I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
fourlightyears.blogspot.com
fourlightyears.blogspot.com
This is completely backwards, at least with OpenSearch and Valkey. AWS didn't create the forks until after the upstream projects changed their license, so it's really weird to say that the forks "resulted" in the license changes when those forks where a response to the license changes. With Valkey in particular it was members of the former redis core development team that created Valkey.
Why do we apply this standard to MongoDB but not to Apache, Linux, Postgres, or MariaDB? One purpose of an open source license is to allow many providers to provide the service. As I've talked about here previously, Elasticsearch wasn't able to provide the service I needed, so I had to move to AWS.
It's weird to me that the Hacker News community doesn't think that sort of competition is good. The narrative seems to be that all these businesses are somehow victims of AWS, when it seems the truth is much more straightforward: they provided open source software and people used it. The fact that their business had no working plan to actually monetize that foundation should not be taken out on the community.
Many support breaking up Amazon so others could compete not killing small entities and growing Amazon.
They took software that others gave away for free without restriction and did what they wanted with it. It took time but the community figured out this exploit path and patched it in subsequent license versions.
From a moral/ethic one, its still shit.
You're legally allowed to do a whole lot of things. You can still be called an asshole for doing them.
But you're right communities are now having to concoct a wild-growing collection of semi open-source licenses to protect themselves from abuse by a few big players.
Free Software was designed to avoid this, and has become stricter as the technology changed. Open Source was deliberately designed to thwart this. The entire intention of it was to allow businesses to resell work that was done for free. When you fork Free Software, your fork is also Free Software.
Also, Amazon were already contributing code back when these companies changed their licenses, the companies don't care about code contributions, just money.
This is pretty much a distinction without a difference. There are licences that qualify as one but not the other (per the FSF and OSI's determinations), but none are in widespread use.
> When you fork Free Software, your fork is also Free Software.
That would be copyleft. [0] Not all Free Software licences are copyleft licences.
I think the GPL has become somewhat obsolete because of this causing it create to completely nonsensical scenarios. For instance I can't comply with the GPL and add vanilla Stockfish (the currently strongest chess engine, licensed under GPL) to a chess app released on the Apple store, yet somebody can slightly modify the engine, keep all those modifications proprietary, and sell access to the engine on the same App store, without source access, so long as the computer is done through a middle-man server instead of being done locally.
The GPL no longer suffices to maintain the spirit of intent of the GPL. Like a peer comment mentioned it seems (??) that AGPL is their update to resolve this.
The only people with any justification for hurt feelings are the community contributors.
Just try a little bit of understanding.
Usually a community can tolerate changes only when it's not already near the bottom. When you're near the bottom, almost any destabilisation can kill your little system.
[0] https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/aldi-closes-west-pullman-c...
Even if it weren't AWS, someone else with enough determination could use the same open source code to create a compelling alternative taking away business from the original authors. Trying to use social norms to make people not do that is not effective. You need mechanisms that can be enforced via legal procedures to be effective.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...
We are supportive of 3rd party ink cartridges, and there's little concern for the business model of the printer manufacturers. We instead care about the rights of the folks using the printers.
With Postgres, no one bats an eye that there are thousands of hosting companies providing Postgres as an offering, and they give nothing back to the project. Same with Apache, Nextcloud, Linux, Nginx, Sqlite, and thousands of other pieces of open-source software. Are folks against hosting companies like https://yunohost.org/?
It's only when (1) the software is open-source, and (2) the entity behind it doesn't know how to sustain itself with open-source, that we suddenly change positions and view the project as a victim. This doesn't happen with printers, it doesn't happen with other open source software. I'm not even against a change in the license, but claiming that AWS is evil for doing this doesn't track.
Also, many of them predate hyperscalers and developed governance/economic structures that make them harder for AWS to capture or destabilize, whereas AWS free-riding a vendor-controlled project can destroy the economic engine sustaining the project itself.
Quite ironically, the only example from your list that doesn't predate hyperscalers (Nextcloud) is fundamentally a self-hosting/federation product. It exists largely as an alternative to hyperscaler-native platforms, not as a cloud primitive AWS can easily commoditise into its own stack.
So, treating PostgreSQL, Linux, Elasticsearch and Nextcloud as interchangeable "open source projects" ignores the completely different institutional and economic realities behind the projects.
But even if we factor that in, we have to remember it only applies to new models and it's only being added because some megacorporation stepped in, so that's not getting me to change sides.
i’m only familiar with the postgres side, but it seems like a more nuanced view of this debate would be to discuss aws monetizing open source relative to their upstream, community-beneficial contributions.
"More efficiently" means procurement efficiency, not operational efficiency. They're not the same thing.
We were going through a process to make vendor management more standardised and it reached a point where we couldn't even consider adding new vendors.
Adding new services to an existing vendor had minimal paperwork and approvals. As long as you had budget for it, you're unlikely to get any push back.
New vendors required tons of back and forth with legal. Infosec reviews. Additional costboards. Having to justify the vendor to multiple groups. Working out how you get them onboarded into the finance system. Once they're onboarded, we would then have additional paperwork to do periodic reviews to rate the vendor and make sure they're not a critical dependency that will bite us in the ass.
I've only worked with AWS and GCP, but they also throw training and credits at us, too. This could be personalised 2-day classroom events just for our company. There's a huge amount of perceived value for funnelling money through a cloud provider.
Ok, then don't be surprised when the most popular license becomes the FairSource license. Under this license, you have no rights, no ability to fork and no ability to modify, no ability to legally change the software in any way, but hey...you can see the source right. I feel like you don't understand the tragedy of the commons somehow.
> The Fair Core License, or FCL, is a mostly-permissive non-compete Fair Source license that eventually transitions to Open Source after 2 years.
I cannot possibly fathom how you're getting from "I deployed some GPLv3 software as part of my hosting service" to "sociopath that think(s) they have a right to steal from others."
Copyright, by default, reserves all rights for the author. The authors then chose to license under a license that explicitly gives all those rights back, and when users leverage those rights, it is being cast as theft. That's...not coherent.
These companies want it both ways: open-source to gain traction, closed-source to monetize. In other areas, we call this "enshittification", and that's what it is here, too.
More and more people are just focused on making a quick buck.
I'm getting a feeling that these people would gladly rip off a lemonade stand, and then defend themselves by saying the lemonade stand deserves it.
It's not 'competition'.
It's carnivorous, predatory.
Consider shifting gears and seeing all of this through the lens of 'power'.
There is no such thing as open/free markets when there is massive power asymmetry.
Anything that a weaker entity produces, will be 'taken' by a more powerful entity via all sorts of mechanisms.
The 'point' of IP/Open Sources liscencing can be whatever anyone wants it to be ...
but consider this: if the 'game' is on a tilted field, then almost all of the economic value goes into the hands of those with the power to reap the surplus - not the creator.
The 'owner' is who has power.
The Kings didn't rule by arbitrary decree - their money came from owning all the land. It doesn't matter how hard you work, how hard you innovate, how much surplus you create - if the landlord says 'I want all of that' and you have no choice.
Your Rent = All The Value of the Stuff You Create with a bit leftover for you to survive.
That is entirely done through legal ownership - not through some kind of forceful cocercion.
Control of distribution, access to financing, entrenched supplier / buyer relationships, barriers to entry, regulatory capture, economies of scale - all of that makes some systems unassailable without some degree of power.
Purely through the lens of power - Open Source is like 'commoditizing' a tiny little part of the system, where the surpluses will get pulled in by the most powerful entity.
In this case: Amazon.
Anyone writing software and 'making it free' - that Amazon can use - is working for Amazon for free.
Again: if you want to see it way.
If you just like 'making stuff' that's perfectly fine as well.
But - the moment you see this as a 'means to income' - then - it's a 'power dynamic'.
This is why better/smarter IP laws should help smaller players.
The whole point of these things is to try to enable actual competition - which is not 'feed David to Goliath' - its supposed to give David a chance.
The 'changing of license terms' by some small vendors is the result of Amazon suffocating them - it's the power system finding it's 'equilibrium' - where the 'creators' are snuffed out - or 'better yet for Amazon' keep working for free.
P.S. I think East India Company's history should be a mandatory lesson for everyone on the ability of a single company to take over a subcontinent. At its peak they had their own army, ruthless efficiency due to a largely meritocratic structure, and was successful in taking over multiple kingdoms.
Negative externalities. The company makes money using a free resource and disincentivises future development.
I'm sure you can see why killing the most popular business model for open source companies is bad for the ecosystem, right?
I do see issues with monopolies pushing inferior products onto users. But that would be a completely different issue, nothing to do with open source.
According to the original license they are both entitled to do that, that's the problem. Do you think it's sustainable for one company to make the software for free and another one to sell it for profit?
It's because the business model for ES is direct competition with AWS and others, and they got out competed. So they had to play licenses games to try and level the field.
It is?
- MongoDB went from AGPL to SSPL
- Redis went from BSD to SSPL
- Elasticsearch went from AGPL to SSPL
- CockroachDB went from Apache to BSL
- TimescaleDB went from Apache to Apache + TLS
- Graylog went from GPL to SSPL
> It's because the business model for ES is direct competition with AWS and others, and they got out competed. So they had to play licenses games to try and level the field.
That's why intellectual property law exist. If I spent years writing a book and you were allowed to copy it and sell it then obviously you're going to "out compete" me by default. You didn't incur any costs in producing the thing you're selling, duh!
But other databases don't need it, and stayed truly open source, because their business model doesn't rely on being the only hosting provider.
> You didn't incur any costs in producing the thing you're selling, duh!
Indeed, you gave it away for free, saying I could sell it... It doesn't take a business genius to know AWS can undercut your hosting services.
It goes to show that most of these companies don't really care about open source. They cared more about making money and open source was a useful facade to get people to contribute for free.
Exactly. You can sell the products of your work all the way you want.
