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Troubles with the AWS web console

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Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#211

Post by Terretta »

cthalupa wrote: post #199
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…

>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 uti…

> 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

Careful, it's not yet 100% possible to do this 100% securely today across all endpoints for all services. Getting closer though.

> This also sounds pretty crazy to me. It's not a situation I've ever spoken to anyone in...

This would seem to disqualify much of your comment. Have a chat with AWS Pro Serv members handling accounts of companies with billion dollar IT budgets.

> I work pretty extensively with enterprise companies that are on AWS...

Most enterprises are not on AWS. That's where the growth will be, and who my comment is about.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#213

Post by freehunter »

oscarwao wrote: post #184
jayd16 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's cloud put a CLI in the web console. Its hilariously ironic but it solves for this, I suppose.

So did AWS. See https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/ Not just a shell but a robust IDE in the cloud.

Cloud9 is amazing but it is not anything like a shell for use with the AWS API. It’s, like you said, a robust IDE. Not a terminal emulator.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#214

Post by jasonlotito »

rolltiide wrote: post #181
nostrebored wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has a steep learning curve. Every time something new roles out and AWS doesn't have a button for that one thing, your static site trying to follow the best practices now needs to know this and have python package managers installed and updated. I would say it is a legitimate complaint, it is a horrible user experience amongst people who aren't even considering what other people would think of it.

> It has a steep learning curve.

I mean, I guess if you are new to AWS entirely. I find the documentation for most things accessible and easy. For the things I want more information on or I'm not clear, support is fairly quick to help and point to the documentation. Most of the time it's the documentation I skipped because I assumed I knew it.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#215

Post by freehunter »

scarface74 wrote: post #207
com2kid wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“Millions of people use AWS” you say in a thread where people are complaining about AWS’s poor usability linked to a comment thread on another site where even more people are complaining about AWS’s usability.

The biggest and best rebuttal against your comment is the mere existence of every other comment in both of these threads.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#216

Post by freehunter »

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?

Not to mention they have two products named EBS: Elastic Beanstalk and Elastic Block Storage. Makes work conversations real fun.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#217

Post by scarface74 »

freehunter wrote: post #215
scarface74 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“Millions of people use AWS” you say in a thread where people are complaining about AWS’s poor usability linked to a comment thread on another site where even more people are complaining about AWS’s usability. The biggest and best rebuttal against your comment is the mere existence of every other comment in both of these threads.

Yes because an HN thread with 236 comments including people who know what they are doing is representative of anything.

Would it also be proof that React is an unusable framework just because I haven’t taken time to learn it even though millions of people use it everyday?

You can find “rebuttals” about the safety of vaccines on the Internet. Does that mean anything?

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#218

Post by sakopov »

I jokingly say that Amazon should have a couple of sessions at re:Invent where they talk about the things they fixed in Console. I generally find that I no longer mind most AWS UI quirks, but some things are really annoying like the broken Parameter Store search which has been broken for years or CloudWatch search which flat out doesn't work at times.

I really believe there is a business opportunity here. I think you could pick a general use-case for AWS, like serverless, and build an intuitive UI around AWS offerings typically utilized by the serverless stack.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#219

Post by whoisjuan »

robbyt wrote: post #151
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 righ…

It's definitely not a single team in charge of the UX. UX is a centralized department but each team can get UX Managers, UX Designers, and UX Researchers. The headcount for those roles come from each individual organization.

Nowadays there's a workflow to ship new consoles and big features that require UI changes but there are still many consoles built on the legacy design system and designing or improving those is pretty hard. The right decision is to migrate those consoles to the design system but that is a painful process.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#220

Post by cthalupa »

Terretta wrote: post #211
cthalupa wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 uti…

> 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 Careful, it's not yet 100% possible to do this 100% securely today across all endpoints for all services. Getting closer though. > This also sounds pretty crazy to me. It's not a situation I've ever spoken to anyone in... This would seem to disqualify much of…

>This would seem to disqualify much of your comment. Have a chat with AWS Pro Serv members handling accounts of companies with billion dollar IT budgets.

I work with companies that have budgets that large. Your situation still sounds very atypical to me.

>Most enterprises are not on AWS. That's where the growth will be, and who my comment is about.

I mean, maybe if you take that out of context and ignore the part where I say 'Lots of these companies are ones that I am helping move to AWS'...

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