Troubles with the AWS web console • Hacker News Board

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#201

Post by cthalupa » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 12:42 AM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #198

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?

>Like "why am I in EC2? I'm making security groups and have zero EC2 systems."

Security Groups were initially an EC2 only concept. You couldn't write security groups for SQS or S3, and they came about alongside EC2.

Obviously EC2 is no longer the only service that utilize security groups, but it's an artifact of when they were.

(I'm not saying this is how it should be, just answering the 'why' part of the question ;))

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#202

Post by cthalupa » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 12:45 AM UTC

taude wrote: post #143

camtarn wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree, at 2.4M/year, i'm surprised you don't get more. we spend about 150k/month on Azure services, and it seems like we get a lot more service and roadmap influence....

In my experience a lot of it comes down to how effective their account team is. A good one will communicate with and work to influence the product management at AWS and set up meetings to discuss things as necessary. A bad one can get feedback from the customers they are assigned to and never do anything with it, or send off an email and never follow up.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#203

Post by com2kid » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 12:48 AM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #163

throwawaywego wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gree…

Because people have to learn somehow?

Building my startup on Google Cloud, I knew nothing about cloud services, and I had none of these issues.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#204

Post by cthalupa » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 12:50 AM UTC

shepardrtc wrote: post #187

scarface74 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cre…

We've hit the throttling issue many, many times. Everything about Parameter Store is difficult. And its a shame. Its such a simple concept. They have enormous resources, so why not throw a couple of devs at it? In any case, we do also use redis. It might be worthwhile to pitch an idea to move over to that. But we pull the parameters in bash scripts using a custom tool called aws-env, so we'd probably have to make or…

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide...

I believe this is a new(ish?) feature, but someone from AWS Support recently pointed it out to me when dealing with throttling issues. Might be of interest to you.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#205

Post by cthalupa » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 1:03 AM UTC

omni wrote: post #182

kristianpaul wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that nothing stops you from using aws apis and making you own UI right?

In many cases AWS's absurd rate limits would make it hard to build a functional UI even if we wanted to. I imagine this is one major reason why list views and filtering/searching them is a disaster in every major AWS service.

If you're building your own management tools, I'd probably suggest persisting the data in your own system as well, rather than constantly hitting the AWS APIs. 10 users going to your tool to look at EC2 instances at the same moment don't need 10 different calls to AWS. Have your management tool query the API once, and persist the data for a period of time. It all being json responses makes this a fairly reasonable and easy use case for mongodb or postgres.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#206

Post by cthalupa » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 1:06 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #192

abledon wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

This is where your analogy sort of falls apart. Amazon seems to be doing the opposite of going out of business to the steakhouse next door.

You can of course get good results out of a bad process, but this is usually not something that happens in a sustained manner over such a long period of time. Processes that result in positive effects for periods of years or decades are generally sound.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#207

Post by scarface74 » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 1:30 AM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #203

scarface74 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gree…

Because people have to learn somehow? Building my startup on Google Cloud, I knew nothing about cloud services, and I had none of these issues.

Yes you have to learn but I wouldn’t be learning when something was mission critical.

Literally millions of people use AWS everyday. So what’s more likely that the issue is with AWS or the implementer?

It took me watching one Pluralsight video to map what I knew about an on prem implementation to AWS. Of course I learned more as I went along.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#208

Post by scarface74 » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 1:34 AM UTC

cthalupa wrote: post #204

shepardrtc wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've hit the throttling issue many, many times. Everything about Parameter Store is difficult. And its a shame. Its such a simple concept. They have enormous resources, so why not throw a couple of devs at it? In any case, we do also use redis. It might be worthwhile to pitch an idea to move over to that. But we pull the parameters in bash scripts using a custom tool called aws-env, so we'd probably have to make or…

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide... I believe this is a new(ish?) feature, but someone from AWS Support recently pointed it out to me when dealing with throttling issues. Might be of interest to you.

Yeah it’s relatively new. It just became available in April.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/04/aws_syste...

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#209

Post by lostmyoldone » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 1:43 AM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #75

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree. After using AWS & GCP, I find AWS “stays out of my way” much much better and has much better documentation. There are weird corners of GCP, like GCS “interop” mode and lack of full compatibility with S3 APIs that feel basically like Google is using dark patterns. AWS is head & shoulders the better cloud provider. Google is just cheaper.

I love when AWS console stays out of my way so much that I have to pick through its backend HTTP requests in the browser developer tools to figure out why it isn't working even though the UI shows no errors or perhaps even reports success. This is a regular occurrence. My absolute favorite is when AWS console stays out of my way in a particular manner that hides expensive resources, with bugs in the per-resource cons…

Yeah, or when you try to open an account get stuck in limbo where you can't really access anything in the console, and suddenly you start getting bills for those Jungle Disk disk S3 buckets you forgot about years ago!

Somehow my new AWS account got linked back to those old S3 buckets, and something went terribly wrong. I really need to try to get that fixed somehow, while it's only $7 or so a month, it is still $7 for exactly nothing. Since I to my knowt haven't had an account for the better part of a decade, I was quite surprised that it was actually still retaining those backup buckets, but also that I started getting bills for the bucket. I believe the terms when JD was liquidated was that the buckets would remain, but be free of charge. Well, they were free until I created a new account.

Last time I tried to shut them down I think I actually managed to set up CLI access, but then I got sidetracked by actual work. First time I tried, AWS wouldn't - figuratively - even show me the time, so getting CLI access wasn't even possible.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#210

Post by lostmyoldone » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 1:57 AM UTC

KaiserPro wrote: post #78

I know many people will disagree, but I really miss the VMware fat windows client. (vsphere 5, before they ruined it with the weird flash hybrid that didn't work properly) That, was a paragon of design reliability and speed compared to the AWS console. What annoys me the most is the sheer weight of each page. If you have to context change, its multiple seconds before the page is useable. A classic example is lambda.…

When I was messing with CF, AWS, and the kitchen sink to make sure I could track/retrieve the state of every single resource we used, I came across the JSON equivalent of Cthulhu. It had JSON as a string in a JSON attribute, recursively 2 to 4 times. I don't recall exactly. Sat there laughing, and cursing, as one might when you stare down into the purest of horrors ...