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I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

fourlightyears.blogspot.com

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Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#231

Post by temp8830 »

aurareturn wrote: post #157
aljgz wrote: post #49

Years ago, I joined a company, took over a dev team and was asked to launch the product in 3 months. They were using AWS, so I logged in the account to add a few more machines. Right there, in front of my eyes, were the signs of an adversarial, abusive relationship. The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs. I had to have the two…

Doesn't Amazon engineering culture have a very engineer-led product culture? Meaning, devs are often responsible for the UX and flow. I remember many years ago we hired a junior developer who just finished his internship at AWS and he showed me the dashboard he shipped all by himself in the summer with no product or designer help. It looked horrible. Some devs have a good product/UX sense but the vast majority are ho…

AWS UX isn't bad because engineers are bad at UX. It's because inside AWS it's every man for himself, and every team for itself. They don't collaborate, they don't talk, they compete to ship everything as quickly and cheaply as possible - quality, usability, and common sense be damned.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#232

Post by nijave »

faangguyindia wrote: post #8

Why do people even bother with cloud? I’ve a couple of apps doing a few million a day. I am using Hetzner and before that used DigitalOcean. Mind you, for close to a decade. People are unnecessarily complicating stuff, and these clouds can go very expensive very quickly. Recently, I came across a company and they were spending $20k a month on GCP. I am like, are you kidding me, $20K for the kind of stuff you do??? It…

It's fairly easy to setup services without worrying about pages.

I can stand something up on AWS in a couple hours and be fairly confident it will run reliably (assuming their service offering is actually decent--some suck)

We test backups and they never fail. Metrics and logs always work.

>People are unnecessarily complicating stuff, and these clouds can go very expensive very quickly.

I don't think that's the cloud vendors fault. They make it easy to stand up new services so people get overly enthusiastic and create convoluted architectures. Have Postgres but need full text search? OpenSearch is just a few clicks (well hopefully IaC config..) away, let's use that! When you're building yourself and need to setup the stack, instrument, monitor, configure backups the cost is high enough where you say "hey, maybe pg fts is fine for now"

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#234

Post by AdityaAnuragi »

causal wrote: post #133
djyde wrote: post #33

I've transitioned between cloud services and self-hosting a few times: 1. Vercel Phase My first project used Vercel. Since my project was Next.js, the experience was decent. But as my project gained some users, I found that even for projects under 100 users, I needed to pay $20 per month. Since my service didn't require high performance, this cost felt steep. 2. Self-host Phase (Hetzner + Coolify) Later, I started se…

Yeah Cloudflare offering has become everything I wanted from AWS. So much simpler to deploy a basic full stack app + files. AWS has become considerably more difficult than self hosting.

I agree, I'm starting to like cloudflare increasingly aswell

Here are a couple reasons of mine (PS I'm still a little new)

1) V8 isolates for serverless functions to address cold start problems, sure the entire node env ain't there but libraries like Hono are designed to work in that env... Combine that with their near immediate start-up - simple lovely

2) UI, AWS to me feels soulless, like if there's an entire industry to make AWS UI not suck it's obvious their UI is just bad, upto the point where people pay a premium for a good UI. Cloudflare UI is so much nicer, atleast to me

I recently developed a library and for that I made a landing page and documentation with Astro (no server just static stuff), and I was checking out how to deploy this and Vercel and Cloudflare, Vercel had a 100Gb/ month of bandwidth free which is nice, what's even nicer is cloudflare has infinite (practical infinite not the theoretical infinite ofcourse)

And once again, that's just lovely to work with!

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#236

Post by pdimitar »

sandruso wrote: post #124
rglover wrote: post #109

You can accomplish a lot by just having a basic knowledge of Linux sysadmin. I was clueless and then learned some systemd-and-curl-fu. Will never forget the "holy sh*t, this is deceptively simple" moment. A bit more research and I found that beyond convenience and specialty APIs, you really just don't need a lot of this stuff to run a healthy system (since reducing absolute cloud dependence, my reliability has gone t…

100%. I'm not really sure why we all agreed that deployment is somehow the hardest thing that you need to outsource when setting the linux server is one the richest experience you can get and it will pay dividents forever.

Stop with this "we" cliche already, please. I never agreed to it and I'm in the profession for 24 years. You don't speak for me.

Executives will always prefer to transfer liability and responsibility to someplace else.

Who's calling the shots in an organization? Engineers or executives?

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#237

Post by aorloff »

themgt wrote: post #47
chuckadams wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just spin up a raw VPS on EC2 or Lightsail, give it a public IP, and call it a day. You aren't required to implement every enterprise pattern in the book.

Congrats, your raw EC2-hosted 500MB WebGL experimental card game went to the HN Front Page! You now owe AWS $30k in egress costs.

Well this is the dream right ?

You build something, well enough that it can handle the traffic, and people come, and it does.

Welcome to the gaming industry

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#238

Post by nijave »

esseph wrote: post #200
goosejuice wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> spending $20k a month on GCP > burning money in cloud I suspect there's two reasons why this happens. One is just the disassociation with opex that seems ever present in the VC model. The other is that many startups settle in on a ops solution before hiring ops and the cost of switching isn't that attractive until they're faced with a dwindling runway and a down round.

> many startups settle in on a ops solution before hiring ops Sounds expensive

Not really. It's cheaper than hiring an IT admin and sysadmin for a while.

Those tend to be tricky hires on the small end since you tend to want jack-of-all-trades who either demands a premium salary or doesn't exist.

When you have 10 software engineers, having 1 dedicate 10-20% of their time is cheaper than hiring 1-2 FTEs that aren't writing code.

Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

#240

Post by znpy »

nijave wrote: post #226
znpy wrote: post #34

> Of course I do not pay for premium support, so I have to wait the 24 hours that they said it would take them to reply. It's 3 days and AWS support has not replied. The writing has been on the wall for a few years now, and this is particularly evident to those thar have worked at AWS: Amazon is in its day-2 era. Amazon being in its day-2 era means that most of what has been written in the past twenty years about Ama…

Imo AWS support is pretty decent compared to other vendors. Azure was by far the worst I've ever dealt with--engineers becoming adversarial and passing blame in tickets without actually resolving anything. I've had some run-ins with poor AWS support and have even gotten bill credits/refunds when they offered incorrect advice. It really depends on the service but in general they're fairly good.

> Imo AWS support is pretty decent compared to other vendors.

yep, that's the point.

it used to be stellar on its own, now it's only good when you compare it to other vendors.

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