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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

#461

Post by cyberax »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #449
cyberax wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even setting up an ec2 instance, a really basic use case that has a fixed cost based on size, you have to go Google it and find their ec2 pricing table This is the "Comparison Table" from the EC2 launch wizard: https://imgur.com/a/YjFhkzb The pricing is right there, along with filtering and sorting.

For the record, my original complaint that ec2 did not have pricing in the dropdown seems to be untrue right now, which is great! For the sake of UX discussion, I want to talk about your picture as if that were the only way to get this info. So let me explain why that's bad. The main reason is this is only true for ec2 and every other resource has its own slightly different way of getting the cost, making it really e…

And to add to this: AWS teams were also quite focused on avoiding surprise bills for customers. Because surprise bills led to customer support interactions, Sev2/3 tickets that needed investigation, etc.

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

#462

Post by alasano »

calmbonsai wrote: post #415

The AWS UI should be, effectively, read-only for any infrastructure aside from setting up some initial roles and perms to manage all of it through an IAC system. Put more bluntly, if you're using the AWS Console to spin-up/spin-down service instances you're doing it wrong .

I've never enjoyed AWS more than with LLMs managing infra as code through sst.dev

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

#463

Post by lelanthran »

dang wrote: post #454
lelanthran wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here’s a cool fact: in America only 35% of DV survivors retain full custody of their children and only 45% retain primary custody. That's because joint custody is the default and you need to have really good evidence when you want to restrict a kids access to their father. > If you flee domestic violence you are more likely than not to lose custody of your children to your abuser. "Being forced to allow kids to see…

Please make your substantive points without calling names or crossing into personal attack. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you dang; here's the thing, even the most charitable reading of GPs comment indicates that he feels being unable to restrict a child's right of access to their parent is unfair in some way.

No matter what you may think of parents, it is absolutely horrific that someone will argue for restricting the rights of children, and do it in a way that he feels is acceptable in society (custody is only in small part about having access to one's children; the actual right is to the child, not the parent - the child has the right to access to their parent).

I wanted to make him understand that trampling over children's rights is not acceptable.

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

#464

Post by mattbillenstein »

I tend to use a few services on each cloud as possible so it's easy to switch between them; spinning up an Ubuntu VM that's identical on nearly every cloud is a superpower.

And, so if you keep it simple like this, it's not too complex and the costs are knowable - mostly VM hours and S3 for most of what I run.

But, the thing I've become increasingly disappointed with is simply the performance. The cpus are _slow_ - being forced to use EBS for a lot of things is _slow_ as hell; and starting/hydrating new VM volumes is super duper slow (have fun paying for fast launch).

So, for what you pay vs what you get, it's a huge difference, albeit very convenient.

Increasingly, I think about like racking stuff - like run most of your workload on dedicated hardware somewhere close to an AWS region and then burst into the cloud as needed and just use s3 in that region. Reduced cost, better performance for what matters, and you just pay for hands-on in the datacenter. Send them servers and just manage it all remotely.

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

#465

Post by reactordev »

tempest_ wrote: post #379
anymouse123456 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

Prior to the RAM crunch you could buy 4 or 5 servers ~50k that would be more than capable to handle many enterprises needs. The thing is the industry has sorta lost the skill set to host and maintain them. The people who can do this still exist of course but they are outnumbered by the YAML jockeys 10 to 1. There are also other things that the cloud hides in its price as well. Redundant networking, provisioning, rack…

No, you misunderstand, it's not that we lack the knowledge or skills (we don't!) it's that the backbones and pipelines all converge on these hyperscalers and that's where you get the best throughput and least latency.

I clearly remember having a discussion with a very VERY large company I worked for at the time about getting some NVidia hardware for our own enterprise data centers and they flat out refused. Now, they have lost any advantage they could have had.

The issue with AWS is that they started off cheap, easy, simple and grew into an enterprise mess complete with opaque pricing. That's an issue. The complexity itself has created a whole new lane of work for the SRE where they can specialize in AWS and not do anything else. It's grown beyond just a cloud provider. People who are still expecting a cloud provider are going to be sour about it.

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

#466

Post by firesteelrain »

ninjagoo wrote: post #422
richwater wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you would be surprised how many commits in OSS comes from paid workers of the various cloud companies and tech companies out there.

> I think you would be surprised how many commits in OSS comes from paid workers of the various cloud companies and tech companies out there. And I think the value that various cloud companies and tech companies derive from open source by far exceeds their contributions to it. When you add in the economic contribution, those OSS value-adds are an order of magnitude higher. According this Harvard paper [1], the cost t…

Understand the argument. No one is forcing anyone to make OSS. They do it because they want to. It’s like they are own worst enemy

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

#467

Post by sumedh »

ceejayoz wrote: post #229
chii wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If those folks wanted money for their work, they should be charging a price for it.

That’s what they eventually did, yes. But it’s ok to be voluntarily grateful for hard work.

> But it’s ok to be voluntarily grateful for hard work.

You don't become a billionaire using that approach though.

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

#468

Post by Dylan16807 »

rpdillon wrote: post #103
cyanydeez wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmart pulling up top a small town, opening a single business, paying everyone minimum wage is not 'competition is good'. Just try a little bit of understanding.

This feels close to "felony contempt of business model". https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine... We are supportive of 3rd party ink cartridges, and there's little concern for the business model of the printer manufacturers. We instead care about the rights of the folks using the printers. With Postgres, no one bats an eye that there are thousands of hosting companies providing Postgres as an o…

If printers were free, and ink was free or open, and the printer company said "don't operate a printer leasing business, that's the only thing you can't do", I would side with the printer company.

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

#469

Post by mpyne »

petepete wrote: post #244
mpyne wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PostgreSQL is doing fine even with AWS having a multitude of hosted offerings. Maybe the business model / community-governance model does matter after all...

PostgreSQL doesn't have a pro/officially supported version though.

Sure they do.

AWS RDS, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, etc. are all "pro" / "officially supported" deployments of PostgreSQL.

On top of that the PostgreSQL official website even lists a whole table full of vendors from whom you can get commercial support at https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/nort...

Bringing faux open source into the world isn't a justification for adopting an infeasible business model and then complaining that your business doesn't compete very well.

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

#470

Post by Aeolun »

raffraffraff wrote: post #248

I 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…

I think the big problems with amazon IAM is not that it’s inherently complex, it’s that every team in AWS came up with their own way to define permissions and the calls these allow you to make. So the API Gateway set of permissions uses a completely different method for no discernable reason.
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