Every single complaint has a simple fix: “just use EC2”
I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
331–340 of 684 posts
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#332Like OP, I was an AWS booster for many years (also a Heroku lover), but fell out of love about 10 years ago for the same reasons.
- It felt like far too much complexity just to do simple things.
- The obvious attempts to trap customers with slightly incompatible, higher level services felt gross
- The inability to run AWS trash on a dev machine had a MASSIVE hit on productivity
- Pricing didn't fall as fast as I felt it should (an obviously debatable position that reasonable, smart folks disagree with)
In my current company, we've been running basic SMB/tech startup functions on-prem (ACK! THE HORROR!) from ~6 basic computers (4 game machines and 2 nucs) for a few years now.
We just reconstituted the entire infra working part-time over about 2 weeks using Claude code and ansible.
It really doesn't make sense in this world to pay tens of thousands of dollars to rent a level of computation that can be purchased and managed for a tiny fraction of that money.
We're also seeing massive dividends paying out with this architecture because we have self-hosted gitea, along with a local workstation for our agents to run in, and now our agents have all of the context without us relying on Github or ingress/egress fees at all.
[edited for formatting only]
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#333Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#334Years 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…
if you see the signs of an abusive relationship, you have the option to walk out, and you don't, all that follows is your own fault. This is needlessly victim blaming and reductive. You're ignoring the dynamics of a relationship and how victims of abuse are often financially dependent on their abuser.
> [if] you have the option to walk out, and you don’t
Ignores nothing, and blames no victim.
It advises people to avoid becoming one when possible.
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#335This title sounds like an employment experience post: "returned to" and "left" both pretty strongly insinuate joining AWS and leaving employment, not simply using it as a customer.
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#336These arguments against AWS are boring. 99% of the negative comments are along the line of "so i have a dead simple product, I dont know anything about AWS, I logged in and it was super complicated and it seemed pricey". Well guess what, if you have a CRUD website and 100 users you're just not the target. Move on. Some days ago I wanted to sketch a 3D model of my TV remote. I opened blender and what a mess of complic…
Maybe but that doesn't mean that the AWS console isn't a royal mess.
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#337Earlier 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…
Personally I think the UI flow is geared towards the idea that engineers don't really see the costs, they just build stuff and then management pays at the end of the month. Often I see something that's supposed to be leaner - like Fargate is leaner than renting a whole server to run docker, right? So it's cheaper as well? - Well, no. Also if you reach any appreciable level of complexity, you should move to IaC - conf…
A core part of an engineers job is including thinking about cost in what they do.
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#338These arguments against AWS are boring. 99% of the negative comments are along the line of "so i have a dead simple product, I dont know anything about AWS, I logged in and it was super complicated and it seemed pricey". Well guess what, if you have a CRUD website and 100 users you're just not the target. Move on. Some days ago I wanted to sketch a 3D model of my TV remote. I opened blender and what a mess of complic…
I agree, this is a common story and your point stands for some significant percentage of the complaints.
It should be made clear though, that some of us helped spend many millions in obviously wasteful on-prem infra in the nineties, bought into AWS wholeheartedly when it came out, fought through the ignorance, developed the ability to deliver highly scaled applications on the platform over many years and at least some of us still carry those same beliefs:
- It's more complicated than it needs to be
- It's more expensive than it should be
- Pricing is more opaque than it should be
Meanwhile, the cost of other options (including self-managed, on-prem infra) has fallen massively since those early days of AWS.
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
t4g.nano is $3/m; a similar spec-ed fargate on ecs (just any docker container) is $10/m
This sentence beautifully encapsulates my point. I know that this is just ordinary jargon, but wow that's a lot all at once. And it does seem like something I need to know before I start.
sure but on the flip side - when I signed up for vercel I had literally no idea what was going on. It just said "do you want to start a blog? here are 1000 templaptes"
Re: I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The cost to run these for me is less than the cost of the cheapest vps (my total requests per month stay under the free tier limit). I don't think this is a valid argument. Free-tier VPS do exist also. On the other hand, if you don't trust unattended-upgrades [0], and prefer to spend time poking package manager manually (while at the same time considering that time an expense) - sure, that's a strong argument in fa…
I do not trust a free-tier VPS with my data.
How is trust model different with lambdas?