But pretending to share with the world and then push back when the world actually use it under these same open terms is a hypocrisy.
And even that's overstating it because there's no prohibition of any kind. Cloud providers are free to use SSPL licensed software as long as they release all associated platform code.
After all we're sharing, right?
Other databases are already funded by cloud companies, predate the cloud, or they're too niche to bother.
I really don't see how Amazon is to blame for this problem, they weren't the ones who picked the license.
> Do you think it's sustainable for one company to make the software for free and another one to sell it for profit?
They both sell it for profit, let the most profitable one win.
Are you sure that's the case with AGPL? Cause they can sue them and enforce the contribution. I doubt that's the case. And those who went with MIT/BSD openly allow distribution without contribution.
Because parasitic antisocial behavior is viewed negatively.
> They both sell it for profit, let the most profitable one win.
Trying to apply market dynamics to selling things you didn't produce (or pay for) is fascinating...
Amazon doesn’t really have a leg to stand on in objection here. Building a platform to re-sell an open source project may end up fracturing that open source community’s user base, that’s a consequence of their own actions.
Open source companies should pick open source licenses that support that business model. They don't. It's short term thinking.
Maybe the business model / community-governance model does matter after all...
AWS RDS, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, etc. are all "pro" / "officially supported" deployments of PostgreSQL.
On top of that the PostgreSQL official website even lists a whole table full of vendors from whom you can get commercial support at https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/nort...
Bringing faux open source into the world isn't a justification for adopting an infeasible business model and then complaining that your business doesn't compete very well.
I'm not going to knock people for charging money to write proprietary software. If that's how you want to approach business dynamics as a software author, then by all means.
But trying to make money by extracting rent through a proprietary hold on your "open source" property, even as you claim to be open source, is too cute by half. Which one is it? The OSI definition hasn't substantially changed since the 90s, it's not like people can act surprised by what counts as open source.
There are ways to try to make money from open source, but they often involve leaning into the commons aspect and then offering a proprietary license as a relief valve for organizations not ready to have to pitch in, but who would be willing to offer up money instead.
Absent that, if you're literally going to be outcompeted on a business perspective on software you wrote, I can scarcely imagine what to tell you.
"Our consultants are recognizable from their many contributions to PostgreSQL"
"Our co-founders have written several books ... [co-founder] is also a core developer and project steering committee member on PostGIS and pgRouting projects"
"With a strong focus on PostgreSQL, they recently launched Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL, which delivers a single source, enterprise-grade, open-source installation of PostgreSQL Core Distribution." (Custom sales on software products based on the open-source original? Sounds almost like what AWS did with Redis)
Obviously these companies are likely to give back monetarily to the things needed by the open-source team, if only because their viability of their own business relies on having the open source product to sell expertise around. But a lot of companies simply use PostgreSQL and pay nothing, and that's fine too. It's all part of what it means to be an open-source product.
There's ultimately no reason Redis Labs couldn't have been successful as the Percona or KDAB of their own product's ecosystem. I guess they figured there was more money in hosting than services, or maybe Redis was simply too foolproof to need consultants?
Then why did they advertise themselves as open-source efforts when they weren't? They should have been the best possible providers of managed service offerings given they wrote the software they'd be managing, no?
Why are monopolies OK here but not elsewhere? Choosing a hard-to-win business model is not supposed to be a choice that guarantees you business income.
"free to pick by yourself" is the equivalent a proprietary freeware product, not an open-source product, because it excludes the idea of others picking strawberries. If that's your thing then by all means license it as such. But call it proprietary rather than open source.
Some companies make a living off a model of "free to pick as needed for as long as you agree to help tend the future strawberries held in common, even if your competitors pick strawberries. Or you can pay $10 for your own exclusive plot of land and no requirement to let others past your fence".
But that's not the model Redis was trying to use.
But if your point is that "open source" is a bad license that most people who use it come to regret later, then yes, I agree, and they probably shouldn't have advertised as open source from the beginning.
I didn't see the PHP or SquirrelMail contributors having a conniption when Dreamhost started offering free webmail with their hosting offering.
They're all just rug pulls when the creators want to get rich off of their open product and realize they can't after raising tens of millions.
I'd have a lot more sympathy if the story wasn't "closing an open project so we can pay investors"
But those license changes were a response to how AWS was monetizing their work in ways unsustainable for the upstream projects.
Or seen from the other side, these projects chose initial licenses that didn't fit with their wants for how others should use their project, in this mind.
If you use a license that gives people the freedom to host your project as a service and make money that way, without paying you, and your goal was to make money that specific way, it kind of feels like you chose the wrong license here.
What was unsustainable (considering this perspective) was less that outside actors did what they were allowed to do, and more that they chose a license that was incompatible with their actual goals.
But it’s ok to be voluntarily grateful for hard work.
You don't become a billionaire using that approach though.
Since they're a for profit entity, they'll do whatever they think offers the best cost/benefit.
Thats a really big deal, how did they legally managed to do the license change? I was under the impression that only works if the original owner is the doing most work
Copyleft protects against that as a general rule. However some projects that rely on copyleft require contributors to sign license agreements granting the project owners a more permissive license.
Almost all of these license changes just change the terms under which _new_ work is contributed - which is why many of them have forks from the last OSI-licensed commit.
I can't just translate Harry Potter to Spanish and sell it.
Redis was not an open source company when AWS moved to Valkey.
Companies are free to license under the AGPL if they want. Or other open source licenses.
Sorry, but non-open source companies aren't getting sympathy from me because they are hating on open source projects.
That original license probably helped them with goodwill and to gain a community; when those benefits no longer exceeded the downsides of using that license, they changed licenses to one that suited them better.
Naturally, this change costs them some amount of goodwill, a portion of the very goodwill that they harvested by choosing an open-source license in the first place.
If you leave some apples at the side of the road, with a sign "$1 per apple" or whatever, and people largely pay enough for you to continue to pick apples, that's great. If someone starts coming every day and taking the entire crate, I don't blame you for discontinuing the convenient apple sales, I blame the thief.
Yes it does. And it's moot because the apples were offered for free, no restriction on usage.
Valkey has some of the (formerly) most prolific Redis contributors for the era in which it was forked.
It’s like someone said “free whole apples, or $2/lb for sliced apples.”
And someone came, took all the whole apples, cut them, and sold them themselves.
Let's be pedantic, and say someone gave apples away in exchange for donations, and when everyone only got a few apples and donated, things are fine, but then someone decided they can just take all the apples and sell them elsewhere.
Is it the fault of the first guy for not offering free apples any more, or is the second guy why we can't have nice things?
What you’re calling “the spirit of” the analogy, others are seeing as “the bias embedded in” the analogy and you seem annoyed that people aren’t accepting your proposed analogy as a valid analog to the topic under discussion.
You think they’re changing the subject; others, including me, experience you as the one doing that.
The formerly OSS companies, you mean.
And I think the value that various cloud companies and tech companies derive from open source by far exceeds their contributions to it. When you add in the economic contribution, those OSS value-adds are an order of magnitude higher.
According this Harvard paper [1], the cost to create wide used open-source software once is about $4 Billion. The replacement value to firms that use OSS, if they had to build or buy the equivalents themselves, is about $8.8 Trillion. The Software spending effect (how much firms would need to spend on software without OSS) is 3.5x.
According to this EU study [2], EU companies invested about €1B in OSS in 2018, but in return the impact on the European economy was estimated €65B–€95B.
[1] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=65230 [2] https://opencommons.org/images/c/c1/The_impact_of_open_sourc...
No, you are your own worst enemy. Because of your attitude, OSS is going to go away as will all those economic benefits you are enjoying. But keep up with the its OK to pee in the pool type ethics of yours. Let's see where that gets you in the long run.
So you are annoyed I am using something for free and per the license that the authors set themselves and wanted no compensation. Got it.
Isn't that how literally all economic exchange works? Why do you think your boss pays your salary?
If the argument is that Amazon should invest 110% of their OSS-derived profits back into OSS, then OSS ceases to have any value to them. They would simply write their own closed-source software, which would be trivial for a company of Amazon's size, and we'd all be poorer off for not having OSS. Getting one percent of someone's profit is better than getting zero percent.
And I still remember JBoss and ahole Marc Fleury ...
But in context, it means “cloned/downloaded and offered as a hosted service.”
The fork came later, after the defensive license, which was in response to the clone+monetized hosting, eg ElasticSearch.
Next, upstream responded with a license change, then amazon escalated with the fork.
Is it supposed to be illegal for me to create my own homegrown database with the same API as MongoDB? If not, then when people start using it, can I offer a hosting solution?
I feel like that should be allowed. It's just not always a happy outcome for everyone...
Crazy sneaky complex billing in which they hit you for data movement within their own systems, double billing you and sometimes triple billing you. Billing footguns and traps are everywhere - you must be a deep expert to avoid them.
IAM - the hideously complex auth and access rules system - this was invented by Lucifer sitting on his burning throne in the ninth level of Hell as the worst possible torment for those who have been sent below for using AWS.
Well guess what, if you have a CRUD website and 100 users you're just not the target. Move on.
Some days ago I wanted to sketch a 3D model of my TV remote. I opened blender and what a mess of complicated windows and panes. I closed it immediatly. Do I think Blender is an over complicated mess? No, I just think I'm not the target. And I'm not offended to be too noob to use it.
It should be made clear though, that some of us helped spend many millions in obviously wasteful on-prem infra in the nineties, bought into AWS wholeheartedly when it came out, fought through the ignorance, developed the ability to deliver highly scaled applications on the platform over many years and at least some of us still carry those same beliefs:
- It's more complicated than it needs to be
- It's more expensive than it should be
- Pricing is more opaque than it should be
Meanwhile, the cost of other options (including self-managed, on-prem infra) has fallen massively since those early days of AWS.
