Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

fourlightyears.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 684 posts

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

#71

Post by 2ndorderthought »

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…

Sometimes I wonder how much it would hurt Amazon to pay the creators and maintainers of OSS software they sell 1 cent per billing period of use(1 hr?). I also wonder how much money that would offer an oss team. To contribute risk free to improving the product

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

#73

Post by ceejayoz »

ipaddr wrote: post #59
maccard wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital ocean is the answer. You give it a container and off you go.

Use to be now they are requiring 2fa for addon domains over a certain amount

Of all the things to be upset about, mandatory 2FA doesn't seem like one.

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

#74

Post by 4nonverbal-alit »

maccard wrote: post #41
faangguyindia wrote: post #8

Why do people even bother with cloud? I’ve a couple of apps doing a few million a day. I am using Hetzner and before that used DigitalOcean. Mind you, for close to a decade. People are unnecessarily complicating stuff, and these clouds can go very expensive very quickly. Recently, I came across a company and they were spending $20k a month on GCP. I am like, are you kidding me, $20K for the kind of stuff you do??? It…

At my previous startup: because AWS gave us a bunch of credits and helped us design the infra. It meant we ran for free what they designed for free. At a previous bigger company, getting procurement to sign up to a new provider requires writing a business case, justifying the spend and then getting multiple competing quotes and speaking to their sales teams. Signing up to a new service takes _months_ even for $10/mo…

At my current team at a “bigcorp” I have noticed a similar pattern. We use aws not because it’s efficient in any way.

We use it because we don’t want to deal with slow procurement process. It kills all the momentum.

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

#75

Post by reliablereason »

tiffanyh wrote: post #9
joefourier wrote: post #4

> Cloud computing was an absolutely mind blowing revolution - suddenly your startup could run its own computer systems in minutes without need to install and run your own systems in a data center. This was an absolute game changer, and I really drank the AWS Kool Aid down to every last drop then I licked out the cup. I was all in on AWS in a big way. Am I the only one who remembers that VPSes and dedicated hosting se…

> suddenly your startup could run its own computer systems in minutes without need to install and run your own systems in a data center. The “in minutes” is doing a lot of the work in that sentence above. I also used dedicated servers in the late ’90s (and they still offer great value today). But before AWS, provisioning new hardware typically took days , not minutes. AWS changed that, and the rest of the industry ev…

No you could rent virtualised servers way before AWS. AWS simply had good marketing.

The virtualised server thing was not a AWS thing, the thing that was were their other services. For example instead of renting a virtual server and installing a database on it. You could rent the database; that was sort of a new thing that AWS made in to thing.

It was never cheaper what you paid for was a promise of fire and forget. You would no longer need to worry about any responsibility to update the server or the database cause the AWS crew took care of that.

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

#76

Post by maccard »

ipaddr wrote: post #59
maccard wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital ocean is the answer. You give it a container and off you go.

Use to be now they are requiring 2fa for addon domains over a certain amount

It’s negligent to not use 2FA for any cloud platform where credentials can be used to spin up resources.

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

#77

Post by alde »

The set of core services on AWS remains amazing: EC2, S3, IAM, EKS, Route53, RDS etc.

AWS IAM is extremely well designed when you compare it with the spaghetti monster IAM systems of other clouds.

Every time I try the new cool thing supposed to replace these services on some other provider - I understand how mature and polished the AWS ones are.

With that said, the rest 90% of AWS services like WorkMail, Cognito, API Gateway, are absolute hot garbage which no good meaning AWS expert will touch with a 10 meter stick.

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

#78

Post by djinn »

AWS has been systematically hollowed out of technical staff since 2023. Either through mass layoffs or via 2 cycles of performance improvement plans. Often I find most skilled peers in presales or support are not with AWS whilst the ones with most ambiguous work history have been retained at promoted.

Use AWS at your own risk, Paul Vixie is not there to save you.

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

#79

Post by mcherm »

dzonga wrote: post #54

the A.I (LLM) merchants will tell you - that AI is now writing software (agentic coding they call it ) - yet one they can't bill you properly or have a broken billing mechanism. their dashboards are trash & don't work - Google Cloud, AWS Console, Google Ads, Meta Ad manager I won't even mention the hyped up LLM vendors. but here we r - people being laid off due to A.I - money being funneled into Gigawatt datacenters

I don't think that's the real issue. The problems with billing and dashboards at cloud vendors are not new within the past few years, they have existed far longer than the LLM coding.
Post reply on HN