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Troubles with the AWS web console

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Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#151

Post by robbyt »

adreamingsoul wrote: post #44

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'm honestly surprised there was only one team in charge of UX for the AWS gui.

It always felt like each product did their own UX because of all the various inconsistency between different areas. I don't have any examples off-hand, but anyone who's used it would probably agree with me.

For the record, I think the AWS GUI is sufficient, but not very good. If you login to GCP, see that feedback button in the upper right on each page? Product managers have emailed me back asking for more information, or explaining features when I've used that feedback button.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#152

Post by AndrewKemendo »

mk89 wrote: post #9
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…

If you hate AWS so much, wait until you use Azure. Worst support ever. UI not in sync with the az-cli, documentation super chaotic, lots of basic features from AWS not yet supported in Azure. From my experience, AWS has up-to-date documentation pages for everything. And when something is hard to understand from their docs, you can find really everything you need by searching on Google. Literally, everything. And if y…

I had the exact opposite experience, and we ran our entire company off of Azure for 3 years without any issues.

The only complaint I had was when I needed to rapidly get like 15 N-Series GPU instances and it took like two months. At the time they were new so weren't allocating them as quickly as they do now. Amazon was way faster for us to get GPUs running on - but this was over two years ago now so I'm not sure if that's still the case.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#153

Post by scarface74 »

EMM_386 wrote: post #137
m0xte wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The naming system ... Route53, Fargate, Greengrass, Sumerian, Step Functions, Kinesis ... none of these conjure up basic computing concepts. Why? Why should "Greengrass" be used for IoT?

Route 53: What port do you use to connect to DNS?

But the rest, I’ve got nothing as far as making the naming conventions make sense.

But honestly it took me about a year to go from not knowing anything about AWS to being sable to hold my own from a development and networking/Devops standpoint with AWS. Almost everything mapped to concepts I had done before - even the IOT stuff from my time developing field service apps for old Windows CE ruggedized devices.

I could basically draw up an architectural diagram of how I would have implemented the same systems today if I had had AWS at my disposal.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#154

Post by AndrewKemendo »

RonaldSchleifer wrote: post #23
iforgotpassword wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To an extent that makes sense, but I think Amazon is just generally bad at web design for reasons unknown to me. Their plain old shopping site has been horrible ever since, inconsistent and confusing, and here you can't even excuse this with diving people to an API. Maybe it's to keep people browsing for longer and get them to buy more but that's assuming it outweighs the frustration induced by it.

It’s interesting you mention the shopping site. I have found their site horrible ever since the beginning and only marginally better since done of their belabored efforts to polish some things. I feel like both WAS and the shopping UI/UX are dependent on an overarching common effect; your willingness to suffer in order to get the hit of addiction. On the shopping site it’s the relative speed and gratification of the…

The Amazon.com desktop homepage isn't meant to be anything more than a search bar and a billboard. Go look at it.

Now go look at amazon.com on a mobile browser. Very different but still focused on search and (effectively) ads.

Even different still is the Amazon mobile app. Again, prime focus on the search bar and big huge ads.

The reality is that Amazon wants you to use it as a search engine. They now beat Google for all product searches. Everything Amazon.com does basically tells you: "Hey, just use the search bar dummy."

So, whether it's being the top results in Google which they work super hard to be, or making the amazon front ends the place you start searching - they optimize their consumer UI's to focus on getting you to search.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#156

Post by scarface74 »

Terretta wrote: post #65
adreamingsoul wrote: post #44

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…

Noting your verb tense, “I was”, I’m assuming you’re no longer in that role. This isn’t feedback, just discussion. I talked to Jassy after his keynote in 2018: “Your message says AWS is for ‘builders’. Why do you keep saying ‘just click and ...’ instead of ‘just call the API and’?” In short, to your point: AWS is for builders... who pay. And right now all the growth is in enterprise, where we don’t know how to make A…

So we can’t adopt AWS at all if that’s the only path in. But our proxy teams can figure out how to open a console URL. For this market, giving a point and click web page with magic infra behind it is a big deal: the modern ‘service catalog

And then your bean counters are going to be rightfully confused about why they are spending so much more on infrastructure when “they moved to the cloud” without changing their people and/or processes.

But then again, they probably listened to some old school net ops folks who watched one ACloudGuru video, passed a multiple choice AWS certification, called themselves “consultants” when all they were were a bunch of “lift and shifters”.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#157

Post by scarface74 »

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #110
adreamingsoul wrote: post #44

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…

I use the console for discoverability, proof of concepts, and quickly reviewing what’s going on. But for any real resource creation, I will then duplicate the steps with CloudFormation or a Python script (or both) and once I verify it, tear down the manually created resources.

The only time I find the CLI useful is for S3.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#158

Post by mrweasel »

m0xte wrote: post #33
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…

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…

Right, the naming "scheme" for AWS is insane. I think one of the reason for the terrible web UI is the fact that AWS does so much, and they just cram everything in upfront. One of the things I feel Azure does very well is showing you the bit you're most likely to use, especially if you're new to the platform (that and they just call stuff be names that makes sense, a VM is a VM, not an EC2 instance). The more advanced feature are available, but not in your face from the beginning.

As for documentation: I don't think that neither AWS nor Azure have excellent documentation. The Azure documentation lacks depth, the AWS documentations is just throw together, things that are part of the same system is documented wildly differentially, e.g. some CloudWatch metric are complete, how you use them, which dimensions are available for which, and you get example. Other parts of CloudWatch: "Well we have some metrics and these dimensions, have fun figuring out which goes together.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#159

Post by pgt »

jonahx wrote: post #81
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.

See also: Kubernetes. This is pretty brilliant. Did you just make this up or it a real thing?

I made it up: https://twitter.com/petrustheron/status/1168438193752031233?...
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