There are also other things that the cloud hides in its price as well. Redundant networking, provisioning, rack space, internet connections, firewalls, UPS backup, power usage.
Still I think a lot of startups would benefit from hosting their own stuff if they intend to be a long term business instead of just shooting their shot and hoping to be acquired.
I clearly remember having a discussion with a very VERY large company I worked for at the time about getting some NVidia hardware for our own enterprise data centers and they flat out refused. Now, they have lost any advantage they could have had.
The issue with AWS is that they started off cheap, easy, simple and grew into an enterprise mess complete with opaque pricing. That's an issue. The complexity itself has created a whole new lane of work for the SRE where they can specialize in AWS and not do anything else. It's grown beyond just a cloud provider. People who are still expecting a cloud provider are going to be sour about it.
- dramatically simpler
- cheaper
- easier to budget
while retaining the scale-on-demand and hide-the-actual-hardware properties that the industry jumped for joy at. What they don't have is the nobody-got-fired-for-rearchitecting-to-aws bit.
If you want to host something complex enough to warrant AWS, you should also understand how to run it yourself.
These arguments for AWS are boring and sound like uninspired regurgitation of their sales pitch. I recall hearing the same about IIS and Windows a few decades back.
Turns out, they both have pretty good marketing departments!
It is about 8x more expensive to run it on AWS than it was on actual hardware. And that's using their reference architecture and designs. And the sprawling nature of AWS services and uptake makes it pretty damn hard to get out. We are slowly and quietly migrating everyting to IaaS / kubernetes so we can get it out again. Just moving to kubernetes and packing stuff tight on EKS and thus kubernetes has shaved 30% of our costs off already.
We were sold a lie and fell for it hook, line and sinker.
Edit: also fuck things like Lambda. It's literally the most horrible experience that the universe can muster. Moved most of our lambdas to simple boring http services on top of Go and just leave 20 instances running. Just not having to deal with CloudWatch saved us more money than Lambda could have.
imagine if instead of being a tied in to aws special interfaces lambda had shown up as closer to cloud run!
Though hopefully not the knative style that azure first went with and the LOOOOONG start times.
No, but it did press charges. We settled out of court, but my wife left me over the whole affair.
would you be more enamored by roofers who came to your house and couldn't break down your quote because they were too professional to know the cost of asphalt shingles?
is it more sophisticated to you that you go to a fish market and the price of the goods isn't listed and you have to ask the cashier for every catch?
perhaps we should all be artists who walk in to supply stores purchasing oil paints not caring what the tubes costs because you're not the target if you want to know the cost of your materials
It's also true that most companies which AWS does target shouldn't use it either, unless you have a good reason why ( like you need data centers in every continent or to quickly scale to 10+ thousands of cpus ).
Which for some reason many people think they need, while in reality 1% actually need it.
Cloud has pros and cons, both for small and large setups. I've spent ca 10 years working with GCP, and as the article says, there's a lot of complexity in these systems as well. And the network cost.. yikes
They almost always come from people that don't have experience running substantive infra at scale without AWS, so they can't make an informed comparison. The complexity of doing so, for a lot of infra, turns out to be lower than using AWS. Also, you end up with transferable skills and a deeper understanding of the foundational protocols and systems. And you save a lot of money, both because you don't have to pay to manage that complexity, and the systems themselves are cheaper.
It's super difficult on a psuedo-anonymous forum to discern if a comment comes from a neutral place or a heavily biased one.
This is made even worse when there's a financial or reputational incentive for people to parrot something. If I had invested the bulk of my professional career in Microsoft: I would be genuinely uncomfortable with criticism. I would subconsciously feel threatened and would work to convince myself and others that it's not so bad, or that criticisms are overblown.
This is even more true if the company actively spends (your companies) money to make you feel good. You neither feel the actual pinch of the financials and you feel good about the company.
It's really clever, and we're emotional animals: so we don't always make the most pragmatic choices.
I suspect that they could have achieved that result far cheaper on a different provider.
They treat big account owners like kings, they fly them out to Formula 1 events, they get 3 day workshops in swanky retreats, because a few k spent on this equals maybe millions of dollars.
If they respond to a small business quicker they don't get anything from it. They collect a bill that if it went missing they wouldn't notice.
I am not saying this is right - but people running small businesses on these platforms are operating under false pretenses.
Why do I say Hetzner?
It's very budget friendly and has a very small list of services so its much harder to screw yourself into a situation where its hard to leave.
For SMBs spending $10k - $100k a month, I would absolutely advise against that.
> Hetzner has the most unintuitive UI out of any host
> one of their competitors
I was with Azure before that and good lord was that a mistake. Miserable experience if all you need is a single VM.
Unfortunately a lot of developers still believe the AWS / GCP / Azure propaganda (tech evangelism, cloud advocacy, or whatever else you're calling it). Nowadays you shouldn't use them at all when starting up.
You’re serious and not acting in jest? Because people focus on their core competencies. Self hosting server infrastructure, or even self-administration via VPS or whatever, is orthogonal to the service being delivered to users.
Calling it “bread and butter” is some form of irony as those jobs are mostly gone now, it’s a data center monkeys job that maintains 10,000 servers across countless unknown clients.
Not if they need a server. I think you might be imagining this from an MSP perspective.
> Because people focus on their core competencies
The IT department handles the computers, it's always been that way. There is no group more competent at it than the IT guys.
> those jobs are mostly gone now, it’s a data center monkeys job
Onprem is still very much a thing, especially since AWS and VMware became expensive in the last couple of years.
The local/cloud thing is cyclical (started with mainframes, went to the pc, then back to the cloud) and I reckon with the cost of ai tokens the push back to local will be led by people running their own ai farms
IAM is just complex. I can't think of any implementation of "users, groups, roles, policies, identity providers, oidc" that is truly simple.
I'm reminded of a guy I worked with, who fought against Kubernetes adoption because it was "too complex", only to slowly reinvent Kubernetes badly, adhoc, out of vault, consul, systemd, nomad, iscsi, ansible, jenkins, puppet, bash, spit, glue... making lots of mistakes along the way. You think you don't need to implement some feature until you do.
Another thing I'll say about AWS (having been the sole infra guy at a few startups) is that it's well within most people's abilities to learn it. And you can usually avoid the shitty stuff. You think lambdas stuck? Don't use them! You could use EKS, ECS or bare EC2.
And that includes engkneers that only know how to use AWS and are terrified at having to learn something else.
(Also, those AWS services are not engineering-free. I tried to migrate a system to RDS once and gave up after quite a few hours when I got to the part of the documentation that suggested that I edit my sql dump using sed to get it into a form that RDS would accept. No, thanks.)
This is a surprisingly common pattern in technology and software. Some things are definitively the “standard” at this point yet so many people simply refuse to spend the time to properly learn them.
It is also a surprisingly common pattern to adopt very complicated solutions for applications that are never going to need them
ultimately it is not possible to come up with a "standard" that is an acceptable replacement for good judgement
IAM is great because it applies internally just like it does externally. The internal AWS team don't get more access than you do, and if we get access to do certain thing on your account to perform specific service that's because you have a service principle in your IAM trust relationship that allowed us access, that you can see, and audit. For instance, lambdas have lambda role because you don't want lambda service just reading your S3 buckets because "we're AWS we automatically get access", you can absolutely see and control access, even if it is internal to AWS.
That’s why it’s so complicated!!!
I don’t understand how I should evaluate trust for your internal EBS org versus your internal ALB org.
I kinda just expect it to be all “AWS” trust.
And it’s all garbage anyway. There’s no way I can prevent the hypothetically untrustworthy EBS team from surreptitiously adding charges to my account if they want to. Right? This would maybe make some sense if I could top level turn off/on services, but that isn’t how it works.
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I have no doubt this makes some sense from someone inside the machine, but from the outside it’s not helpful nor useful.
This would be very unwise from security standpoint. Internal access to customer stuff is granular and made hard for internal staff to gain, to minimize chances of screw up intentional or not.
1. It's about trust and auditability, while you may not want or need it, there are a lot of customer that are either interested or legally obligated to know who have accessed certain data.
2. It's about dogfooding - how would you trust an identity and access system when the company does not even use it internally?
3. In general, there are quick buttons and template to do it if you don't want to worry about it, in the LLM age, this gets easier. Personally I prefer this because I intensely dislike "magic". This allow you to control, to the maximum degree possible, what is actually going on, despite not owning any of the physical aspect of the data center.
We had an AWS rep try to sell us on an AI tool to help with predicting the IAM permissions that our infrastructure code needs. My response was, essentially, "why have you built a deterministic system so complicated that it needs an AI to configure correctly?" I have not had an answer.
And I don't think you do either.
Also the access are not "team", it's software. The control plane would have access to resource if you granted the service principle and then it would go ahead to do what was already written as service logic for those resource. The engineers do not gain access to your resource now - all prod service principles are access gated and we can only see certain non-PII logs as required by operational events. We don't run the service manually.
Hahahaha. No, fundamentally it is one input into a huge mess that you cannot actually see or audit from a 10k foot level.
AWS has produced a long, rambling and imprecise description of (some of?) what’s actually going on. You can read it here:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access_poli...
Some of what they’re describing doesn’t even live within the IAM umbrella as far as I can tell. I’m not convinced that a concise, formal and unambiguous specification exists anywhere, even within AWSes own development teams.
I’ve asked LLMs to write AWS “policy”. They get the grammar mostly right. They cannot explain what the effects are in a manner that they will stand by after they search the web for documentation. Since I have never found good documentation despite looking, I can’t personally do any better than the LLMs. I’d love to be pointed at real documentation or specs.
I don't work for IAM but I worked for several other teams over the years and IAM is actually one of the least confusing services. But I am definitely biased and have more than average amount of experience on this particular subject. I still think the general idea is more sane than Azure Account for example. I do think this reflect on the philosophical level where whether cloud are building blocks or are they consulting projects. I personally think IAM is done right in that regard.
