Troubles with the AWS web console • Hacker News Board

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#191

Post by vagab0nd » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 9:34 PM UTC

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.

Just curious, where and how would one get credits in their AWS account?

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#192

Post by jrockway » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

abledon wrote: post #84

RonaldSchleifer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amazon aggressively A/B tests their shopping site -- if the UI was suboptimal, they wouldnt be showing it that way. so much information is crammed into one page. look at most sites in asia and it will be similar. It seems to me that your complaints _are_ what lots of other people actually want to see, (someone saying: yes amazon, please DO show me 20 variations on lightbulbs after i just bought some because Im a shop…

I think A/B testing requires A or B to actually be good. Imagine a data-driven restaurant that uses A/B testing to determine what customers want to eat. A is cockroaches. B is tarantulas. The data says that more customers prefer tarantulas! But they still go out of business because the steak next door is much better than either option.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#193

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 9:43 PM UTC

ken wrote: post #165

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…

[deleted]

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#194

Post by sakisv » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 9:43 PM UTC

ken wrote: post #165

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…

> 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.

As a personal anecdote, my first interaction with AWS was to try and adjust the size of some elasticsearch disks. Not knowing better I tried to do it through the UI, only to find some crazy inconsistencies were the tooltip would say to type any size between 5 and 50 GB while the current value was 100GB. Even if you clicked "apply" with the current value of 100 you'd get an error message. I tried different browsers and it seemed to be a browser-specific issue.

After that I delved into the terraform that was used to provision all our AWS resources and I haven't looked back since. Apart from the obvious benefits of keeping your infrastructure as code and automation etc, terraform actually helped me understand how all the different services we had worked together and allowed me to get a grasp of our infrastructure layout quicker.

I would seriously discourage anyone from using the console for anything other than searching logs or managing DNS records (terraform is a bit flaky on that regard)

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#195

Post by ptomato » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 10:06 PM UTC

llimllib wrote: post #177

acdha wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 profi…

so 200 megabytes/second? I'm not sure what your definition of large files is, but hashing anything sizable with SHA1 is trivially CPU-bound with any modern SSD, in the absence of a processor with the sha asm extensions.

that being said, quick glance at the source suggests that awscli's s3 sync only compares files by size & timestamp, not etag, so it's not hashing anything client-side.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#196

Post by guilded » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 10:25 PM UTC

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,…

Created an account to say how much I love this. I'm all for learning your stack well enough for confusing situations but you expect better from AWS.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#197

Post by captn3m0 » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 10:58 PM UTC

Surprised nobody has mentioned AWS's official (but no longer updated) GUI client: ElasticWolf[0]. It is very much not-maintained but it does have some benefits.

My understanding is that AWS hasn't officially closed it because of US-Gov accessibility guidelines.

Are there any other similar clients?

[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/tools/aws-elasticwolf-client-console/

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#198

Post by Waterluvian » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 11:24 PM UTC

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…

Purely from speculation: AWS console looks and feels like it was designed and built by a ton of different teams that did a poor job working with and empowering each other. When services intermingle the console gets really confusing. Like "why am I in EC2? I'm making security groups and have zero EC2 systems."

Any truth to this sense I get?

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#199

Post by cthalupa » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 12:27 AM UTC

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…

>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 API calls from a command line.

I work pretty extensively with enterprise companies that are on AWS, and most make significant use of the APIs and command line. Lots of these companies are ones that I am helping move to AWS, and their teams are frequently excited at being able to utilize the command line and API as much as possible.

>We don’t know how, because two decades of IT practices and security practices made sure we couldn’t make API calls from a command line. (No access to install CLI tools, no proxy, firewall rules from the S3 era still classify AWS as cloud storage and block it, etc.) 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’.

This also sounds pretty crazy to me. It's not a situation I've ever spoken to anyone in, and quite frankly: If your security and networking teams are unable to figure out how to open access to API endpoints that are all documented, you need new people on those teams. It's also certainly possible to proxy the API and command line calls to these endpoints, as well.

>So to anyone following along from a team with two pizzas: invest in the UI, but please nail the APIs first, and then use those from the console. Keep yourselves honest to the Bezos imperative from 15 years back: if you want it in the console, so do IaC developers, so let there be an API for that

I 100% agree with this, though. I want APIs for everything, but a lot of people like the console for discoverability and gaining familiarity - not everyone can grok what something is from reading the API documentation as they can from poking at it with the console, even if they ultimately do end up managing it elsewhere. Build great APIs, build a great console on top of those APIs, and everyone is better off for it.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#200

Post by cthalupa » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 12:38 AM UTC

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.

>but I'm not aware of any service that has functionality solely offered in the console

Historically, there have been some big ones, including some features related to pretty core services - I am fairly sure some autoscaling related features were console only for some time before an API was added. Instance limits were a console only feature for a year or so before DescribeEC2InstanceLimits was a thing.

It's not just historic examples, either.

Basically all of Quicksight outside of group/user management lacks an API today. Which is particularly annoying for some of my use cases, since the more technical folks generally will use Athena directly, and the people that want to use quicksight to examine the data are the ones that are less technical, which means needing other people to go and manually configure data sources, setup refresh schedules, etc. I'd love to be able to shove all of that into cloudformation and do it programmatically, but since it lacks APIs to begin with, I can't do it in cloudformation even as a custom resource via lambda.