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Troubles with the AWS web console

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Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#161

Post by scarface74 »

shepardrtc wrote: post #120
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 think that the vast majority of UI's in AWS are perfectly fine. But there's one that drives my entire team insane: the AWS Parameter Store Holy mother of god, the search on it is horrific and simply doesn't work. Heartfelt begging through the feedback tool goes unanswered. I have offered money, firstborn children, sacrificial goats, virtually everything. But the search is still broken :( I've had to scroll through…

Parameter Store is such a god awful experience via the UI. But everything about parameter store is awful.

- severe unchangeable, undocumented limits before you get throttled. Throttling is so bad that if you have too many parameter store resources in your CloudFormation template it will start causing errors because CF is trying to call the API too quickly - the only way around it is to use DependsOn and chain the creation.

- no way of creating an encrypted value with CF without a custom resource.

We ended up just using DynamoDB for config anda Custom CloudFormation resource to create values in it.

You should never depend on Parameter Store as a reliable key/value store for configuration.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#162

Post by __david__ »

Cpoll wrote: post #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…

IoT is one of those client side searches. And worse, it's an endless scrolling page, so to do the search proper you have to repeatedly scroll down until you've loaded all the data (20 or more pages on our infra), then scroll back to the top and search. It's so bad I don't even know what to say—it's like no one ever tried to use it.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#163

Post by scarface74 »

throwawaywego wrote: post #139
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…

Persona of a person wanting to study AWS for commercial projects at one of AWS's biggest clients: - Create account. Enter credit card details, but verification SMS never shows up. Ask for help. - I get called at night (I'm abroad) by an American service employee, we do verification over the phone. - Try to get the hang of things myself. Lost in a swamp of different UI's. Names of products don't clarify what they do,…

It seems like the real issue is that you wanted to create an entire business critical infrastructure on top of a technology that you didn’t know.

How was this a good idea? I’m horribly inexperienced with modern web development but I know the rest of the stack pretty well - backend, databases, AWS networking and most of their standard technologies, CI/CD etc. When I was responsible for setting up everything for a green field project, I pulled in someone who was much better than I was for the front end even though I could have muddled my way through. Why would I take the risk?

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#164

Post by nostrebored »

cloakandswagger wrote: post #113
Terretta wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most AWS services' console/API are 1-1. Occasionally a console might offer some convenience features which are just a combination of API calls, but I'm not aware of any service that has functionality solely offered in the console. As the original comment touched on, this would be really unusual in AWS where most attention goes to the APIs/SDKs which are what larger customers use.

Lots of features within Amazon Connect are console only.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#165

Post by ken »

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've had to use AWS in the past professionally. The general categories of problems I've seen with AWS are threefold:

1. Each individual service in AWS may be perfectly well designed, but there are now about 5000 services in AWS, which means there's 5000^2 possible interactions between services. Services interact in strange ways, and there's no visibility (and no documentation) into exactly how. You can write 5000 bug-free functions, but that doesn't mean you'll end up with a bug-free program.

2. The craftsmanship that goes into each element of the AWS console is poor. Controls don't work like I expect, and don't work like similar controls elsewhere. Error messages are terrible, or missing, and don't give any clue what is actually going on, or what secret AWS-specific trick I need to use to fix it. I've wasted hours of my life on those spinners because it's not even clear if an action will occur right away, in 30 seconds, or 30 minutes. What is one supposed to do when they click a button, wait a few minutes, go to lunch, and come back to see "at least one of the environment termination workflows failed"?

3. The documentation and support is lousy. I've asked a few questions on AWS's own forums, and never gotten any response at all. The above error message appears in exactly one forum post, and AWS finally got back to them after 2 weeks, and it was all done via PM so I learned nothing from it. I've used the 'Feedback' button, and when I get a reply, it feels like some combination of "it's your fault" and "you should have googled harder".

> designing, leading, and building the frontend for an AWS service

Designing the frontend for an AWS service doesn't help with the biggest problems. It's like designing a city by designing apartments and offices, with no thought given to roads or signs.

> The universal thinking within AWS is that people will ultimately use the API/CLI/SDK.

I can't understand this. If someone can't get the web console to work, they're not going to say "I know, I'll just write everything by hand with the API instead". The web console is essentially your landing page and your trial combined. Do all your "personas" consist of people who build for the web but never use the web? Or who try a service, and when they can't get it to work, they double down on it?

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#166

Post by nostrebored »

rolltiide wrote: post #116
lentil wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the AWS documentation nearly always covers both.

an outdated version of both. Here's a bunch of buttons! What do you mean you didn't install the CLI, discover your system has mixed up versions of the package manager, and finally get around to running this convoluted command, after you learn how to get a list of IDs from your organization with the CLI

The AWS cli is a simple pip install and the CLI documentation nearly universally includes samples. Input and output can be JSON. There are a lot of legitimate complaints about AWS but the CLI is pretty decent.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#167

Post by matchagaucho »

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…

My frustration is more commonly the opposite.

Adopt an AWS service through the console. Then discover advanced feature [X] can only be done from the CLI via APIs.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#169

Post by nostrebored »

camtarn wrote: post #121
nkozyra wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Amazon does have vendor and seller managers who are allocated to specific vendors/sellers. I'm surprised that for a $2.4M/year AWS customer (presumably with the highest support level) that they wouldn't have a similar setup. That said, having personal attention from a manager is definitely not the same as getting features actually built for you.

With the highest support level you do receive TAMs and Solutions Architects within AWS. They can add feature requests and make sure that influence is added for you and follow up directly with Product Managers to explain why a feature is important.

But, sometimes a high amount of spend on a service isn't really much more than the average. For instance, if you spend 200k/mo on a niche service then you'll get a ton of say in how things move forward, but if you spend 200k/mo on EC2 you might not be able to strongarm anything.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#170

Post by drchewbacca »

cloakandswagger wrote: post #128
drchewbacca wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this was a while ago and I fully admit it might have been me being stupid. However when I was doing it I don't think there was a "Use this bucket to host a website" button. Instead you had to give the bucket a special type of permissions which meant anyone could see the contents but no one could write to it. I kept following the guide as closely as I could but I couldn't get it to take.

Maybe it's been updated since then. This is the guide I followed: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/HostingWebsi...

Ok yeah I think it was changing the policy that access I couldn't get to work.

Again it may be that is super easy and I fucked up something obvious however I tried a lot of times a lot of different ways until I gave up in rage.

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