I know they’re all checked. What don’t know is how the results of those checks are combined to get the final result. As far as I can tell, the result is not something like OR or AND — it seems like it’s something exceedingly complex and that the output of the policy part may be more complex than just a Boolean value.
Maybe the underlying implementation is fantastic (and my distinct impression is that AWS takes this stuff far more seriously than Azure), but that doesn’t mean that the docs are easy to find or that the system actually makes sense in anything other than an agglomeration-of-backwards-compatible-layers sense.
I mean something like actions: s3:cp Resource: bucketarn/key
Most of the time, actions are self explanatory and good enough, but i recently gave a developer permission to scale an asg, and it required a lot of unguessable actions, if i were to give "actions: scale" (forgot the correct cli parameter for it), it would make more clean env
The console kept warning me that I was giving root AWS access to my external application because they want people to use the locked in AWS path, and I was running off cloud.
On top of that, they break copy paste on the web console, so you can’t just ctrl-c ctrl-v and then ask Claude to explain their WTF-ery. Instead, you have to OCR or send a PNG.
I honestly did not think they could make IAM worse, yet here we are. Bastards.
As for simple permissions, go read the UNIX paper. It spends a page or two on their approach and is all you need.
Then, read the paper on mapping between NTFS SMB ACLs and NFS. It’s either impossible or undecidable, depending on the deployment. IAM is from the windows acl lineage which is known pessimal from a usability and security perspective.
However, the secret to IAM in AWS is to NOT use IAM. Just create separate AWS accounts for separate services and only share whatever resources are needed. Then you can have dead simple IAM policies because you won't need to do granular permissions ("AWS role X can access database Y").
My understanding is that different AWS accounts have different mappings of availability zones, so it's very easy to suddenly find yourself with an unexpected bandwidth bill due to all the cross-az traffic.
I've been irritated at AWS (and the other large cloud providers) that they charge $0.01/GB for cross-az traffic. That's $3.24/Mbps -- about the same I was paying for internet transit (as in: from London to anywhere in the world) 20 years ago, and this is just between two datacenters in the same city controlled by the same organisation, markup must be 10,000x or more considering these places are cross-connected with massive bundles of fiber!
As far as I remember, accounts within the same organization will have the same mapping. You also can use stable zone names these days, instead of the regular mappings.
And yeah, egress traffic pricing is freaking insane at this point. It's the biggest reason to NOT use AWS.
I know Azure has done a bunch of work around Pyramid Codes (essentially a locally repairable EC/RS variant), and Google obviously have the Colossus infrastructure that allows variable encodings, I'd be surprised if AWS is still triple-replicated everywhere.
S3 also has a reduced redundancy tier and infrequent access tiers that are quite a bit cheaper.
It _is_ expensive, but once you crunch all the numbers, it's actually not unreasonable. I'd argue that using the real S3 is overkill for most scenarios that don't need infinite scalability.
Let's say you have 10 data blocks, and you have 4 parity blocks. You can now lose 4 servers containing a block and still be able to repair the data, whereas in 3 x Replica you can only lose 2, and have to store everything 300% of size, instead of only 140%.
And yes, it is unreasonable how much they charge for both storage and inter-az bandwidth.
So I'm pretty sure that you need to have at least 2 full copies in different AZs, and then likely at least some additional redundancy within a single AZ (in the form of erasure codes or a full mirror).
So that's at least 3-4x the amount of data. 1Tb of NVMe SSD capacity is around $200 and with 3x redundancy that's $600, or about 2 years of AWS S3 storage. As I said, it's expensive but not unreasonable.
In fact, the RS configuration is often in the >50 data blocks and >10 parity blocks range (albeit with an LRC/nested RS config) for object stores because it's more important to have that recoverability than repair efficiency. While one large provider I worked at did have a system whereby they did effectively have two copies of the RS-encoded data (so that 130% turned into 260%) across two AZs, they were actively in the process of swapping to the blocks being evenly distributed across the AZs, near-halving the total required disk space.
As I said before, most object storage is not on SSD, it's on hard disk: it's 20% of the price per TB, and most objects are read very infrequently. I can promise you that they're not paying $200 for 1TB of SSD either... I realise prices are higher than sensible in the last 6 months, but it was fairly easy to pick up SSDs for under $50/TB at retail pricing (and hard disks for under $10/TB) only a year ago.
AWS: I came, I saw, I threw up in my mouth a little, I left.
If you are dynamically scaling a set of web services sure. The problem is that people use k8s for running batch pipelines and streaming analytic services and a bunch of other things too. And k8s is terrible at doing those things and entirely too complex. And if you don't have to scale your web services very often, then k8s is a waste in that case too. Its a right tool for the job and k8s's job isn't deploying to the cloud, its dynamically scaling a website.
The best way I can come up with to rack up a $75 bill for some prototype code is to vibe-code a thing that attempts to treat it like a SQL database with JOINs and GROUP BYs etc. Or similarly write code against it absent-mindedly with about as much understanding as a 2-year-old free AI tool.
Where it really shines is use-cases like I need like 1 or 2 simple relatively small tables of persistent storage and don't want to deal with a full RDBMS. Or I need 1 ridiculously huge table to be queried in a relatively simple way, and don't want to deal with fitting that data into a RDBMS.
I built an app a few years ago and needed some sort of DB to store around 50 million records that had ~10k reads+writes per month with 1 index. It cost me something like $50 to load it up initially, and then something stupid like 10 cents/month to maintain.
It is the same story over and over again. Your AWS bill is "low" because the actual resources you use are a tiny fraction of what a modern computer can deliver.
This is probably fine for your case, but you could run the same load on any toaster, and without a meaningfully demanding task it is hard to tell them apart.
I would not build in DynamoDB if you suspect your access patterns will drastically change over the lifetime of the application (or if you intend to, e.g., plan to build a data warehouse or something crazy with it).
1. you have a limited number of global supported indexes, 5 iirc, which means your queries are very limited. If your use case ever expands beyond that you're pretty screwed. 2. You will have race conditions. Strong consistency is 2x the cost, and not supported on global indexes. 3. Data is split into 10GB partitions and all the read/write quotas are split evenly by the number of partitions. 100 reads you're paying for is actually 10 reads per partition if you have 10 partition. Hot sharding becomes a real problem.
Take your document data, stick it in a JSONB and you get the same performance way cheaper + query able/indexable columns. The only time Dynamo wins I think is it scales well globally, but you probably dont need it
If you need high scale globally distributed persistent data, uniform distribution of hash reads/writes, dont care for schema, and know your query will remain simple yeah its a fine choice.
I just wouldn't consider it outside of enterprise level
you can create 20 global (GSI) and 5 local (LSI) indexes per table[1], I think the number must have been lower at some point in the past, because it's not the first time I hear this complaint
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...
For me though, it's not having to worry about DB uptime, performance, or version updates that keeps me reaching for DDB even for small hobbyist stuff. But I'm also comfortable architecting for it, probably more comfortable than I am for traditional dbs, so that's a huge part of it.
DynamoDB handled >100M qps during prime day, and its storage is effectively infinite. You don't have to self manage sharding, failover, CDC, etc.
disclaimer: I work for AWS (but not on DDB)
And every time it's a nightmare. I'm just banging out a server for my experimental card game, not setting up an new financial institution. Everything looks as if I'm preparing to scale to infinity tomorrow, with a staff of a thousand and a budget backed by VCs.
Fortunately there's Netlify and similar, who put a gloss on it so that I don't have to boil the ocean. I figure that one of these days I might actually be forced to learn IAM and VPNs and God only knows what else. Meantime, every time I touch it my eyes bug out.
You build something, well enough that it can handle the traffic, and people come, and it does.
Welcome to the gaming industry
Yes it is, we call these dreams a nightmare
It's a ghost of its former self, but I'd probably still rather use Heroku today than being forced to use Lightsail even once again.
Its not my favourite, but its not terrible.
Lightsail is pretty competitive (price wise) with other providers. Been running s B2B app on it for a few years now - nothing much, just your basic crud app running on lightsail instance + lightsail db. Nice to have a "monthly" rate on each instead of the EC2 opaque (and "surprise!") pricing.
You could do this, but for the life of me I can't imagine why you do this over using a platform like DO, vultr, hetzner or any one of a hundred similar services that will give you a better developer experience for this kind of workflow, often at a fraction of the price
For 90% of the time when they're up.
Their help page lists a bunch of 2FA app options, all of which run on phones, so it's understandable to think a phone is required. (I'm disappointed they don't list the app I use, which is Aegis Authenticator.)
But actually you can use any TOTP app, and they don't all need a phone. For example, macOS (desktop) has built-in TOTP 2FA as part of the password manager.
1. Vercel Phase My first project used Vercel. Since my project was Next.js, the experience was decent. But as my project gained some users, I found that even for projects under 100 users, I needed to pay $20 per month. Since my service didn't require high performance, this cost felt steep.
2. Self-host Phase (Hetzner + Coolify) Later, I started setting up my own server with Hetzner and deploying with Coolify. Since Coolify is open-source and free, I only had to cover the cost of a VPS (even $5 a month was sufficient). I could deploy PostgreSQL instances and run a web server on it. But later I discovered that even this way, I still had to spend a lot of effort maintaining PostgreSQL and Redis. Even though they were containerized with Docker, managing them was still troublesome. I needed to pass various system and environment variables between services, which was very tedious.
3. Cloudflare Phase So later I switched to Cloudflare. With Cloudflare Workers, I can deploy fullstack applications and use D1 Database and Cloudflare KV to replace Redis. These features can be called directly within the Worker without needing to pass environment variables.
Plus, the local development experience is excellent and the pricing is very reasonable, so I've been using Cloudflare's entire suite ever since.
