Troubles with the AWS web console • Hacker News Board

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#171

Post by nostrebored » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 6:33 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #46

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…

The only part of the console that I absolutely hate is dealing with the Parameter Store. But I hate everything else about the parameter store too so there is that. CodePipeline is pretty bad too. There is no way you can create a cross account code pipeline from the console.

Cross account setups from the console are generally not allowed.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#172

Post by deanCommie » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 6:36 PM UTC

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…

Did you see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosti...

I'm of two minds about this.

On the one hand, the cloud is a meaningfully different abstraction from hosting locally, and figuring out how to do things effectively with it end to end without prior experience is a little bit like going from Windows to Linux, or back.

On the other hand, the use case you describe is one of the most basic, standard and well documented out there.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#173

Post by nostrebored » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 6:41 PM UTC

m0xte wrote: post #60

scarface74 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that hard? The CLI automatically does multi part uploads. It’s also simple with the various AWS SDKs.

It looks like it works but it's not reliable so your reliability concerns then get externalised into your application which multiplies complexity terribly.

What do you mean by it's not reliable?

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#174

Post by mattbillenstein » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 6:43 PM UTC

I use the web console fairly sparingly - iam, billing, browsing around s3 from time to time, etc. It's good enough - way better than it used to be, and better than the firefox extension that I started with.

This is probably not a popular way of doing it, but I write python to orchestrate the provisioning steps of a VM with specific roles, routes, etc in a VPC (with public/private subnets in multiple AZs) and then I use other tools for config-management and deploy.

I'm using few of AWS's services, it helps me do multi-cloud (another python script doing the same thing on another cloud), and it helps me keep my local dev environments in parity with production even on MacOS.

I do use S3 and route53 globally - they're simple enough to use using boto. IMO if infra is now code, you should probably write code to manage infra...

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#175

Post by miguelmota » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 6:52 PM UTC

AWS has great APIs and SDKs and most of the time I use AWS services through the command line and not so much though the web interface.

Even though AWS web interface has it's flaws, it's still 10 times better than Azure's web UI.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#176

Post by noneeeed » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

mdaniel wrote: post #99

noneeeed wrote: post #85

The three things that annoy me the most about the console: 1) state management/sync is frequently terrible. E.g you are looking at a page with some health indicator and a log view. The last entry in the log is some variation of "transitioned from busted to not busted", but the state indicator doesn't update until you refresh. 2) if you have multiple tabs open at a time (pretty common use case) there is a good chance…

> 2) if you have multiple tabs open at a time (pretty common use case) there is a good chance it will suddenly decide that you have to reload the page for some reason, often when you are in the middle of something I so strongly agree with that observation, and have repeatedly and often submitted feedback through their in-page feedback mechanism about please, I'm begging you, never involuntarily reload my page. That's…

It can be incredibly annoying when doing something like updating a cloudformation stack. I might open RDS in another tab to grab a snapshot ID or EC2 to check a sec group, and when I switch back to my half updated CF parameters the damn page forces a reload and loses the setting I've entered.

I can't work out what it is they are doing that nesessitates these reloads

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#177

Post by llimllib » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 6:59 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #135

llimllib wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing an ‘aws s3 sync ...’ on a directory with large files causes 100% CPU usage

How would you compare hashes without calculating them? Any operating system more advanced than Windows 95 shouldn’t “lock up” with a CPU-bound task.

An extremely naive program can sha1 hash 1 million 100 byte strings on my computer in less than half a second: https://gist.github.com/llimllib/72f60aa33b32e422962d876ddf0...

This is literally the first program I came up with, no attempt to optimize it at all.

There is zero chance that the AWS sync command is filling my CPU just by hashing bytes

edit: I'm going to try not to let you nerd snipe me into doing the profiling the AWS CLI needs to be doing, for them. Because that's now what I desire to do.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#178

Post by Trisell » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 7:00 PM UTC

I’ve been working at a company where I have had to fight with the infrastructure team because they see no reason why I would need programmatic cress to do anything on the cli or with the sdk. The reason why. They don’t use it so why would I?

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#179

Post by scarface74 » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

nostrebored wrote: post #173

m0xte wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like it works but it's not reliable so your reliability concerns then get externalised into your application which multiplies complexity terribly.

What do you mean by it's not reliable?

I’ve never had the experience myself, but I would assume he means you would have to build in some type of retry logic in your script.

Just from a cursory glance, I couldn’t find any samples of how to do a multipart upload with retries in Python with Boto3.

This is an example of how to do multipart uploads though.

https://medium.com/@niyazi_erd/aws-s3-multipart-upload-with-...

Fun Trivia note: when you do a multipart upload, the S3 hash of the object is not the same as it is when you do a single part upload. I had a file with the same contents but a different hash when I used Python than when it was transferred with the CLI or CloudBerry. The quick and dirty way to fix the hash is to copy the file to itself with Boto3.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#180

Post by noncoml » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 7:03 PM UTC

The problem with AWS teams in general is their arrogance. I dread having to deal with them. They are destroying Amazon’s reputation.

Don’t want to bother you with specific examples, but every interaction I had with them was dreadful.

I think this attitude gets reflected in their console design.