such cases you could propose something like a hybrid cloud. It's an expensive effort that could save your butt in the future.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#16

Post by the-dude »

dammitfoo wrote: post #6
pgt wrote: post #3

The Law of Better is Worse: User-friendly tools prevent skilled middlemen from monetizing their expertise, which stifles adoption of that tool. So on-sellable tools that are too easy-to-use, don't get on-sold. Some examples by contradiction: tax returns, AWS Dashboard, many programming languages.

> Some examples by contradiction: tax returns, AWS Dashboard, many programming languages. By programming languages, do you mean Rust?

How about SQL

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#17

Post by pgt »

dammitfoo wrote: post #6
pgt wrote: post #3

The Law of Better is Worse: User-friendly tools prevent skilled middlemen from monetizing their expertise, which stifles adoption of that tool. So on-sellable tools that are too easy-to-use, don't get on-sold. Some examples by contradiction: tax returns, AWS Dashboard, many programming languages.

> Some examples by contradiction: tax returns, AWS Dashboard, many programming languages. By programming languages, do you mean Rust?

Absolutely Rust and JavaScript. Rust would be a far better language if it used S-expressions and didn't try to reinvent a macro syntax. But then it would not be as popular.

In this way Lisp suffers from having no syntax, although it's a slightly different argument. When you can't have flamewars about a language's syntax, fewer articles are written about it. So instead, people will argue about the encoding of the AST - the parentheses.

Similarly, well-designed languages like Clojure, Haskell and Erlang have fewer questions on StackOverflow and older GitHub issues, so there are fewer flamewars about them (although monads are Haskell's saving grace here).

The NPM crowd are quick to ask, "Is this project abandoned?" when it hasn't had any activity for a year. In Clojure country, we dislike using libraries that haven't been stable for at least five years. As Alan Kay put it, Computer Science is very much a pop culture.

The phenomenon needs a good name, though. Perhaps the Moving Target Paradox, since developers are more likely to run after a moving target.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#18

Post by pgt »

the-dude wrote: post #16
dammitfoo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some examples by contradiction: tax returns, AWS Dashboard, many programming languages. By programming languages, do you mean Rust?

How about SQL

SQL gave business analysts a way to express relational set algebra. If SQL had launched with an (arguably superior) datalog syntax, I wonder if it would have been as popular. Probably not, so it does feel like a good example. If SQL was composable (i.e. not a concatenated string), it would employ far fewer API gluers.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#19

Post by stevekemp »

drchewbacca wrote: post #4

I hate AWS so much. I spent 3 hours trying to get a bucket to host a static single page of html and failed completely. I use amazon polly. I wanted to know how many characters I was using each month. I spent 2 hours searching through hundreds of pages and literally couldn't find that information. I thought of trying to start a little text to speech service for dyslexics to make it easy to use Polly but one of the mai…

Uploading a single file to S3 seems like it should be a simple job, that is well-documented:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/user-guide/uploa...

There are parts of AWS that are hard to use, and non-intuitive. But S3 didn't ever seem to be one of them, though perhaps I'm forgetting how hard it was initially.

You might consider a "friendly" system for static hosting if raw-S3 is too hard though, such as netlify. There are a lot of services out there which basically wrap and resell AWS services. (I run my own to do git-based DNS hosting, which is a thin layer upon the top of route53 for example.)

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#20

Post by slovenlyrobot »

Since starting to use Google Cloud for bits and pieces I've come to appreciate the AWS UI approach much more than previously. All those little spartan pockets of UI means nothing gets overengineered, the tools feel more like a quick Intranet web app (and generally load as quickly!) than anything else

Meanwhile over in GCloud, almost /any/ operation whatsoever will spam you with an endless series of progress meters, meaningless notification popups, laptop CPU fans on, 3-4 second delays to refresh the page (because most of their pages lack a refresh button), etc., and the experience is uniform regardless of whatever tool you're using.

The uniform design itself was clearly done by a UI design team with little experience of the workflows involved during a typical day. For example, requiring 2 clicks and at least one (two?) slow RPCs to edit some detail of a VM, with the first click involving the instance name with any 'show details' button completely absent from the primary actions bar along the top. The right-hand properties bar in GCloud is also AFAIK 100% useless. I've yet to see any subsection that made heavy use of it

Underengineering beats massive overengineering? Something like that. Either way, the GCloud UI definitely pushes me to AWS for quick tasks when a choice is available, because the GCloud UI is the antithesis of quick

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