Here are a couple reasons of mine (PS I'm still a little new)
1) V8 isolates for serverless functions to address cold start problems, sure the entire node env ain't there but libraries like Hono are designed to work in that env... Combine that with their near immediate start-up - simple lovely
2) UI, AWS to me feels soulless, like if there's an entire industry to make AWS UI not suck it's obvious their UI is just bad, upto the point where people pay a premium for a good UI. Cloudflare UI is so much nicer, atleast to me
I recently developed a library and for that I made a landing page and documentation with Astro (no server just static stuff), and I was checking out how to deploy this and Vercel and Cloudflare, Vercel had a 100Gb/ month of bandwidth free which is nice, what's even nicer is cloudflare has infinite (practical infinite not the theoretical infinite ofcourse)
And once again, that's just lovely to work with!
It seemed like the bindings you needed to set to allow email can't actually be set (or even seen once Wrangler sets them) from the console at all.
Did docker make it easier?
The only issue I have with PostgreSQL is a bit of migration effort moving to new major versions.
> I needed to pass various system and environment variables between services, which was very tedious.
Was docker making this harder?
I think a mix of 2. and 3. is good for a small team or solo dev. Im throwing in a bit of homelab as well by adding some action runners and models on my desktop as well.
But cloudflare is great value for small teams. Not sure how it as at higher scale.
On the topic of env and config. It took me a while to get this write, and maybe overengineered.
But I invested a lot of time in trying to standardize env definitions, secrets manager, and per env config definition defined in my nx projects, and consumed by the commands or deployers. As well as pulumi for IaC.
I tried a couple of different approaches, but finally I just decided to use typescript as my config language. I use nx project.json but defined using typescript. And just define the env config as typescript functions to be injected to each command or deployment as a pure function of target env.
For the past 10 years or so I've mostly used Heroku end then Fly. Last year I invested time into switching to self hosting with dokku for new projects. After the initial learning curve it's been great. Honestly don't see the point of using anything else except if I need to run something at the edge.
AWS takes as long as possible (for me it was a month) to respond to the initial DTO request, then require you to submit a multi-page form answering a barrage of questions about why you're leaving, where you're going to, what services you used, and estimated data egress. A week or so later, if they approve the request, you're not allowed to begin DTO until 60 days after the approval.
By the time you can egress your data for "free", you've been stuck on AWS for 3-4 months since you first made the decision to leave.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-i...
But to be fair, I deal with several customers that are in the double digit petabyte scale. When you’re operating at that scale, and have 7-figure AWS bills on a monthly basis, AWS is suddenly a lot more available to you and much more willing to accommodate pretty much anything.
This is why we're slowly and quietly moving back to a couple of cages in a DC. Well we were until the AI companies bought all the fuck RAM and SSDs.
Do you have proof of this? That is not disclosed in their policy.
They were using AWS, so I logged in the account to add a few more machines. Right there, in front of my eyes, were the signs of an adversarial, abusive relationship.
The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs.
I had to have the two tables open, cross check the specs and price.
If I had learned one thing from my past life was that if you see the signs of an abusive relationship, you have the option to walk out, and you don't, all that follows is your own fault.
Created a DigitalOcean account, moved everything over. Set up our CI/CDs to deploy there, and spent the next two months on the product, launching one month earlier than promised.
Some years before that I saw a video online where a person digs a hole near a river and puts a pipe connecting the river and the hole. The fishes push themselves hard in the pipe to get to their trap. Choosing the path of least resistance, and never backing off from a mistake: recipes to end up like those fishes. The video left a big impression on me.
> The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs.
I don’t want to be the one defending AWS, but I don’t think that this is a valid reason not to like them. I mean, pricing depends on so many factors like reserved/dedicated/spot/on-demand instances have all different prices.
I don’t even think that using the UI to spin up the machine is the right way to do that in an enterprise setting, you should always do that through Infrastructure as Code, to know exactly what you have up and running, just by looking at that as you would with any program. I’d suggest to use the UI for simple testing, for which the costs are often (but not always) negligible.
Jeff Bezos if you see this please send me some cash.
Let’s look at Lambda for a second. Deploying a lambda function to AWS costs literally nothing. And yet, depending on how it’s used, it can cost an infinite amount of money. Which price should it show?
There are far more sevices like Lambda than EC2.
"Estimated cost per 1000 invocations"
But that's the problem: The complexity of doing that properly is pretty much the same as just doing your own hardware (which is what I'm working with most of the time - handling stuff on physical servers). And at that point the question should be why you're paying AWS so much money and pay your people to automate AWS workflows when you could just pay them to automate workflows on physical hardware, which would be way cheaper to run than the AWS instances.
It should really be a read-only layer for metadata and logs.
Or you can have your own negotiated private pricing which is a whole different story in itself.
About using IaaC to set-up the infrastructure, sure, but sometimes you just need to browse stuff before actually writing code to get a feel.
I'm tired of people acting like complex infrastructure tooling is adversarial because it's not completely intuitive. Infrastructure is hard. AWS can give you tooling and docs with patterns to follow, but they can't read your mind. Neither can the PaaS providers - they just make choices on your behalf and hope it won't matter to you.
This is still hugely prevalent at some of the largest companies in the world
I get to see how a lot of companies use AWS. The console does make its appearances, but less and less often these days.
i just use vantage (https://instances.vantage.sh/) now. their api is functional and reasonable.
Heck, I even have a hard time telling the price I pay on an account by account basis; because we have savings plans, those get charged against the root account and then I see $0 spent on EC2 in the individual account because it's all covered with a savings plan.
And when I'm putting together that IaC and trying to decide which new instance type to upgrade to, I have to dig through multiple confusing interfaces to figure out that what I want is to upgrade from m8a.4xlarge to c8a.8xlarge and how much that is going to cost me.
If they know how to bill you then they obviously know how to consider and calculate all of these factors, they just choose not to show you up front.
If it bothers you that you need to open two tabs for cross-checking the costs, you may want to avoid every cloud provider, not just AWS.
Once you have NAT gateways, CloudFront, S3, auto scaling, loadbalancers, etc, calculating the cost becomes an art rather than an exact science. And if you don't use these, there is no point of using AWS, there are plenty of "cheap" VPS providers.
They cannot predict what my bandwidth consumption will be, or other such variable costs. For those, they tell you rates.
That's just for ec2. Everything is like this. Super awesome when you're being brought onto a new project and trying to estimate costs for your client. And let's not forget the little tiny things that should cost nothing. A NAT gateway with no redundancy is $30/mo. That's a fun surprise.
This is the "Comparison Table" from the EC2 launch wizard: https://imgur.com/a/YjFhkzb
The pricing is right there, along with filtering and sorting.
The main reason is this is only true for ec2 and every other resource has its own slightly different way of getting the cost, making it really easy to miss things like this. But here are the steps we take to get to your image.
- First you click compare instance types, and you're brought to a completely different page with a table.
- By default, there is no column for pricing, but two columns for "storage space" even though most of the instance types have these blank.
- There's nothing that says you can add columns to this page. You eventually figure out it's the gear icon.
- Then you click the gear on the top right to look at column names. You try searching the 44 column names for "price" or "cost" but both of those turn up blank, because there's no fuzzy searching.
- So rather than use the search box, you manually scroll through all 44 column names and find pricing at the bottom of the list.
This is the definition of out of the way. It's hard to imagine why you would default to showing two different storage columns over the pricing column, when half the instances are blank on storage.
Now do FSx, which has no pricing information at all, or any links to pricing information. They have an info tab telling you your backups are incremental, which would make you think they are fairly inexpensive. Not more expensive than the filesystem itself!
So they just added a default table widget, and they didn't even bother with customizing it. You can enable the context menu for the table's rows, which works and is empty.
I worked at AWS around 6 years ago, and we had a great win with just getting access to a service that provided the full list of available instance types and base prices.
This kind of disjointness is both good and bad. It's good in the sense that individual services stay within reasonable complexity, and usually all the functionality is available through the public APIs because the UI console is just another consumer of these APIs. AWS is also very careful with permissions, internal services try to avoid escalating privileges and try to perform everything using the user-visible access policies.
But it's bad because integration just sucks, and the UI layer is the ultimate example of this. AWS console _is_ really messy.
Yes, as long as you do not have seasonal traffic, auto-scaling, spot instances, burstable instances, saving plans, reserved instances, floor/custom pricing, etc. These are tools to optimize your spendings and spend less if you know what you are doing.
> defending deliberately obfuscated pricing
A bit contradictory that price simulators are fine, but then the pricing is deliberately obfuscated. Then which one?
I think about the diversity in usage patterns: from generating giant video stream broadcast somebody trying to calculate yet another digit of pi. It’s wild.
Is true, probably, that AWS doesn’t know how much anyone’s use case will cost (even when it’s yet another version of something we’ve seen before). Too many variable.
If only there were some kind of software with a text based, natural language interface that we could ask a question like “how much would it cost to do XYNZ on AWS?”
The suggestion to setup some kind of IAM policy to shut things down and stop resource usage is insanely complicated for users who need this kind of feature the most. If I’m learning AWS and just added my CC to it, I am the last person to be qualified to setup this kind of an alert and policy from scratch. This needs to be a single text input in the billing page, like it is for countless spend-as-you-go services. When the limit is hit, the service needs to stop the usage at the customers peril, because that’s what they customer requests.
Hope this helps.
We set this up at my last job like in 10 minutes. Complexity is a matter of perspective, and if your job to do this, you have done this many-many times, and you have ready to use infrastructure as code templates.
Yes, AWS is massive, the documentation is huge and makes things inherently complex, but flexible too. You can define what behavior do you want when you exceed your limits. We can argue whether this is obfuscation or complexity or what, but based on my experience AWS optimizes it's product for enterprise-ish companies, that can afford to have SREs who knows exactly what to do in such cases. That is where they have their own training/certification program. For simple use cases there is AWS Lightsail where pricing is simple and easy to understand.
