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Comment by fipple | Hacker News Reader

This is not unique, it is the “integrated” vs “best of breed” offering. It’s like the oldest business school IT case. Amazon isn’t trying to sell the best anything, they’re selling one spot where you can get everything you need even if some of it is crappy.

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It’s also a result of feature-driven RFPs or similar check-the-box driven evaluation.

There’s a line item for “integrated log analysis” that needs to be met, but there’s less analysis on how useful that feature may be in reality.

This.

Enterprise IT processes are filled with these kind of word-docs filled with checkboxes, and for that, AWS's featureset excels.

This makes a lot of sense because most of us aren't going to work with a different company for each and every part of our infrastructure. If it's super critical it be the best, I'm going to seek out the right tool for the job. If I just need to have something, at a basic level, I'd rather work with a company I already work with.

Absolutely. I think the parent poster is massively overgeneralizing that CloudWatch is only good for "hobbyist users". Nearly every product I've worked on that's utilized AWS has sent to CloudWatch, because unless they have special needs CloudWatch doesn't meet then you might as well use it because nearly every AWS product and docs are already sending their logs there by default and it's one less infrastructure company to keep track of.

I have been super-unsatisfied with the status quo of Cloudwatch; it is not a production grade logging system if it allows you to keep zillions of streams in logs but provides A) no way to search through them all to find the last time you had a certain error containing a certain string (grep -r -i on EFS plain text logs is better than Cloudwatch!), and B) no way to trend specific errors/issues over time.

It does seem like as of last week's announcement they are starting to try to fix this. I was annoyed we had to log stuff to both Cloudwatch and Splunk to try to get decent logging.

Have to agree... I generally log to line separated json for logging, and what CloudWatch does offer for this works out really well for the times I've used it. TBH, for small/personal projects, I'm more likely to use, and have used dokku on Digital Ocean.

About the only thing I don't like doing is managing my own DB server... so I'm really happy to see DO expanding into this space. For applications and services, dokku gets me where I need to be with the least fuss. I know if anything took off it would mean some pain, but I'll take that when/if it ever happened.

> This is not unique, it is the “integrated” vs “best of breed” offering.

The integration aspect really matters for security and compliance, as well as standardisation: all of which become bigger concerns the larger your organization. If you use the AWS service, you can re-use IAM, CloudTrail, CloudFormation etc. If you attach a third-party service to your AWS setup, then there's a bunch of things to work out.

"Overwhelming mediocrity"

Software industry's evolution in a nutshell. New tools are this to old tools. SaaS are this to desktop software.

It seems like your qoute is a common saying but neither me nor google seems to really know it. So I would guess your downvotes come from not providing enough context about what you want to say.

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