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Troubles with the AWS web console

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Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#61

Post by enraged_camel »

sho wrote: post #36
mk89 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your level of experience with ops/networking etc.? Because it all boils down to that. If you need a simpler service, maybe you could use digital ocean etc...

Technically you're right of course but I think you miss the broader point. AWS is ludicrously complicated and overkill for most startups, like a corner store implementing SAP. The problem is it's the gold standard for "cloud" and choosing anything else (apart from GCS, perhaps) attracts the need for justifications and, ultimately, unwelcome accountability. "Nobody ever got fired for [choosing AWS]". I'd personally lo…

>> "Nobody ever got fired for [choosing AWS]".

"Hey Joe, the app you built for Goldberg Partners uses AWS right?"

"Yeah."

"What does it do on AWS again? Store some files?"

"Yeah, and a load balancer in front of a few containers that handle thumbnail generation for those images. Pretty standard stuff."

"I see. What was their pricing like?"

"Last time I checked, the billing page said something like $0.023 per GB for the first 50 TB or something like that, and $0.0116 per hour for the containers. I don't remember the load balancer pricing, but it should be pretty cheap, we don't have that much stuff on there."

"Interesting, okay. Can you explain why they sent us a bill for $10,372.77?"

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#62

Post by acdha »

llimllib wrote: post #50
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

I won’t defend their CLI arguments other than noting that they usually closely follow the also poorly-named APIs[1], but locking up is highly unusual — do you have something like AV software or other quasi-malware which might be interfering with normal I/O? We’ve used it for many millions of files over the years and that’s never been an issue on macOS or Linux.

1. AWS needs a Chief Consistency Officer who can block shipping until you cleanup the prototype slop

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#63

Post by itomato »

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…

The last point is echoed in every IaaS and CM product.

As with any "convenience tech", learning the underlying protocols is essential.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#64

Post by acdha »

pgt wrote: post #17
dammitfoo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some examples by contradiction: tax returns, AWS Dashboard, many programming languages. By programming languages, do you mean Rust?

Absolutely Rust and JavaScript. Rust would be a far better language if it used S-expressions and didn't try to reinvent a macro syntax. But then it would not be as popular. In this way Lisp suffers from having no syntax, although it's a slightly different argument. When you can't have flamewars about a language's syntax, fewer articles are written about it. So instead, people will argue about the encoding of the AST…

> well-designed languages like Clojure, Haskell and Erlang have fewer questions on StackOverflow and older GitHub issues

Can you share the methodology you used to validate that this explanation is correct, ruling out the orders of magnitude larger and wider audiences which the languages with more questions have?

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#65

Post by Terretta »

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…

Noting your verb tense, “I was”, I’m assuming you’re no longer in that role. This isn’t feedback, just discussion.

I talked to Jassy after his keynote in 2018: “Your message says AWS is for ‘builders’. Why do you keep saying ‘just click and ...’ instead of ‘just call the API and’?”

In short, to your point: AWS is for builders... who pay. And right now all the growth is in enterprise, where we don’t know how to make API calls from a command line.

We don’t know how, because two decades of IT practices and security practices made sure we couldn’t make API calls from a command line. (No access to install CLI tools, no proxy, firewall rules from the S3 era still classify AWS as cloud storage and block it, etc.) So we can’t adopt AWS at all if that’s the only path in. But our proxy teams can figure out how to open a console URL. For this market, giving a point and click web page with magic infra behind it is a big deal: the modern ‘service catalog’.

So I think he’s right, that’s the dominant use case by dollar count and head count, and he’s speaking to those deciders.

At the same time, I think it’s terrible when capabilities show up in the console first or only, as the infra-as-code builders can’t code infra and services through the console.

So to anyone following along from a team with two pizzas: invest in the UI, but please nail the APIs first, and then use those from the console. Keep yourselves honest to the Bezos imperative from 15 years back: if you want it in the console, so do IaC developers, so let there be an API for that.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#67

Post by waylandsmithers »

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…

I would say that's the maddening part of it-- the CLI tool and various language sdks and docs (and obviously the underlying technology) are incredible feats of engineering, and then someone said oh it's just some dumb html and css who cares about the web console. I see this in some engineers I work with- there is a prideful ignorance in anything UI or design related.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#68

Post by baseballMan »

scarface74 wrote: post #46
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.

CloudWatch log filters are pretty bad too. I basically just use ctrl + f now in cw logs to find what I'm looking for.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#69

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

sdan wrote: post #57
timc3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Total opposite experience. AWS UI is slow, workflow is terrible. Google cloud is much better. Mind you once you get to a certain point using the APIs is better.

Agree. Having used both GCP and AWS, I like GCP's UI a lot more than AWS's huge dropdowns and constant usage of the search bar.

I have to disagree. After using AWS & GCP, I find AWS “stays out of my way” much much better and has much better documentation. There are weird corners of GCP, like GCS “interop” mode and lack of full compatibility with S3 APIs that feel basically like Google is using dark patterns.

AWS is head & shoulders the better cloud provider. Google is just cheaper.

Re: Troubles with the AWS web console

#70

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

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…

I’ve had these same experiences, only with GCP, not AWS.
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