But even if it would be insanely complicated, that is a reason to downvote? HN used to be better than this kind of "I don't like your comment, let's downvote it".
>AWS is not built around hobbyist needs
Yes, as if no startup teams are tasked to remain within hard spending targets when they're trying to build a POC with technologies that they are not initially experts in.
You might have leftover reserve instance that applies, which make the listed price inaccurate. That reservation might even be in a different AWS account in the same organization that you don't have access to. That reservation might not even be there between the time you quote and the time you actually launch it if someone/something did launch before you.
Your organization might also have discounts. I believe some discount may also be very confidential. For example, my reseller policy is that the customer must not be able to see AWS Billing in the organization root account as supposedly the price in that console are the price AWS charged the reseller, while we pay listed price minus any discount we negotiated ourselves.
Finally, I suppose they don't want to have prices shown in multiple places as they will need to update it when prices changes. Doesn't want to risk forgetting one place and getting sued for it. You can see that AWS documentations often do not want to mention the price at all, even if that price is currently free.
Chinese clouds kinda make this simple by making reservation part of the buying machine itself - you have to mark that particular machine as monthly/yearly committed when you start it (or convert it later). The complicated part is recycling instances - if you delete a server before its reservation ends it ends up in a recycle bin that you need to look before making new reservations.
No thank you
I spent 5 years optimizing spendings on AWS at various companies. Yes, it does come with traps and footguns. On the other hand if you know what are you doing, there are plenty of tools to optimize your spendings with RIs, saving plans, auto-scaling, etc, and spend less than the list prices.
Based on my experience AWS for the companies that can afford to pay surprise bills out of pocket if something goes wrong.
I agree with him/her, just shared my more nuanced take, based on my experience coming from my past workplaces.
I’ve never felt surprised by pricing. Cost has been surprising, but that happens when usage is surprising in my experience.
They absolutely could to you a base price on the ec2 setup page, but they don't. And I have been absolutely surprised by pricing. Services that do almost nothing could cost more than your ec2.
I've been working with AWS for nearly 10 years. Many people I know, both small and large, just don't even use the console. If I need to figure out how much a project costs I use the AWS pricing calculator. Having an ec2 pricing on the pricing page is meaningless once you spend any meaningful amount of time in AWS. Once you add discounts and reserved instances, that number is going to be inaccurate anyways.
If you just need a VPS provider, there are better, less complex options. I find these complaints kind of like stepping into an F1 car and complaining that the F1 car is deceiving you because theres no fuel gauge.
> If you just need a VPS provider, there are better, less complex options. I find these complaints kind of like stepping into an F1 car and complaining that the F1 car is deceiving you because theres no fuel gauge
That's fine if you feel that way. The article and following discussion is clearly about the smaller audience, and I think you're underestimating how far up these little problems stack and scale. If a couple grand is a rounding error to you, that's great. Most businesses fall firmly in the place where that would be a problem.
I think there is a value add for large companies on AWS, but for smaller ones, I don't particularly feel like AWS is an F1 car, more like a self driving Tesla that locks you inside when it's on fire. And I find the cavalier attitude that these companies aren't important enough to add the distinction to be exhausting. AWS is being pushed on everyone.
The complexity of AWS is because a service like AWS is complex. Neither Azure or GCP has any less complexity. DigitalOcean offers way less services and as a result is way less complex.
>And I find the cavalier attitude that these companies aren't important enough to add the distinction to be exhausting
They aren't important in the same way a F1 car doesn't think families are important enough to add a back row seat. No company is going to have fidelity to serve a perfect product to every market. The frustration comes from the misplaced belief that a product should serve every kind of user in the market.
I don't know of anyone saying you should buy an F1 car for your family, do you?
I do see people in this very thread with very different ideas of when AWS makes sense for you.
It's a metaphor. Your clients telling you they need you to deploy on AWS are the kind of people I believe are telling you to buy an F1 car to daily drive to whole foods. You said it yourself: "AWS is being pushed on everyone".
>I do see people in this very thread with very different ideas of when AWS makes sense for you.
Naturally. However, 99% of, what I believe are illegitimate complaints of AWS (AWS has tons of legitimate complaints), are from people who were probably better served by a using a simple VPS provider than a cloud provider. A VPS provider is simpler, easier to understand wrt to pricing, and cheaper. Most of the complexity in AWS comes from the fact that AWS itself is a very complex tool targeted to large organizations and deployments where people aren't using EC2 instances, or are using 100s of them. The complaint that the UI doesn't have enough affordances when trying to create a single EC2 instance is kind of ridiculous when you consider it's a tool designed for people launching 100s of instances. Nobody is reasonably launching 100 instances through the dashboard. Furthermore, if vendor lock-in is a concern you have AWS is the wrong tool.
Likewise for IAM. People complain a lot about IAM. But AWS has thousand different user types, and a 1000 different services. I've written my fair share of permission systems with a fraction of the amount of permutations. They always become complex due to the combinatorial nature. GCP manages to somehow be even worse. But you wouldn't need to deal with something like IAM if you just stuck with a VPS.
For instance, I don't see any pricing information when setting up an FSx filesystem, even for the size you setup. And there's definitely nothing saying backups will cost you more than storage (even though they are incremental?)
AWS is almost never required and almost never the best option. It's the Cisco of options, it's often the default but for no good reason other than someone on the team probably knows enough about AWS to make it work.
Almost every startup I've worked at has leveraged AWS as their primary but when not they end up using AWS for something. And in every startup there's always contention with AWS spend and all of these startups invest significant time and, funny enough money (via cost savings products or consulting), to reduce their AWS bill. And yet, they never seem to try anything else. Doomed to the cyclical cost savings cycle. Amazon knows this and the UI/UX is designed to keep companies in this money burning loop.
Finally, AWS isn't a silver bullet. For anyone in us-east-1, you know [0].
[0] https://mashable.com/article/amazon-web-services-outage-may-...
I probably should have commented on the original article here, but I pulled all of my company's production infra out of that AZ back in 2019 because AWS dragged its feet for too long deploying 5th gen hardware there.
I assumed the racks were full or something. I still don't know if they ever did get newer hardware in that AZ—I just avoid it like the plague.
I had a light chuckle this week when I discovered the work I did out of sheer frustration saved us from a partial outage seven years later.
On Google cloud compute, the ui shows an updated 'cost' as you start building your machine.
This is false. The price shows up right away when you select a machine. I dont work for AWS...
It gets far more complicated when you have reserved instances, and combine reserved instances with RAM sharing when working in a larger org.
I remember many years ago we hired a junior developer who just finished his internship at AWS and he showed me the dashboard he shipped all by himself in the summer with no product or designer help. It looked horrible.
Some devs have a good product/UX sense but the vast majority are horrendously bad at UX.
My point is that maybe it was intentional, but just bad UX culture.
Edit: It wasn't intentional
I think that applies both to Amazon's dev system and pricing system. From what I hear about the insides, alignment is chaotic neutral inside of Amazon, but that shouldn't affect how we judge the system itself.
In the end, our leadership changed what we were building so often that all of the UI work was scrapped long before we shipped. We ended up launching a janky console, quickly assembled by SDEs who were racing against deadlines. We skipped virtually all operational readiness work to meet the launch deadline. After claiming the launch win, the director, two managers, and the pm promptly left for other orgs.
Some background. I work at an Amazon sub. This is a good UI for the way we work. We don't spin up a single machine pretty much ever unless it's a cloud dev machine, at which point the price is listed at startup on a custom internal UI. They should consider putting that UI in the ec2 console.
When I spin up machines I pick an instance class by looking through specs and the price chart and set it via AI into a cdk construct. Usually pick a relatively normal machine type digging through all the ilvarious enterprise discounts (which are not reflectedin the prices in the console). Then as I roll out or when I get resource limit alarms on the fleet I adjust the instance types. Or when accounting asks me about price. In those cases I usually look if it's worth it to optimize.
The enterprise discounts are a big consideration. Every year new hires make bad decisions because they don't know about the discounts. They wildly affect total cost. Some things are more expensive (lambda first few years), and others are very cheap so we dog food. The console price in no way reflects reality.
In 15 years we've had about 1k services stood up, around 700 are active. 2000 or total counting tutorials and tests. That means out of an eng org of 500, we've made those decisions maybe 10k times total.
That's how Amazon thinks about it as well. So yeah I agree that the UI isn't meant to be like one where your spinning up a host. I haven't spun up a single host in like 5 years, but I've made many clusters.
But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be better to work for a wider audience. Customer obsession and all
This may be valid, but even if it is someone (or a group of people) at Amazon are violating one of their core leadership principles - Customer Obsession
https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
A useful (and hopefully delightful) UX is key to showing customer obsession.
That being said, I personally feel the UX at Amazon sucks overall, not just for pricing/packaging but even getting basic shit done. So perhaps Amazon (or at least AWS) doesn't think a good UX is a key ingredient to demonstrating Customer Obsession.
Ask me how I know
AWS services names are notoriously bad at communicating what they actually do: https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/
So no, they care zero about their customers, except maybe for getting as much money as possible out of it.
Often I see something that's supposed to be leaner - like Fargate is leaner than renting a whole server to run docker, right?
So it's cheaper as well? - Well, no.
Also if you reach any appreciable level of complexity, you should move to IaC - configuring all that stuff on the UI, and getting it right is torture.
> the UI flow is geared towards the idea that engineers don't really see the costs, they just build stuff and then management pays at the end of the month.
So this is about the engineers consuming AWS, not the ones who designed and implemented AWS
It was absolutely hammered into me in the years of working for startups that followed, though.
When I started my latest project my first rule was: I never have to login to AWS console. I didn’t achieve ‘never’ but I am pretty close and the experience is a lot better
I think the problem is that nobody understands the size of the problem.
For most tasks, the accomplishment is getting something to work. That takes 90% of the time. But the UI requires polish, working things out, backing out and trying again, and takes the OTHER 90% of the time.
