Ten Years in the AWS Cloud | Hacker News Reader

Ten Years in the AWS Cloud

aws.amazon.com

70 pointshepha197911 comments

7 years ago, I took a computer networking class in college, and it came with $100 in AWS credit. This class, and those credits, were some of the most career-impacting things that I took away from my 4 years.

Here's why. As a poor, unemployed student, $100 was a lot of money. Even once I had a nice job, I wasn't used to paying for services beyond very basic web hosting, and probably wouldn't have put any thought or energy into learning how to deploy and run things in the cloud. The opportunity cost was simply higher than I was used to.

BUT, because I had that $100, and because the networking class had given me a basic understanding AWS's offerings, I kept using AWS once I graduated. Because, why not? For small projects (hosted free on Heroku), $100 can go a LONG way (spent mostly on S3), and I was able to fund my side projects for about 2 years. Side projects that led to my current job as a full-stack Rails developer.

It wasn't about the actual value of that class or the AWS credits. (Looking back, $100 was dirt cheap compared to my tuition costs.) It was about the activation energy required to get a clueless student programmer familiar with the cloud and understanding what kinds of problems can be solved.

The missing piece from AWS is feature parity across regions. We use us-west-1 (San Francisco) and it is still missing a lot of services such Lambda, CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline, and CertificateManager.

CodeDeploy is currently listed in us-west-1, though it may not have been when you trialled it.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/codedeploy/latest/userguide/troub...

Yes, us-west-1 has always seemed a bit of a second-class citizen. For years it has just been two availability zones, but they're named '1b' and '1c', as if there was once a third.

Did picking us-west-1 over us-west-2 have a dramatic performance increase in your apps?

Honestly it was arbitrary, and if I could redo I would chose Oregon because it has more features and cheaper costs, but not worth the time and energy switching now.

> CodeDeploy

Yeah...you're not missing much there with CodeDeploy ;)

They are also giving away free lab time to celebrate.

https://qwiklabs.com/?qlcampaign=aws10#section-4

One of the best things about AWS is how much focus they have on client libraries that actually support the available features and functions within AWS.

The other clouds don't seem to think it is so important that their clouds can actually be programmed. Other clouds seem to think the important thing is that a cloud has a feature, less important that it can be used.

Also the AWS documentation team is first class and runs rings around the cloud documentation from Google and Microsoft.

One of the best arguments for Rackspace is that their cloud offering is far more straightforward and easy to use than AWS, and they have boatloads of SDKs (https://developer.rackspace.com/docs/) and client libraries as well. Even better than Rackspace as far as ease of use is Digital Ocean, which has tutorials very basically every topic you can think of googling and a ton of libraries too (https://developers.digitalocean.com/libraries/). I'm not saying that any of these are better or worse than AWS, but if we're talking in terms of usability and learning curve AWS is a bit of a beast to fully grasp compared to other IaaS offerings out there due to its shear number number of constantly growing offerings.

In love digital ocean but they are apples and oranges to aws. Pretty much all they have IIRC is the equivalent of ec2, elastic ips and pseudo snapshots (you must reboot). So not really a fair comparison. It's HARD to explain all the myriad aws services let alone make clear and intuitive client sdks.

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