When are we gonna start hearing the same stories about Anthropic/Openai/etc? The whole AI thing kinda smells like the early days of AWS: everyone was getting onboarded, but later realized they'd built up a pretty big dependency that's not easy to shake
I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
281–290 of 684 posts
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#282Why 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…
> they said they must show they are on Hyperscaling cloud.
This is the main reason; and it applies to developers (they need cloud buzzwords on their resume), it applies to managers (who in turn hire only those with said buzzwords) and it applies to company execs/CTOs who can brag about the complex (self-inflicted) problems their company is solving at the next cloud provider conference, so they can justify yet another VC round.
Run this for over a decade, and you'll end up in a situation where an entire generation of "engineers" is no longer capable of configuring a Linux box to serve some basic webapp and will make up whatever reasons to avoid even attempting to do so.
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#283Years 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…
I agree with you at some degree, but I would like to point out that AWS pricing is much more complicated that you can calculate how much will you pay from a static number showing up on the UI. If it bothers you that you need to open two tabs for cross-checking the costs, you may want to avoid every cloud provider, not just AWS. Once you have NAT gateways, CloudFront, S3, auto scaling, loadbalancers, etc, calculating…
>If it bothers you that you need to open two tabs for cross-checking the costs, you may want to avoid every cloud provider, not just AWS.
On Google cloud compute, the ui shows an updated 'cost' as you start building your machine.
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure I understand. AWS has detailed pricing information for each service. I’ve never felt surprised by pricing. Cost has been surprising, but that happens when usage is surprising in my experience.
In completely unrelated pages to where you setup resources, yes. Ec2 pricing is in a random doc disconnected from the AWS console. They absolutely could to you a base price on the ec2 setup page, but they don't. And I have been absolutely surprised by pricing. Services that do almost nothing could cost more than your ec2.
Not unrelated pages. All AWS pricing is and has been for a very long time posted on predictable pages alongside the service marketing and documentation. The console is the console. I, for one, don’t want to see pricing in the console or in cloudformation or CDK documentation — because if in one then in all, right?
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have a problem with their business model, then. License changes to a formerly open source project are costly. The community reacts very strongly when license terms change after they've come to depend on a product, and they should. Why do we apply this standard to MongoDB but not to Apache, Linux, Postgres, or MariaDB? One purpose of an open source license is to allow many providers to provide the service. As I'v…
Competition would mean Amazon creating their own software. Taking software others made and using your monopoly eco-system and scale to drive the original creator out of the game kills the product. Many support breaking up Amazon so others could compete not killing small entities and growing Amazon.
Original creator business model relies on extracting free labor from community. It backfired and they changed the license. They abuse contributors by betraying their trust and changing the license after AWS abused their business model. No good guys here.
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s negligent to not use 2FA for any cloud platform where credentials can be used to spin up resources.
I should have been more clear 2FA has been in place for years the phone requirement is new.
They use TOTP for 2FA (industry standard), which doesn't require a phone.
Their help page lists a bunch of 2FA app options, all of which run on phones, so it's understandable to think a phone is required. (I'm disappointed they don't list the app I use, which is Aegis Authenticator.)
But actually you can use any TOTP app, and they don't all need a phone. For example, macOS (desktop) has built-in TOTP 2FA as part of the password manager.
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> My point is that maybe it was intentional, but just bad UX culture. This may be valid, but even if it is someone (or a group of people) at Amazon are violating one of their core leadership principles - Customer Obsession https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-... A useful (and hopefully delightful) UX is key to showing customer obsession. That being said, I personally feel the UX at Amazon suck…
Just saying, you can be customer obsessed and still not have a good feel for UX...
Ask me how I know
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#288> AWS stomped on open source projects - despite the clear desire of projects like Elasticsearch, Redis, and MongoDB not to be cloned and monetized, AWS pushed ahead with OpenSearch, Valkey, and DocumentDB anyway, capturing the hosted-service money after those communities and companies had built the markets; the result was a wave of defensive licenses like SSPL, Elastic License, RSAL, and other source-available models…
You’re reading “cloned and monetized” as “forked.”
But in context, it means “cloned/downloaded and offered as a hosted service.”
The fork came later, after the defensive license, which was in response to the clone+monetized hosting, eg ElasticSearch.
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now explain why they don't have a killswitch for a user defined spending limit.
How many real applications actually want this behavior? AWS is not built around hobbyist needs. It’s built around being a platform to run most shapes of production use cases.
This has been a feature request since AWS was a thing.
>AWS is not built around hobbyist needs
Yes, as if no startup teams are tasked to remain within hard spending targets when they're trying to build a POC with technologies that they are not initially experts in.
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#290I always smile at posts like this. They're right and wrong at the same time. Systems should be "as simple as possible, but no simpler". And thinking that you can gloss over the detail is just going to create more hassle later on. IAM is just complex. I can't think of any implementation of "users, groups, roles, policies, identity providers, oidc" that is truly simple. I'm reminded of a guy I worked with, who fought a…
> fought against X adoption because it was "too complex", only to slowly reinvent X badly This is a surprisingly common pattern in technology and software. Some things are definitively the “standard” at this point yet so many people simply refuse to spend the time to properly learn them.
> This is a surprisingly common pattern in technology and software. Some things are definitively the “standard”
It is also a surprisingly common pattern to adopt very complicated solutions for applications that are never going to need them
ultimately it is not possible to come up with a "standard" that is an acceptable replacement for good judgement