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I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

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541–550 of 684 posts

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

#541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grafana (and especially Loki) is hot garbage compared to what you get out of the box in GCP. I'm in a Grafana organization today and the sheer amount of developer and devops time it wastes is mind boggling. You moved something from a single datastore to three different database technologies? I don't know your domain, but that sure doesn't sound like a complexity reduction.

>You moved something from a single datastore to three different database technologies? I don't know your domain, but that sure doesn't sound like a complexity reduction. what's bad about graphana? it's simply used for some alerts and monitoring, i've used it for really long time and it has never failed me not even once. it's much simpler to query postgres or mongo compared to duplicating data dozens of times on datas…

The UX is dreadful? I could spend hours picking apart the terrible design decisions. After many years with the comparative luxury of the stackdriver tools on GCP, I moved to a BigCorp with a grafana/loki/mimir system and a whole devops army to maintain it. For two years I've been unable to find anything positive to say about this experience. Our devops folks are super smart, so I can only conclude that the software sucks.

I can't really judge your database choices; I don't know your specific problems, we're just trading quips on the internet for fun. But man oh man grafana is disappointing.

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

#542
These fake open source rugpull companies deserve what Bezos did to them.

They made hosting their software hard, intentionally.

For example, prohibiting more than one node/replica, and being hostile to PRs/features that they consider their ”commercial offering”.

But the worst thing I’ve seen, for many software, is probably the hostility towards people who want to automate the software, for example putting the software in a container (10 years ago), then they refused to give support even if you had a valid paid contract.

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

#543
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS literally did that. They paid for full time developers to contribute back to the redis code base, including core redis developers. If you actually look at the redis code base the majority of it was written by people who never worked for redis.

> If you actually look at the redis code base the majority of it was written by people who never worked for redis. Thats a really big deal, how did they legally managed to do the license change? I was under the impression that only works if the original owner is the doing most work

Permissive licenses don't protect against projects that decide to change the license when releasing a new version.

Copyleft protects against that as a general rule. However some projects that rely on copyleft require contributors to sign license agreements granting the project owners a more permissive license.

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

#544
post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's weird to me that the Hacker News community doesn't think that sort of competition is good. Negative externalities. The company makes money using a free resource and disincentivises future development. I'm sure you can see why killing the most popular business model for open source companies is bad for the ecosystem, right?

I can't? I mean, if Amazon does commercial version of Elastic better than Elastic themselves then so be it. I don't see how one company is entitled to turn an open source project into business and the other is not. I do see issues with monopolies pushing inferior products onto users. But that would be a completely different issue, nothing to do with open source.

> I don't see how one company is entitled to turn an open source project into business and the other is not.

According to the original license they are both entitled to do that, that's the problem. Do you think it's sustainable for one company to make the software for free and another one to sell it for profit?

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

#545
post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's weird to me that the Hacker News community doesn't think that sort of competition is good. Negative externalities. The company makes money using a free resource and disincentivises future development. I'm sure you can see why killing the most popular business model for open source companies is bad for the ecosystem, right?

I can't? I mean, if Amazon does commercial version of Elastic better than Elastic themselves then so be it. I don't see how one company is entitled to turn an open source project into business and the other is not. I do see issues with monopolies pushing inferior products onto users. But that would be a completely different issue, nothing to do with open source.

I mean it’s a free country either way then. Elastic can change the licensing and Amazon is then free to compete with a fork of the software pre-licensing change.

Amazon doesn’t really have a leg to stand on in objection here. Building a platform to re-sell an open source project may end up fracturing that open source community’s user base, that’s a consequence of their own actions.

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

#546
It's hard to take the author seriously technically competent when reading "DynamoDB what a hot pile of garbage. I tried it and ended up with a $75USD bill by the end of the day."

Clearly there are many people - including me - who built highly scalable, available and near maintenance-free systems using DynamoDB for a ridiculously low cost.

I have no idea how you can actually burn more than $5 in development for DDB. If you don't make the effort to explore what a technology is built for and/or clearly didn't understand it, maybe you should holding back ranting about it. Unless you want to look like a fool.

Same goes for IAM. It's complex but still easily understandable to get the basics. Creating e.g. a rule where you can only read from a DynamoDB table but not delete entries or the whole table takes you under 10 clicks.

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

#547

Earlier 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…

"It's weird to me that the Hacker News community doesn't think that sort of competition is good." It's not 'competition'. It's carnivorous, predatory. Consider shifting gears and seeing all of this through the lens of 'power'. There is no such thing as open/free markets when there is massive power asymmetry. Anything that a weaker entity produces, will be 'taken' by a more powerful entity via all sorts of mechanisms.…

And for society as a whole, we are getting to a state where corporations have incredibly large amount of money and gradually, hard power too. OSS is kind of small rebellion that we need to sustain so that we don't that tiny bit of freedom we have.

P.S. I think East India Company's history should be a mandatory lesson for everyone on the ability of a single company to take over a subcontinent. At its peak they had their own army, ruthless efficiency due to a largely meritocratic structure, and was successful in taking over multiple kingdoms.

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

#549
post #90

I'd tend to agree with the author. If forced to choose a cloud platform though (and that often is the case) then AWS is probably the best of the bunch in terms of reliability. Have heard and experienced some real horror stories with Azure & GCP by comparison.

I would read a GCP horror story for fun. Any thing you can direct me to?

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

#550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they changed their license, they were no longer open source. They could have chosen open source licenses such as the AGPL, but they did not. They were a non-open source company at that point, and AWS was putting out a product build on open source. Simple as that. Redis was not an open source company when AWS moved to Valkey. Companies are free to license under the AGPL if they want. Or other open source licenses…

These were open source projects that had to change licenses away from open source because of AWS. I'm not sure how the OSS companies are the bad guy here.

> I'm not sure how the OSS companies are the bad guy here.

The formerly OSS companies, you mean.

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