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Comment by JMTQp8lwXL | Hacker News Reader

At a conceptual level, I support this, but there should be no need for a cottage industry to explain how to use AWS. The UI is a nightmare. I have to open my browser's element inspector to see full docker image names in ECR. That's atrocious for a product that brings in billions. Clearly the UI's deficiencies "don't matter" to AWS' success, but they could try a smidge harder to make user's lives easier. But they likely won't, since it's business, and many of us using AWS aren't doing so by individual choice. But next time, when I am the decision maker, ...remember that, Amazon. People (individual contributors) do occasionally ascend upwards in technology organizations, and they will know what it's like to use your technology, and it will absolutely influence decision making.

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For any proper use the AWS console is nothing more than a brochure of what you could be doing.

If you want to use their services properly, read the documentation for the ones you have chosen and use proper tooling that provides repeatability (for the lack of a better word), provided by AWS themselves or by a third party.

The thing is, even “proper tooling” is a nightmare.

Tons of consistency issues in APIs, poor documentation, boto3 is atrocious where services names are passed as strings and why not use ‘args’, ‘*kwargs’ so you don’t know how to use the method by looking at the signature.

I had to implement s3 presigned URLs generation as we had no access to SDKs, the documentation is littered across their website, you literally have to go through dozens of pages to compile enough information.

Their quota system is borderline frightening, there is so much individual limitations that you may really never know if some limit is not gonna blow up in production.

Not to mention their voluntarily incomprehensible pricing. You may brankrupt your company just doing a few API calls and anyway, I generally found the overall quality of their products so poor that their premium just kills it.

Every time I know I’ll need to use one of their service, I prepare for the pain.

I generally support most things AWS does, but agree with you here. Though documentation you get a handle on fairly quick... Nearly all SDKs follow the same pattern. Still room for improvement. The lack of easy helpers (like for signing setup and validation) got us too.

Kinda to the other replies point though: does anyone do it better?

>does anyone do it better?

Not currently, sadly, imo.

What other providers do you use?

> The UI is a nightmare.

While I definitely wish it was better, I’m tired of posts implying it’s completely unusable like this.

First of all, it’s night and day better than GCP and Azure to me, both are far worse UI wise. I spent 30+ min once trying to find the magic incantation to just update the billing CC in GCP and only after reading dozens of google SERPs wading through lots of negative comments online of people ranting about the same issue did I figure out what was wrong.

But that’s not the point, having better UI than your two leading competitors doesn’t automatically make yours not awful too. So to that I have to ask, what makes it so bad to you? From the very beginning I was always able to find everything I needed without much difficulty. Sure, there were rough places, especially around ECS when it first came out, but overall it felt intuitive for the most part.

Furthermore, AWS APIs (which is imho how you should mostly be interacting with AWS) are generally feature complete and not overtly painful to use in my experience. Sure, I’ve had to add a busy loop in my code before to poll for completion, but there’s far worse sins with other APIs I’ve had to use. There’s also head scratching “why must I do this in two or more separate calls” moments too, but again, if you read the docs it’s all easily doable.

Endpoint, can you actually provide some definitive examples to justify that “UI is a nightmare”, or is it just FUD to relieve your own stress on something likely unrelated?

> I’m tired of posts implying it’s completely unusable like this.

I didn't say it was unusable. I just said it was atrocious and really bad. If it was literally unusable, I wouldn't even consider it an option to try and navigate it or even consider it part of the offering, I'd just use the CLI instead.

> or is it just FUD to relieve your own stress on something likely unrelated?

No. My pain point of AWS is the UI. When I do use the CLI, I find it quite reliable. However, I occasionally like to use the UI to confirm a deployment occurred, or inspect when ECS containers are unhealthy, etc. I primarily use it in a "read-only" way.

I really dislike that your comment suggests that I don't understand what my own problems are. Try not to de-legitimize the experiences of others.

ohh, i could not agree more!

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