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Comment by windowshopping | Hacker News Reader

I find all of AWS frustrating. Their interfaces feel like they were designed by an 80s IBM analyst.

I use them heavily for work. IMO, they're pretty well designed for managing large numbers of servers with sophisticated coordination and management systems. If you just wanna run a single server, it's kind of ridiculously over-complex. IMO, Digital Ocean, Linode, etc have much better workflows for just spin up a single Linux server attached to this DNS and let me set everything up on it.

Aws also offers that in terms of aws Lightsail It comes with the servers , DNS system , ip management under one interface.

I find it more simplistic that Digital Ocean , tbh

> Their interfaces feel like they were designed by an 80s IBM analyst.

The purpose of the AWS Console, AFAICT, is:

(1) To be used by semi-technical ops and management types, and people doing tutorials, and

(2) To drive everyone else as quickly as possible to the APIs/CLIs/SDKs.

I wonder if that is internal motivation for design as well

This made me laugh, thanks.

If I'm honest, I do find AWS in general fairly high friction at times but it's way better than renting servers directly I think.

It's the only cloud provider I've really worked with to be honest though (other than a few experiments), maybe some others are much better in this regard?

For me the Azure management portal is frustratingly slow, AWS is at least moderately responsive in comparison. I've not tried the Google stuff for years, but in my experience everything they do is ridiculously overcomplicated.

I don't really get where you're coming from on renting servers directly, using AWS is far more expensive if you actually need a server for a while.

Though I do admit being able to fire up a server for a couple of hours and then delete it is pretty awesome.

I wasn't referring to cost as, yes, it's definitely cheaper to just rent some servers.

The operational overhead of provisioning them, configuring them (and so on) is really difficult for a lot of teams though.

There is some truth to that. They are designed to serve a number of personas in an organization, so if you just need to do one thing or another, they will seem overly complex, but I think you could say the same thing about a cockpit or any interface for a complex system.

Haha! Funny, and there is probably a kernel of truth in there.

I’ve been thinking a lot about AWS lately and it definitely seems to me like a modern take on what IBM did in the 80’s.

I'm amazed that people use the console for anything other than discovery. Any heavy lifting you want the AWS CLI or CloudFormation.

For one offs, it's... Usable. But also it's not really the user's fault because AWS pushes it.

Ultra slow too, logging into the console is one of my least favourite things to do.

Time to check out https://vantage.sh/ :)

It is considered impolite to plug your own stuff without disclosing your relation to it within the same post.

...didn't know that - thanks for the heads up.

I was just looking at your pricing page and the greyed-out-but-still-ticked items in the comparison lists are very confusing. Being greyed out makes it look like their not included, but there's still a tick, so maybe they're still included but less capable? Or available as an add-on? I can't tell what, exactly, you're trying to convey to potential customers.

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