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Troubles with the AWS web console

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Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#41

Post by scarface74 »

m0xte wrote: post #33
drchewbacca wrote: post #4

I hate AWS so much. I spent 3 hours trying to get a bucket to host a static single page of html and failed completely. I use amazon polly. I wanted to know how many characters I was using each month. I spent 2 hours searching through hundreds of pages and literally couldn't find that information. I thought of trying to start a little text to speech service for dyslexics to make it easy to use Polly but one of the mai…

For me that isn't the problem. It's mapping the several-thousand acronym riddled hairballs into reality. The reality matches no other reality which means the knowledge is probably useless in 20 years time, much as the knowledge I had of proprietary stuff then is useless now. My head has only a certain amount of space and motivation for ephemeral complexity hairballs like AWS. At this point I have to wonder if this is…

Being in technology means constant learning. My knowledge of the intricacies of the 65C02 in the 80s, working with DEC VAX and Stratus VOS in the 90s, knowing MFC and DCOM in the 2000s, etc all useless.

When I started learning AWS, it was quite simple mapping what I’ve done for over 20 years on prem from both a development and networking perspective.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#42

Post by Legogris »

slovenlyrobot wrote: post #35
Legogris wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I have the complete opposite experience. Monitoring, metrics graphs and logs are just miles ahead in Google IMO. It's so much easier for getting visibility. Do you really prefer Cloudwatch to Stackdriver? How about having a Lambda being triggered both on SNS messages and HTTP requests (setting up a proxy) and having that Lambda deployed with a CD pipeline - compared to doing the same with Cloud Functions? But I…

A series of loaded questions does not convince anyone :) With large accounts all of these tools start to break down, by that point it's much easier to work from the command line than, say, navigating GCloud's single global view of VMs which becomes actively harmful in this case. I run 1500 instance load tests on GCloud quite regularly, so this is not some imaginary problem, and genuinely large accounts can easily gro…

I was actually genuinely curious, I guess ^^

Oh yeah, the inconsistency in which links open in new tabs by default and which you can ctrl-click and not is a bit frustrating in GCP for sure.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#44

Post by adreamingsoul »

These comments are fascinating to me.

I was responsible for designing, leading, and building the frontend for an AWS service. One of the challenges was with obtaining useful feedback from a diverse range of people. During the product definition phase, the majority of the feedback, input, and feature priority was for customers who were planning to dedicate a large budget towards using said service. I often felt that stakeholder decisions sacrified usability for feasibility.

Regardless, it was the responsibility of my service team to seek and obtain feedback, input, and data points that could help us inform our decisions. But from what I witnessed, it only went as far as to validate our exisiting concepts and user personas of how people use AWS services. Going beyond that was seen as unnecessary.

The universal thinking within AWS is that people will ultimately use the API/CLI/SDK. So, investment into the console is on a case by case basis. Some services have dedicated engineers or teams to focus on the console, but most don’t.

I’m proud of what I built. I hope that my UI decisions and focus on usability are benefiting the customers of that service that I helped build.

A little known fact, in the AWS console exists a feedback tool (look in the footer) that will send feedback straight to the service team. I encourage you to submit your thoughts, ideas, and feedback through that tool. There are people and service teams who value that feedback.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#45

Post by underwater »

The example I ran I to the other day was so typical of AWS. I was trying to set a monthly budget for my account but the "Continue" button was greyed out. After staring at every field for a long, long time (and attempting to undisable the button through the dev tools) I realised that the value of "80" in the percent usage trigger field was not in fact a pre-populated value, but a value in the "placeholder" field. I needed to manually enter a value (and chose to enter "80").

This is not just bad UX, this is the territory of never even bothering to sit down with someone to see how they might use the product. Amazon love to tout their focus on the customer and amazing leadership principles, but they sure produce some mediocre experiences.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#46

Post by scarface74 »

adreamingsoul wrote: post #44

These comments are fascinating to me. I was responsible for designing, leading, and building the frontend for an AWS service. One of the challenges was with obtaining useful feedback from a diverse range of people. During the product definition phase, the majority of the feedback, input, and feature priority was for customers who were planning to dedicate a large budget towards using said service. I often felt that s…

The only part of the console that I absolutely hate is dealing with the Parameter Store. But I hate everything else about the parameter store too so there is that.

CodePipeline is pretty bad too. There is no way you can create a cross account code pipeline from the console.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#47

Post by notimetorelax »

adreamingsoul wrote: post #44

These comments are fascinating to me. I was responsible for designing, leading, and building the frontend for an AWS service. One of the challenges was with obtaining useful feedback from a diverse range of people. During the product definition phase, the majority of the feedback, input, and feature priority was for customers who were planning to dedicate a large budget towards using said service. I often felt that s…

Can you address user complaints about resets to the root view and non functioning sorting?

Both seem to be bugs and single user report should be sufficient to identify and fix the issue. I think you make it look more complicated than it is.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#48

Post by zabhi »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #40
RonaldSchleifer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting you mention the shopping site. I have found their site horrible ever since the beginning and only marginally better since done of their belabored efforts to polish some things. I feel like both WAS and the shopping UI/UX are dependent on an overarching common effect; your willingness to suffer in order to get the hit of addiction. On the shopping site it’s the relative speed and gratification of the…

I'm curious, could you point me at a shop that has a better UI? So far, all the other online shops I used so far (and that have a varied set of items) were either on par or much worse. Most of them were bog slow, search didn't work as expected, or some other aspect failed to work properly. Those that were on par were for specialised products.

You can check https://www.flipkart.com/ or https://www.myntra.com/. Both belong the the same group. They are fast to load and feel very lite, in spite of being very client heavy.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#50

Post by llimllib »

nickjj wrote: post #26

On the other hand, their CLI tool is very good. I wrote some video training material 3 years ago that goes over setting up an ECS cluster and I decided to use the CLI for just about everything. We interact with a number of resources (S3, load balancers, EC2, ECS, ECR, RDS, Elasticache, etc.) and other than a single flag to login to ECR it all works the same today. I'm happy I chose not to use the web console. The onl…

Their CLI manages to completely lock up my up to date MacBook Pro when simply downloading files and has very strange and conflicting choices of parameters. It is comprehensive, but I wouldn’t call it good
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