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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

#601

Post by archerx »

Galanwe wrote: post #324

These arguments against AWS are boring. 99% of the negative comments are along the line of "so i have a dead simple product, I dont know anything about AWS, I logged in and it was super complicated and it seemed pricey". Well guess what, if you have a CRUD website and 100 users you're just not the target. Move on. Some days ago I wanted to sketch a 3D model of my TV remote. I opened blender and what a mess of complic…

To be fair Blender’s UI is very unintuitive and not as good as other 3D modeling software. Between 3Ds max, Maya, Houdini, XSI, Modo, Milkshape and others only Blender has felt painful to use.

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

#602

Post by [deleted] »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #570
dns_snek wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> According to the original license they are both entitled to do that, that's the problem. I really don't see how Amazon is to blame for this problem, they weren't the ones who picked the license. > Do you think it's sustainable for one company to make the software for free and another one to sell it for profit? They both sell it for profit, let the most profitable one win.

[deleted]

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

#603

Post by devin-2030 »

AJRF wrote: post #572

AWS / GCP / Azure aren't for individuals or small businesses. They won't tell you this anywhere, and they won't stop you from signing up - but they simply do not care one iota about users with anything less than $100k billing per month. They treat big account owners like kings, they fly them out to Formula 1 events, they get 3 day workshops in swanky retreats, because a few k spent on this equals maybe millions of do…

Used to be different when AWS started properly 20 years ago with S3 and EC2. But yes they went from catering to startups to SMBs to enterprise.

Unfortunately a lot of developers still believe the AWS / GCP / Azure propaganda (tech evangelism, cloud advocacy, or whatever else you're calling it). Nowadays you shouldn't use them at all when starting up.

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

#604

Post by devin-2030 »

stingraycharles wrote: post #584
AJRF wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner. You won't get much better support, and you will have to deal with EU legislative nonsense, but it won't be hard to do that if you are actually small. Why do I say Hetzner? It's very budget friendly and has a very small list of services so its much harder to screw yourself into a situation where its hard to leave.

For individuals, probably. For SMBs spending $10k - $100k a month, I would absolutely advise against that.

Back when we were spending 100k/mo on AWS, I calculated that equivalent infra would be $15k-$20k/mo at Hetzner.

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

#605

Post by NohatCoder »

sambellll wrote: post #201
sudosteph wrote: post #123

I'm surprised by the author's hate towards DynamoDB. It's probably one of my favorite AWS Services. Great availability and no operational overhead. Cost was pretty minimal too each time I've used it, but you do need to spend some time architecting your data model up front, and that requires reading service docs and understanding it.

Here to say the same thing. I built an app a few years ago and needed some sort of DB to store around 50 million records that had ~10k reads+writes per month with 1 index. It cost me something like $50 to load it up initially, and then something stupid like 10 cents/month to maintain.

"~10k reads+writes per month"

It is the same story over and over again. Your AWS bill is "low" because the actual resources you use are a tiny fraction of what a modern computer can deliver.

This is probably fine for your case, but you could run the same load on any toaster, and without a meaningfully demanding task it is hard to tell them apart.

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

#606

Post by bpicolo »

torginus wrote: post #476
petesergeant wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is lambda adding in this situation that throwing a docker image up somewhere isn't?

Well, complexity and iteration time for example. For docker, you need something that runs it (like your own cluster of EC2 or ECS), a private registry you push to, a separate user that provisions the actual server, while iteration (code changes, or something as simple as changing an env var) - involves the cycle of upload new image, shut down the old containers, try to start up the new ones, with all sort of weird fa…

You’re describing incidental complexity of running a container on AWS, though. Which you can also do with lambda because there are 15 different ways to do it.

Dead simple on GCP Cloud Run.

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

#607

Post by 0123456789ABCDE »

hankerapp wrote: post #19
tedivm wrote: post #13

> AWS stomped on open source projects - despite the clear desire of projects like Elasticsearch, Redis, and MongoDB not to be cloned and monetized, AWS pushed ahead with OpenSearch, Valkey, and DocumentDB anyway, capturing the hosted-service money after those communities and companies had built the markets; the result was a wave of defensive licenses like SSPL, Elastic License, RSAL, and other source-available models…

A lot of these projects work on a business model where they open-source their core product, and provide advanced services, installation, maintenance or fully-managed services around their product. AWS was bypassing them by providing fully-managed services. On this, I am on the side of the people behind the projects. Basically AWS was eating their lunch. They had no choice but to change the licenses.

isn't it that a lot of these projects start as open-source, then try to bank on that free labor, by switching licenses?

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

#608

Post by kaydub »

Alright, so where are the good engineers these days?

Reddit died quite a while ago and I was holding on to Hacker News, but with all the anti-LLM posts and the anti-cloud fud I see on here it's obviously not here either any more.

What is going on that all the "engineering" users are anti-engineering, against change and advancement?

You guys posting this shit have to realize you're working on podunk garbage coding projects right? If you're finding AWS overly complex this is sounding more like a YOU problem.

Those of you saying on-prem is better, you're saying a lot more about yourself, your experience (lack of) and the project you're working on than you're saying about cloud.

Like holy fuck, how can you hate lambda? It's STUPID simple wtf???

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

#609

Post by kaydub »

oneneptune wrote: post #420
anymouse123456 wrote: post #332

Like OP, I was an AWS booster for many years (also a Heroku lover), but fell out of love about 10 years ago for the same reasons. - It felt like far too much complexity just to do simple things. - The obvious attempts to trap customers with slightly incompatible, higher level services felt gross - The inability to run AWS trash on a dev machine had a MASSIVE hit on productivity - Pricing didn't fall as fast as I felt…

The value in paying someone is if you have enterprise requirements for physical data security. Then after that if you go the Hetzner route, you have to micromanage your underlying OS, Redis, DB, etc... and it's just more work.. and if you're in enterprise business it reduces friction a lot to just pay someone a trivial amount like $10,000 a month.

I honestly can't believe most of the people posting aren't engineers or they work at small companies or something. They show their lack of experience when talking about how cheap Hetzner and DO are.

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

#610

Post by kaydub »

thomas_witt wrote: post #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. I…

Yup!

I've been holding Hacker News in too high of esteem for too long I think. Most people on here are amateurs at best. The complaints about AWS/Cloud and LLMs are getting too loud. Did the industry pull in too many inexperienced during covid and now we're witnessing the backlash or something?

I've been doing this a long time. Running hardware, running VPS in the cloud, and running on AWS. I'll never go back to hardware/on-prem.

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