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Comment by benterix | Hacker News Reader

A cynic in me is happy about this state of affairs - the companies who happily joined the AWS bandwagon have to pay the price (including my salary). For my projects I almost always choose something else that offers better value, except in very rare cases when it makes sense.

A decade ago or so AWS was marketed as - to simplify - "fire all your sysadmins because we manage the systems for you" to the current state where good AWS DevOps engineers are expensive and not so easy to find and you pay through the nose if you really follow AWS recommendations, especially for larger setups.

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Yeah this has been my observation.

CTOs bought the "fire all your sysadmins" literally, and now we have a 20% overhead on all app devs who are supposed to learn all this stuff.

It's crazy to me. It's literally the opposite of every management training / book about focussing on highest value work / where you add value / where you provide expertise.

20%? Seems like at least half of all the work has to do with infrastructure plumbing, now that people who are supposed to write product code are expected to be Cloud prodigies.

I hate CloudFormation I hate CloudFormation.

Unless you're using AWS as yet another VPS provider, creating a "cloudy" product requires way too much knowledge about AWS services as a developer.

When I was at a company that went all in on AWS. I went from 100% of time working on product, to easy 75% of time working on AWS. Even though we had teams who just set up infra on aws for us to use and it was supposed to be "so easy". There was far more time setting up AWS infra than writing code.

Yes, and management discounts that .. if you make me, a product expert, working on application software.. deal with this stuff, I am going to do the worst, most rapid, half-assed, security and everything else be damned job.

I have clients, product, scrum masters, tech leads, and others breathing down my neck on feature delivery, and you're asking me to figure this alphabet soup out, lol.. don't expect happy results dudes.

I've been a domain expert in a field for 20 years, what value do I bring to the client in dealing with this alphabet soup of AWS networking/security? Either it works and client gets what they want, or it doesn't and they don't.

This stuff is a full time job and should be respected as such. If you think you can push it all down on app dev, you are going to have unhappy results.

Pretty tedious work though. I'd far rather feel I was actually doing useful work instead of dealing with this stupid crap.

I never saw it marketed that way - but even so, anyone stupid enough to fall for it deserves every NAT gateway charge they've had since.

would you mind elaborating on the nat gateway part? are you insinuating that nat gateway as mean to provide oneway internet access for instances in private subnets are misguided or suboptimal?

Managed NAT Gateways are one of the more expensive services in the known universe.

what would you use instead?

AWS NAT Gateway pricing is so outrageous that smart people came up with a peculiar hybrid:

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/an-alternat-future-we-now...

I wouldn't use it in production (some companies do, for internal things) but the very fact it exists speaks volumes.

a tiny ec2 box that provides NAT for about $3/mo.

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