I remember talking to a friend who worked with apple to port some dvd authoring software. And steve jobs started with the UI, and said "this is what you do". I think it was just a blank screen and you drag your video onto it. the software they were porting was a bunch of windows type confusing nonsense, and they had big changes to make.
That said, AWS might be a dark pattern. Remember the cable companies that didn't WANT to show the hidden fees? because $29.99 a month was really $71.41?
"Azure’s Security Vulnerabilities Are Out of Control" - https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/azures_vulnerabilities_ar...
I just read:
> If I had learned one thing from my past life was that if you see the signs of an abusive relationship, you have the option to walk out, and you don't, all that follows is your own fault.
so... :)
If you flee domestic violence you are more likely than not to lose custody of your children to your abuser.
That's because joint custody is the default and you need to have really good evidence when you want to restrict a kids access to their father.
> If you flee domestic violence you are more likely than not to lose custody of your children to your abuser.
"Being forced to allow kids to see their father" is, to you, the same as "losing custody of your children"?
You're talking absolute horse puckey here. I'm also pretty certain you don't believe it.
No matter what you may think of parents, it is absolutely horrific that someone will argue for restricting the rights of children, and do it in a way that he feels is acceptable in society (custody is only in small part about having access to one's children; the actual right is to the child, not the parent - the child has the right to access to their parent).
I wanted to make him understand that trampling over children's rights is not acceptable.
When you feel like someone else is doing something outrageous (e.g. trampling over children's rights), that of course gets pretty hard to do. In such cases the better options are to (1) wait until the activation subsides before posting, or (2) just walk away.
Incidentally, the GP comment was also a provocation, I suppose mostly because of the "cool fact" snark intensifier. But it wasn't enough of a violation to clear the bar for a moderation reply, whereas your post was. That's often the case with responses to provocation - they end up being even more provocative in their own right.
https://eng121.net/online%20textbook/cause-effect/The%20Wall...
Haven't had anything impacting in GovCloud, but if you're not there yet I'm sure there's shenanigans in the consumer version.
if you see the signs of an abusive relationship, you have the option to walk out, and you don't, all that follows is your own fault.
Ignores nothing, and blames no victim.
It advises people to avoid becoming one when possible.
Thing about abusive relationships is, though, many (I would go so far as to say "most" but I'm no expert on the numbers) people in one have lots of options to walk out... but they either don't know they can walk out, or they don't feel that they can.
So telling them it's their own fault for leaving, when they didn't really understand that leaving was an option, does blame them unfairly.
Now, when the analogy is employee-employer, the "don't feel that they can" so often doesn't apply: the psychological reason for not leaving ("but I love him!") is almost never something the employee feels. But the "I feel trapped" reason (it's the only job I could find that makes nearly the money I need for my mortgage, if I leave then we might lose the house, etc.) VERY often applies.
EDIT to add this P.S.: I understand the intent of saying that was to advise people "Hey, walk away when you get the chance, otherwise everything that happens to you was 100% avoidable". But saying "it's your fault" is going too far. I've seen people claim that statements purely intended as advice (like "Hey, if you park your car in THAT neighborhood, you might wanna lock your doors and not leave any valuables in sight so nobody smashes your window") are victim-blaming. But it's really, really about the phrasing. The example I gave was definitely NOT victim blaming. Saying "Well, you were asking for it by parking your car there" WOULD be victim-blaming. The way it's phrased is very important. And saying "all that follows is your fault" is most definitely wrongly blaming the victim.
If I know a dog is dangerous, but try to touch it anyway and get bitten - then yes the evil dog bit me, but it was my fault for not reacting to danger. Same way with a abusive company, if you know they are, but still make a contract because it seems convenient, then it is still a abusive company, but your fault for getting into a relationship with them.
At some stage, (regardless of law or what’s right), standing in a pedestrian-crossing on a busy thoroughfare is foolish.
Keep hanging out in the crosswalk hoping Bezos will stop for you,
if you want,
but don’t chastise those warning others to move.
But yes, people in abusive relationships (whether in their personal or professional lives) should be advised to get out of there, and should be helped to do so as best as you can. No qualms with that.
The idea that AWS is abusive seems a bit much to me. There is Amazon Lightsail for people who prefer pay-monthly upfront costs.
Edit: and when I say “99% of products”, I mean “99% of products where the team thinks they are building something too complicated for a simple setup”
Every time I've needed to manage something on AWS I've been shocked at just how over wrought the whole system is. There's tons of As-specific terminology for everything, and lots of stuff is tremendously complicated to manage. I can definitely understand why companies need to hire people who are experts in AWS specifically, it's complicated enough to justify that. However, for me personally I'd rather learn more traditional sysadmin systems. The skills are more evergreen, and I'd rather spend my time learning open systems than one tech giant's specific system.
About 6 months ago I needed to migrate some of our systems from DigitalOcean to Hetzner. It was a 2 day process that was very painless. The only complicated bit was managing the DNS switchover with zero downtime. If we were moving those same 3 components from AWS to GCP or Azure, it would have involved needing to rearchitect and rewrite a lot of software.
I'm sorry, what? I just tried the EC2 launch wizard, and the price is listed right in the dropdown with the instance types. Or you can open a table with comparisons and enable the price there, along with ~20 other instance type properties.
Yeah, the AWS UI is not great. But they go out of way to make pricing predictable and public.
Einstein split the atom. Newton explained gravity. Musk can land rockets backwards on floating platforms in the ocean.
But none of them could answer the ultimate question:
How do I stop AWS from charging me $47k because someone forgot to turn off a Kubernetes cluster?
Okay but https://ec2instances.info/ is right there. It's valid to point out that you shouldn't have to do that, but sometimes you just have to live with the relationships you have.
A) they are receiving massive discounts off of list prices, and
B) they’ve setup everything such that no-one working on the cloud can see the spend.
Companies just really don’t want employees to know what their spend is.
And, so if you keep it simple like this, it's not too complex and the costs are knowable - mostly VM hours and S3 for most of what I run.
But, the thing I've become increasingly disappointed with is simply the performance. The cpus are _slow_ - being forced to use EBS for a lot of things is _slow_ as hell; and starting/hydrating new VM volumes is super duper slow (have fun paying for fast launch).
So, for what you pay vs what you get, it's a huge difference, albeit very convenient.
Increasingly, I think about like racking stuff - like run most of your workload on dedicated hardware somewhere close to an AWS region and then burst into the cloud as needed and just use s3 in that region. Reduced cost, better performance for what matters, and you just pay for hands-on in the datacenter. Send them servers and just manage it all remotely.
The writing has been on the wall for a few years now, and this is particularly evident to those thar have worked at AWS: Amazon is in its day-2 era.
Amazon being in its day-2 era means that most of what has been written in the past twenty years about Amazon is bot valid anymore.
“Customer obsession” is literally their first leadership principle, and stellar support was their defining characteristic.
They've always struggled to hire for those roles. The people who are best at Engineering Support also tend to be the people who move on to other roles after a year or two.
I've had some run-ins with poor AWS support and have even gotten bill credits/refunds when they offered incorrect advice. It really depends on the service but in general they're fairly good.
yep, that's the point.
it used to be stellar on its own, now it's only good when you compare it to other vendors.
We intentionally engineer prod so it doesn't rely on any system in the colo (so nothing like 'store our config in git and the apps pull it on startup' type party tricks).
With memory prices right now it's harder to recommend expanding colocation but it's something every company needs to do (eventually). Not every system you have has equal production value.
I will bite the bullet and pay for RDS because it adds a lot of value - scalability, a reasonably optimized config, backups I don’t have to worry about.
But Elasticache is exploitatively priced with almost no value add.
It is slower, less optimized, less stable, and only supports one DB compared to a vanilla redis install with zero configuration.
There are some scalability improvements, but it’s extremely rare they’re even required because vanilla redis so wildly outperforms elasticache on a similar instance.
AWS doesn't add much in terms of APIs or polish. On the other hand, Redis/Valkey is one of the most simple services to self-host.
Use AWS at your own risk, Paul Vixie is not there to save you.
- It felt like far too much complexity just to do simple things.
- The obvious attempts to trap customers with slightly incompatible, higher level services felt gross
- The inability to run AWS trash on a dev machine had a MASSIVE hit on productivity
- Pricing didn't fall as fast as I felt it should (an obviously debatable position that reasonable, smart folks disagree with)
In my current company, we've been running basic SMB/tech startup functions on-prem (ACK! THE HORROR!) from ~6 basic computers (4 game machines and 2 nucs) for a few years now.
We just reconstituted the entire infra working part-time over about 2 weeks using Claude code and ansible.
It really doesn't make sense in this world to pay tens of thousands of dollars to rent a level of computation that can be purchased and managed for a tiny fraction of that money.
We're also seeing massive dividends paying out with this architecture because we have self-hosted gitea, along with a local workstation for our agents to run in, and now our agents have all of the context without us relying on Github or ingress/egress fees at all.
[edited for formatting only]
Perfect explanation - no notes
I don't think I remember anything so over-engineered and confusing in recent times (probably SELinux now that I think of it).
And I understand - we kinda need the complexity for what they intend to do but they do need a Come To Jesus moment here to make the Insane Asylum Machine make a bit more sense for mortals
2nd most annoying thing? Boto3 lib, where conventions don't matter and Pythonic is just a suggestion and the thing works more like a REST wrapper than anything else over a not-great API (please why tell me there's an S3 API and an S3Obj API)
This is always the weird things in those rants. He's complaining that after 4 days his mails are offline.
Now I'm doing a mix of physical servers in rented rackspace, and rented servers - but even there I can have billing mixups where they deactivate servers for no good reason. And to get email working again the limiting factor would be the DNS TTL - new servers would be online somewhere else within hours of it going down. (And yes, I tested that just last year - one hoster threatened cutoff due to non-payment on a paid invoice, which prompted me to move the mail server just in case while getting this resolved).
