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AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong

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Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong

#271

Post by gigatexal »

hnlmorg wrote: post #220
gigatexal wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it’s just terrible. If Amazon knew what was good they’d just replace it with almost anything else. Heck just got all in on terraform and call it a day.

They do contribute to the AWS provider for Terraform. Also that have CDK which is a framework for writing IaC in Java/TypeScript, Go, Python, etc.

Meh. The CDK doesn’t look terrible. It’s still not ideal. But even if this compiles to a mess of CF it’s still better than writing CF by hand and that’s only because CF is so bad to begin with.

https://dev.to/kelvinskell/getting-started-with-aws-cdk-in-p...

Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong

#272

Post by sklarsa »

regularfry wrote: post #96
general1726 wrote: post #72

I think there is more of us who kind of degenerated from doing it the AWS way - API Gateway, serverless lambdas mess around with IAM roles until it works, ... - to - Give me EC2 / LightSail VPS instance maybe an S3 bucket let's set domain through Route53 and go away with the rest of your orchestrion AWS.

Honestly just having to manage IAM is such a time-suck that the way I've explained it to people is that we've traded the time we used to spend administering systems for time spent just managing permissions, and IAM is so obtuse that it comes out as a net loss. There's a sweet spot somewhere in between raw VPSes and insanely detailed least-privilege serverless setups that I'm trying to revert to. Fargate isn't unmanag…

Usually I write some IaC to automate this tedium so I only have to go through the IAM setup pain once. Now if requirements change, that's an entirely different story...

Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong

#273

Post by elcritch »

jiggawatts wrote: post #242
awongh wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I use LLMs for. To just read the docs for me and pull out the base level demo code that's buried in all the AWS documentation. Once I have that I can also ask it for the custom tweaks I need.

Back when GPT4 was the new hotness, I dumped the markdown text from the Azure documentation GitHub repo into a vector index and wrapped a chatbot around it. That way, I got answers based on the latest documentation instead of a year-old LLM model's fuzzy memory. I now have the daunting challenge of deploying an Azure Kubernetes cluster with... shudder ... Windows Server containers on top. There's a mile-long list of…

I just want a service that does this. Pulls in the latest docs into a vector db with a chat or front-end. Not the windows containers bit.

Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong

#274

Post by count »

mdaniel wrote: post #199
count wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TAMs are super hit and miss. We’ve had great ones (hi Nick!) and not so great ones. ($7-10M/mo customer AWS spend, support is a complicated sliding scale % of that, gogo ES!). Non-ES at smaller customers has been universally useless, except at quota increases.

If you're pushing 10 mil per month through AWS, I pray you have some bitcoin miners hidden in that spend. The mind reels

Multiple large scale SAP S4/HANA workloads wasting electrons…

Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong

#275

Post by austinshea »

mdaniel wrote: post #260
austinshea wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most work isn’t greenfield. AWS can be used in a different, cost effective, way. It can be used as a middle-ground capable of serving the existing business, while building towards a cloud agnostic future. The good AWS services (s3, ec2, acm, ssm, r53, RDS, metadata, IAM, and E/A/NLBs) are actually good, even if they are a concern in terms of tracking their billing changes. If you architect with these primitives, you…

Of that list, watch out since IAM != IAM != IAM, so "cloud agnostic" is that famous 80/20 split

Some stuff is going to be provider-specific.

Let me explain why we’re not talking about an 80/20 split.

There’s no reason to treat something like a route53 record, or security group rule, in the same way that you treat the creation of IAM Policies/Roles and their associated attachments.

If you create a common interface for your engineers/auditors, using real primitives like the idea of a firewall rule, you’ve made it easy for everyone to avoid learning the idiosyncrasies of each deployment target, and feel empowered to write their own merge requests, or review the intended state of a given deployment target.

If you need to do something provider-specific, make a provider-specific module.

Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong

#276

Post by lysace »

count wrote: post #274
mdaniel wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're pushing 10 mil per month through AWS, I pray you have some bitcoin miners hidden in that spend. The mind reels

Multiple large scale SAP S4/HANA workloads wasting electrons…

At this scale it may make sense to run your own mini data centers?

Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong

#277

Post by danudey »

philistine wrote: post #157
danudey wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most likely explanation is that they used a tape robot, such as the one seen here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/12um0ga/the_ro... Which is basically exactly what you described but the picker is a robot. Data requests go into a queue; when your request comes up, the robot looks up the data you requested, finds the tape and the offset, fetches the tape and inserts it into the drive, fast-forwards i…

I've read very definitive discussions on here that Glacier never used tape. It has always been powered off hard disks.

That's... interesting. I wonder what the wear-and-tear on an HDD is to spin it up/power it back down again.

Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong

#279

Post by buzzdenver »

indigodaddy wrote: post #262
viccis wrote: post #100

>In EC2, you can now change security groups and IAM roles without shutting the instance down to do it. Hasn't it been this way for many years? >Spot instances used to be much more of a bidding war / marketplace. Yeah because there's no bidding any more at all, which is great because you don't get those super high spikes as availability drops and only the ones who bid super high to ensure they wouldn't be priced out a…

Re: SG, yeah I wasnt doing any cloud stuff when that was the case. Never had to restart anything for an SG change and this must be at least 5-6 years..

IAM Role change is more recent though

Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong

#280

Post by Inufu »

viccis wrote: post #100

>In EC2, you can now change security groups and IAM roles without shutting the instance down to do it. Hasn't it been this way for many years? >Spot instances used to be much more of a bidding war / marketplace. Yeah because there's no bidding any more at all, which is great because you don't get those super high spikes as availability drops and only the ones who bid super high to ensure they wouldn't be priced out a…

> You don’t have to randomize the first part of your object keys to ensure they get spread around and avoid hotspots.

Sorry, this is absolutely still the case if you want to scale throughput beyond the few thousand IOPS a single shard can serve. S3 will automatically reshard your key space, but if your keys are sequential (eg leading timestamp) all your writes will still hit the same shard.

Source: direct conversations with AWS teams.

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