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Does anyone else finds AWS and other Amazon services overly complicated?

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Re: Does anyone else finds AWS and other Amazon services overly complicated?

#61

Yeah this is normally why you'd use the SDK, because its just horrific when you're outside. However, having said that, compared to FAANG internal tools, its actually not that bad. It's at least vaguely consistent

> compared to FAANG internal tools, its actually not that bad It's because it is an "internal tool". All services are built on top of aws native.

It's the contrary.

An internal service is really good and then it becomes an AWS service.

I've even been in 2 teams that have tried to do that and one may succeed in a few years.

Re: Does anyone else finds AWS and other Amazon services overly complicated?

#63
post #7

Ah that's nothing. Simple problem from a high level: static web site on apex domain. What you should be able to do: Click click done. Upload files to S3. Point CNAME at AWS. What you have to do: Create an S3 bucket and stick the files in it. Create a zone in Route 53 and import your old zone file. Change your nameservers at the registrar. Wait a bit. Go to ACM in the correct region and create a cert. Tell it to add t…

100% this. A couple times I've considered moving my personal website to AWS, but each time I got lost in the documentation trying to keep all the different moving parts in my head. At the end of the day managing a single VPS running debian+nginx+certbot[1] with a Gandi domain is orders of magnitude simpler.

[1]: I'm probably going to move that to FreeBSD/OpenBSD with OpenBSD's relayd+httpd+acme-client at some point, but the general idea stays the same.

Re: Does anyone else finds AWS and other Amazon services overly complicated?

#64
post #60
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. CDK is just another way of expressing the same things as terraform and cloudfront but using a framework which is opaque. Plus it's slow as fuck, buggy and difficult to debug when it goes wrong. Every attempt keeps trying to solve the same problems with a new abstraction but the problem is the underlying abstraction not the tools.

> CDK is just another way of expressing the same things as terraform and cloudfront but using a framework which is opaque. It also involves writing many, many less lines of code than Cloudformation/Terraform thanks to the excellent abstractions it bundles in. Your example of writing "2 days' worth of YAML" is less than 120 lines of Typescript in CDK. You could even skip that and just npm install the AWS solutions con…

We don’t know typescript. So we’d have to learn that first.

Re: Does anyone else finds AWS and other Amazon services overly complicated?

#65
Entered the thread for a different reason. No, I don't really find building the API request complicated. I mean, it is but they provide a python example that I was easily able to get working in lua without major issues. And you spend half a day wondering why it's returning forbidden until you get it right and then it's done.

What is complicated is receiving the response, that different services sometimes operate in regions and sometimes operate globally (but have a us-east-1 endpoint) and that some return XML, some return JSON, some return a gzipped response and some not, and much of it I haven't found documentation for and have had to figure out how to wrap calls to different services to be able to interact with them in a sensible manner.

Re: Does anyone else finds AWS and other Amazon services overly complicated?

#66
post #64
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CDK is just another way of expressing the same things as terraform and cloudfront but using a framework which is opaque. It also involves writing many, many less lines of code than Cloudformation/Terraform thanks to the excellent abstractions it bundles in. Your example of writing "2 days' worth of YAML" is less than 120 lines of Typescript in CDK. You could even skip that and just npm install the AWS solutions con…

We don’t know typescript. So we’d have to learn that first.

Do you know JavaScript?

Re: Does anyone else finds AWS and other Amazon services overly complicated?

#69
post #64
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CDK is just another way of expressing the same things as terraform and cloudfront but using a framework which is opaque. It also involves writing many, many less lines of code than Cloudformation/Terraform thanks to the excellent abstractions it bundles in. Your example of writing "2 days' worth of YAML" is less than 120 lines of Typescript in CDK. You could even skip that and just npm install the AWS solutions con…

We don’t know typescript. So we’d have to learn that first.

CDK also works with Java or Python.
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