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Comment by StratusBen | Hacker News Reader

Of all design systems I'd be curious about, the AWS console may be the last one I'd choose to mimic/leverage.

I liked the AWS console so much better when it looked like it was made in jQuery (not sure if it was). It was more information-dense and so much more performant. Now it looks and works pretty badly.

Still leagues better than Azure, which causes brain damage.

It’s not better but more consistent than GCP cloud console.

GCP is not only disorganized but it’s so slow. I shudder when I hit the window reload button.

Try using it on anything but Chrome. It goes from slow to abysmally slow

If you're building a platform, have a design system and the platform ends up inconsistent, you're doing something wrong. Consistency is the entire point of design systems.

Don't you mean the Firebase cloud console? It is Sunday, after all.

That was my wonder - AWS has a system to it's design?

What are some of your favorite design systems?

As someone who is very critical of it internally, for all its a faults it’s very consistent and easy to use if you’re React focused.

As a user of the AWS, consistent is not a term I would use to describe the console.

This might not be a fair argument against this design system, since it was created to combat the inconsistencies between products in the console, and I believe it's doing a good job, perhaps just slower than we'd all like.

Having been in the AWS console on a nearly daily basis for the past 3 years, I've definitely seen some of their screens that are terrible, some services that are hard to use and I've also seen screens get worse/harder to use with design updates even if they're more consistent. Often this is followed by consistent and better functionality, but that varies per service. I definitely understand where you're coming from as it feels like support for any given service in AWS is a game of chance, but the designs are absolutely converging over time.

The console is surprisingly terrible, ugly and basic... although for something that deals with so many unrelated services, I guess it's better to have ugly symmetry than no symmetry at all. I usually need to open it in several tabs just to not get totally off track in security groups and lose whatever services I was looking at, since the back button is unreliable. But it does helpfully remind me of the fact that any of the myriad things I rely on from Amazon right now could just be temporary, half assed implementations on their end that are setting me up for forced updates and technical debt... and that my job isn't supposed to be fun.

I have made worse. I am not proud :(

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