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Comment by JCM9 | Hacker News Reader

This. When AWS was 10 solid core services it made sense and was exciting. It’s now a bloated mess of 200+ services (many of which almost nobody uses) with all that complexity starting to create headaches and cracks.

AWS needs to stop trying to have a half-arsed solution to every possible use case and instead focus on doing a few basic things really well.

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Imo the fact that an "AWS Certified Solutions Architect" is yet another AWS service/thing that is attainable, via an actual exam[0] for $300, is indicative of just how intentionally bloated the entire system has become.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-solutions-arc...

"Embrace, extend, extinguish". It was a Microsoft saying, but it explains Amazon's approach to Linux. Once your customers are skilled in how to do things on your platform, using your specialized products, they won't price-comparison (or compare in any other way) to competing options. Whether those countless other "half-arsed solutions" actually make money is beside the point; as long as the customer has baked at least one into their tech stack, they can't easily leave.

Likely the best comment in the thread: Microsoft couldnt kill Linux. But AWS did it by adding itself as a layer on top of Linux and literally taking control of the web that Linux liberated by taking over the entire server space in the mid-2000s.

(Real question, not meant to be sarcastic or challenging!) -- What are the challenges in trying to use just the ~10 core services you want/need and ignoring the others? What problems do the others you don't use cause with this use case?

The early services were mostly self-contained.

A lot of newer stuff that actually scales (so Lightsail doesn't count) is entangled with "security", "observability" and "network" services. So if you just want to run EC2 + RDS today, you also have to deal with VPC, Subnets, IAM, KMS, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, etc.

Since security and logs are not optional, you have very limited choice.

Having that many required additional services means lots of hidden charges, complexity and problems. And you need a team if you're not doing small-scale stuff.

Costs have not dropped. Computing becomes cheaper over time, but AWS largely does not.

They used to release new ec2 sizes at the same price as the previous gen which made upgrading a no brainer. That stopped with m7 and doesn’t seem to be coming back.

Not sure what Amazon plans to do when the m6 hardware starts wearing out.

I don’t think I’ve seen a menu as hilariously bad as the AWS dashboard menu. No popup menu should consume the entire screen edge to edge. Just a wall of cryptic service names with ambiguous icons.

Word on the street is that Amazon leadership basically agrees with this and recognizes things have gotten off course. AWS is a small number of things that make money and then a whole bunch of slop and bloat.

AWS was mostly spared from yesterday’s big cuts but have been told to “watch this space” in the new year after re:Invent.

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