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Troubles with the AWS web console

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Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#101

These comments are fascinating to me. I was responsible for designing, leading, and building the frontend for an AWS service. One of the challenges was with obtaining useful feedback from a diverse range of people. During the product definition phase, the majority of the feedback, input, and feature priority was for customers who were planning to dedicate a large budget towards using said service. I often felt that s…

Approximately how much does one have to spend per month to get prioritized feature improvements? We spend about $200k per month, and AWS treats us like we’re unimportant.

I would like to try Azure or Google a try, but neither seem to make it easy to transfer Petabytes.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#103
post #33

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…

For me that isn't the problem. It's mapping the several-thousand acronym riddled hairballs into reality. The reality matches no other reality which means the knowledge is probably useless in 20 years time, much as the knowledge I had of proprietary stuff then is useless now. My head has only a certain amount of space and motivation for ephemeral complexity hairballs like AWS. At this point I have to wonder if this is…

I second this. I found it easier to spin up servers on other services and run big install scripts than to try do decode Amazon's naming/acronym hell. The requirement to connect invented names to computational activity is big overhead.

I guess each AWS service get's named it's own thing as it is developed and those names just stick forever. it is maddening. Reading the docs outloud often sounds like a weird technical Dr. Seuss. I've never looked at Azure, but since Microsoft has been the king of making up their own names for things, I expect it to be just as bad.

I wonder how this naming issue comes about. If AWS devs and early adopters are doing this as their first big rodeo, then everything might seem new and they get to invent names - as if the computing were new. But after these devs and early adopters work on 2 or 5 of these kinds of projects in different environments they will see that special naming is a mistake, because it makes it incredibly hard to communicate about the same computing tasks using dozens of different names and acronyms.

I know computing requires continuous learning, but specialized naming tends to obfuscate higher order abstractions. And if you grok the higher order abstraction and want to dev a system, then the naming and minute computing differences make development on any given service harder than it needs to be because it requires learning specialized lingo. As human beings we need to get much better at getting to standard names and conventions faster. It will speed all our development.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#105
I have nothing against the AWS UI. I haven’t used it much, but it has never been a problem to me. It must be increasingly difficult to build an UI for a console like that, there are so many different users, use cases, services and perspectives.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#106

These comments are fascinating to me. I was responsible for designing, leading, and building the frontend for an AWS service. One of the challenges was with obtaining useful feedback from a diverse range of people. During the product definition phase, the majority of the feedback, input, and feature priority was for customers who were planning to dedicate a large budget towards using said service. I often felt that s…

Interesting. I’ve always found it befuddling as a generalist with a relatively high learning curve. I gave it the benefit of the doubt until Google Cloud started rolling out its updates with far better documentation and interfaces. That said, AWS has way better customer support.

I bet GCS docs will not keep up with changes to GCS very well either, judging by other Google docs. Start out good, don't keep up with changes. AWS docs are relatively good at keeping up with changes.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#107
post #101

These comments are fascinating to me. I was responsible for designing, leading, and building the frontend for an AWS service. One of the challenges was with obtaining useful feedback from a diverse range of people. During the product definition phase, the majority of the feedback, input, and feature priority was for customers who were planning to dedicate a large budget towards using said service. I often felt that s…

Approximately how much does one have to spend per month to get prioritized feature improvements? We spend about $200k per month, and AWS treats us like we’re unimportant. I would like to try Azure or Google a try, but neither seem to make it easy to transfer Petabytes.

I wouldn't expect those services to offer you much more personal attention, honestly.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#108
Search in the UI is my particular bane.

Sometimes it works great (searching for EC2 instances).

Sometimes you need to construct restricted search queries (slightly aided by a slow dropdown auto-complete) that look like `Name: Begins With: /blah/` (ParameterStore).

Sometimes search is client-side, and only searches the page you're currently on (ECR, I think? I can't remember what does this). I think in this case it's sometimes form just following the limited functionality of the API.

I have a _lot_ of scripts that are just ways to extract data quicker than I can in the UI.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#109
post #52

I'm a solo academic researcher user and there's one thing even simpler than this that i can't stand: there is no way to check which EC2 resources are running all at once. You have to click on every single region in turn to see what is actually running. If you've had multiple types running across regions, trying shut everything down without closing the account is a real pain. I am not the only person with this problem…

Out of curiosity, why are you running multiple EC2 instances across more than two regions?

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#110

These comments are fascinating to me. I was responsible for designing, leading, and building the frontend for an AWS service. One of the challenges was with obtaining useful feedback from a diverse range of people. During the product definition phase, the majority of the feedback, input, and feature priority was for customers who were planning to dedicate a large budget towards using said service. I often felt that s…

I personally dislike the CLI until I am very familiar with the AWS service I am learning or in early phase if using. Even then the CLI is usually a last resort. The Web UI is much more discoverable and understandable than having three terminal windows and a web browser open to figure out what to do with whatever random long ID on the CLI.

Assuming everyone, even extremely experienced AWS users like me, will just use the CLI seems like a mistake.

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