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Troubles with the AWS web console

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Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#221

Post by com2kid »

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.

I had never done any back end work before.

In less than 2 hours I had auth'd https rest endpoints up and running with logging.

Deploying new endpoints is as easy as exporting a function in my code and typing deploy on the command line. This isn't after some sort of complex configuration, it is after creating a new project via 1 cli command that asks for the project name and not much else!

Google's cloud stuff, especially everything under the Firebase branding, is incredibly easy to use. Getting my serverless functions talking to my DB is almost automatic (couple lines of code).

Everything just works. The docs are wonky in places, but everything just works. The other day I threw in cloud storage, never done cloud storage before, had photo hosting working in about an hour, most of that being front end UI dev time. Everything fully end to end authenticated for editing and non-auth for reads, super easy to set that all up. No confusing service names, no need to glue stuff together, just call the API and tell it to start uploading. (Still need to add a progress indicator and a retry button...)

Everything about Google's cloud services has been like that so far. While I regret going no-sql, I can't fault the services for usability.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#222

Post by scarface74 »

com2kid wrote: post #221
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.

I had never done any back end work before. In less than 2 hours I had auth'd https rest endpoints up and running with logging. Deploying new endpoints is as easy as exporting a function in my code and typing deploy on the command line. This isn't after some sort of complex configuration, it is after creating a new project via 1 cli command that asks for the project name and not much else! Google's cloud stuff, especi…

And you could do the same thing with lambda/DynamoDB/API Gateway just as easily by using one of the wizards.

What you can do as a hobby project is much different than the parent poster who was trying to deploy an enterprise grade setup with an existing legacy infrastructure. How would you know if GCP is easy based on your limited experience? Not trying to sound harsh, as well as I know AWS, I would be completely loss trying to manage any non AWS infrastructure. Just like I said about the front end in my original response, if I were responsible for setting up a complicated on prem or colo infrastructure from scratch, I would hire someone.

“It’s a poor craftsmen who blames his tools”.

A guy that works with us was also an inexperienced back end developer except with PHP. He was able to easily figure out how to host his front end code with S3 and create lambdas in Node after I sent him a link to a $12 Udemy course. I only had to explain to him how to configure the security groups to connect to our Aurora/MySQL instance.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#223

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

ernsheong wrote: post #94
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #66

The only thing worse is the GCP web console.

Not sure how you came to this conclusion. GCP by far has the better UI, even AWS engineers acknowledge this.

I came to this conclusion after using GCP and AWS both for extended periods of time across multiple jobs, and just noticing that AWS solved my problems in a better way.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#224

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

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…

It sounds to me like you’re describing GCP, based on my experiences.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#225

Post by Aeolun »

nostrebored wrote: post #169
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.

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 s…

How about saying something like ‘for gods sake, make your UI experience consistent!’, would that work?

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#226

Post by nickthemagicman »

bob33 wrote: post #155
nickthemagicman wrote: post #146

There seems to be a huge need for a boto3/django(or something) user interface that you could run locally to interface with AWS.

You should give Commandeer https://getcommandeer.com a try. It is a Desktop UI just for this.

Thank you! This is amazing. I want to contribute to this!

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#227

Post by bob33 »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #226
bob33 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should give Commandeer https://getcommandeer.com a try. It is a Desktop UI just for this.

Thank you! This is amazing. I want to contribute to this!

So, the main app is not opensource. We are in Beta mode, but do plan on having it be paid for, but most likely, free for developers, but a charge for companies to use the teams aspect. The other part we are doing is that we are open sourcing the Terraform, Serverless, and other templates. We have a plan to then enable the usage of them within the app. So you could just apply a serverless template to your environment, and immediately be setup with let's say an SQS queue, tied to a lambda. That repo is located here https://github.com/commandeer/open . Happy to chat more about it, as we are very excited about this and are working day and night on it.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#228

Post by omni »

cthalupa wrote: post #205
omni wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

A management UI showing me stale data sounds like a terrible experience, honestly

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#229

Post by cthalupa »

omni wrote: post #228
cthalupa wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

A management UI showing me stale data sounds like a terrible experience, honestly

It works well enough for Netflix - https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/edda-learn-the-stories-o... - and Target ( https://tech.target.com/2017/04/07/how-and-why-we-moved-to-s... ) :). I've only ever used Edda as part of a Spinnaker setup, but there's no reason it couldn't be used with something else, or the same idea in general reused.

You don't have to cache it for very long, but you get two benefits here: Being able to query the data and search through it ways you simply can't do when making an API call to AWS, and having primarily only one system munching through your API throughput limits. If you've got a large account with a lot of resources and a lot of people or systems that are querying the API frequently, you'll probably have more consistently available data, rather than having systems sitting around doing retries and getting throttled there, on repeat.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#230

Post by cthalupa »

freehunter wrote: post #216
EMM_386 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I haven't used Beanstalk in forever, and don't think that it's particularly relevant compared to other alternatives available today, but last time I did, AWS support always abbreviated it to EB when I had to work with them on issues related to it.
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