That he is complaining about his email being down or that he trusted AWS at all with email?
(to clarify: DNS+domain at the same service can be OK, as long as you have nothing else there. As soon as you start having other stuff, keep the DNS there, but move the domain registration away. Depending on which domain make sure you have auth keys, access to the admin domain or whatever would enable moving the domain without registrar cooperation. In my hosting days I did my fair share of emergency transfers and infrastructure to help companies get their basics online again after a SNAFU - totally doable to have first mail coming in again within a working day)
Yeah, no that's not how it works with email. You have to build reputation for weeks or receivers throttle you.
For outgoing emails, reputation is a huge issue, but at the same time it’s also fairly trivial to set up a (different) 3rd-party (gmail, outlook, sendgrid, whatever) with previous reputation so you can get back communicating.
1. IAM and policies. I’m not convinced that anyone knows how IAM rules and policy rules interact. There’s a flow chart that appears to be incomplete. There is not obviously a complete enough spec that one could, say, write a test suite to confirm that the actual behavior follows the spec. LLMs, of course, don’t know either because the training data does not exist.
2. Utter nonsense pricing. The cost of listing an S3 bucket goes up by an order of magnitude if you set the default storage class to archive despite this having nothing whatsoever to do with the operation in question. (But GCS adds two orders of magnitude for the same offense.) Conclusion: NEVER EVER set your default storage class to an archive tier.
3. Boto. It’s an Unbelievable Piece Of Crap. It’s not a library at all — it’s a meta-library that generates itself at runtime because someone had fun doing that and because Python didn’t stop them. Python type checkers, of course, just give up. And Boto is, um, a community project that AWS claims not to care about. Which is, of course, why its maintainers refused to fix an interop bug with GCS (I fully documented the entire bug for them, and the fix would have been the removal of a bit of pointless code).
4. Egress pricing. And the way it multiplies if you use any advanced VPC features. Why on Earth is it cheaper to sent an object to S3 from my own machine than to send the same object to the same endpoint from within a different AWS region nearby?
5. Authentication. It’s so bad that they invented Identity Center to try to unsuck it. But if you use Identity Center you get logged out even while actively using the console, and you get a helpful link to the WRONG PLACE to sign back in. Because of course core AWS isn’t even aware that Identity Center exists.
I don’t even use AWS very much. I’m sure I would fall in love with more of it if I did.
Am I the only one who remembers that VPSes and dedicated hosting services were a thing before AWS came around? Yes you had to pay for a month at a time and scaling wasn’t as instant, but it wasn’t like the only option before cloud computing was having to drive to the datacentre and install your own server.
The “in minutes” is doing a lot of the work in that sentence above.
I also used dedicated servers in the late ’90s (and they still offer great value today). But before AWS, provisioning new hardware typically took days, not minutes.
AWS changed that, and the rest of the industry eventually followed.
VPSes and non-custom configs for dedicated servers were pretty instant as far as I know, I think the advantage of AWS was more that you could scale up and down much more easily since you weren’t locked down in a monthly contract, and that you could automate server provisioning through an API.
The virtualised server thing was not a AWS thing, the thing that was were their other services. For example instead of renting a virtual server and installing a database on it. You could rent the database; that was sort of a new thing that AWS made in to thing.
It was never cheaper what you paid for was a promise of fire and forget. You would no longer need to worry about any responsibility to update the server or the database cause the AWS crew took care of that.
I miss the Media Temple days.
We had super bursty traffic, and had to go with Google Cloud (very early days! [0]) because you'd need to communicate with AWS and pre-warm the ELB capacity of your expected bursts.
We did a dead launch to 60 million customers (0 to 60 million, no organic growth phase) this way. I wouldn't want to do that on a VPS.
Well, besides for the fact that the author's got suspended for no reason, WorkMail is being shut down March 2027 anyway. I recommend checking out Purelymail for a budget, batteries included option. Another option is to run your own server but have it use something like AWS SES to send externally, avoiding the IP reputation issue.
Executives will always prefer to transfer liability and responsibility to someplace else.
Who's calling the shots in an organization? Engineers or executives?
On the one hand, they bust through a bunch of the pain points of setting it up and configuring it. Especially if you are trying to do it using something like Terraform etc. So they make it more accessible.
But on the other hand, they equally reduce the pain of building all the premium part of the offering yourself. Why do I need AWS ECS / ALB / autoscaling etc etc services if I can get all that configured on bare metal just as easy now?
So in a different scenario all the lock in and premium services wither away and it all reduces to commodity compute - in some sense, where it should never have left. Initially experienced joy as the bitter battles I fought with Terraform became smooth prompts I issued to have Claude deal with all my problems. Life has gotten much better. But I'm now definitely moving into frustration because it's clear that AWS is mostly a middleman causing friction now across a whole set of infra that I could be managing directly. So I'm paying for the privilege of all this frustration. Why?
I don't know at the moment which way this will go, but I'm quite curious about it.
I don't know... Maybe I spent too much time studying how to tame AWS using IaC and gitops reproducible deployments, but AWS lambda seemed to me the most impressively simple and inexpensive product. Once I did an complete project, from end to end, designing the architecture and flow of multiple lambdas communicating with each other through SQS queues to search, extract and load info from geotiff files from S3 into a PostgreSQL database, and it was really straightforward.
If you leverage docker images for deployment and separate the interface for treating lambda requests from the core logic, it doesn't have much space for surprises.
If the author went with the cliché that lambda scalability can harm your budget, it wouldn't be original, but at least it would have been plausible, but complex? I don't know, maybe someone could present the case with more deails for why it's so complex.
These people are professional amateurs. They don't know what they don't know so they post stupid posts like this and all the other know-nothings upvote it and comment likewise.
Seriously, there's nowhere online for good software engineering discussion.
their dashboards are trash & don't work - Google Cloud, AWS Console, Google Ads, Meta Ad manager
I won't even mention the hyped up LLM vendors.
but here we r - people being laid off due to A.I - money being funneled into Gigawatt datacenters
Innovation has ground to a halt of mostly just meh “hey us too” launches. Pricing and design patterns feel increasingly focused on locking you in. AWS folks tell me internally they talk a lot about making sure things are “sticky” with customers. The best engineering talent no longer wants to work there and it shows, especially in places like AI where AWS has just released wave after wave of discombobulated nonsense.
As a core “rent-a-server” concept with a few add on services there’s still a lot of utility, but AWS is gradually becoming a boring baseline utility with a ton of distracting half baked stuff jammed on top. Most companies I talk to are no longer focused on single cloud and increasingly are bringing a lot of workloads back on prem or in colos. Not everything, but for a lot of stuff that just makes more sense and is a heck of a lot cheaper.
The chips business in Annapurna is probably the most interesting thing and that plays to its strength of the boring low level infrastructure stuff. Nearly everything AWS tries to do beyond chips and rent-a-server plays is a hot mess.
AWS isn’t going away, but its future looks a lot less exciting and inspiring than the story that got us to this point.
I saw some 192 core instances on Vultr, but I haven't tried them yet. What are you doing with all them cores?
I often fantasized about spinning up hundreds of nodes for various projects that needed number crunching. Then realized "wait I can just rent one big box for an hour" haha. It's really cool that we can do that now.
The ancient forgotten art of Vertical Scaling.
Otherwise, some things that are good about AWS are as under:
1. IAM is I think good, logical and granular enough.
2. Separation of compute and storage in EC2 is very good.
3. S3 is amazing.
4. SQS is heavily underrated.
5. RDS is expensive but too good. I do not know how to go about 1 TB+ database size with daily backups without RDS. Similar ZFS setup with file system snapshots is complicated.
Not good things about AWS:
1. Super expensive. About 10 times. With zero support.
2. Current geopolitical environment would suggest getting off AWS if you are not a US company. The fascist idiots at the helm of affairs have lower IQ than the big void's average temperature in outer space.
EDIT: Typo + Formatting
What most people realize, that you don't have to go microservice or fragment your code to a billion little repos, you could take a standard webserver, and move it to lambda, as long as you don't expect requests to be able to share on-server state.
Then you have to take care to update your images etc.
All this stuff, like ECS also lives in a subnet, so you have to manage routing, and public accessibility and stuff - its legit crazy amout of work compared to either lambda or just running stuff on a virtual machine.
Imo it's the worst of all worlds.
Dead simple on GCP Cloud Run.
lol ok. I have ~50 lambdas running in my personal aws account. Some of them are webservers running behind an api gateway or using a lambda function url to expose them to the internet. Some are running on a schedule, some are triggered from s3 events. The cost to run these for me is less than the cost of the cheapest vps (my total requests per month stay under the free tier limit). There is also zero maintenance I need to do for these functions (ok, this year I did have to find-replace al2 to al.2023 in my terraform config). I don't have to worry about making sure the os is patched for the latest vulnerabilities. And I don't have to worry about the specific hardware my code is running on at any time. Doing maintenance for old projects sucks. It is great to have servers I deployed years ago continue to chug along without me needing to think about it.
Now, all of my lambdas are written in Go and I suspect if I was using one of the manged runtime libraries I would find the language upgrades to be quite annoying. Go also helps quite a lot with cold start times.
Then again maybe I have just drank the koolaid. In my quest to use lambdas for as much as I can as cheaply as I can, I made a library[0] to use sqlite on top of s3 (not just readonly). It uses the sqlite session extension plus s3 compare-and-swap to allow you to write updates safely to s3, even if you have concurrent writers.
I don't think this is a valid argument. Free-tier VPS do exist also.
On the other hand, if you don't trust unattended-upgrades [0], and prefer to spend time poking package manager manually (while at the same time considering that time an expense) - sure, that's a strong argument in favour of using lambda.
[0] https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/how-to/software/automatic-upd...
DynamoDB: I think DynamoDB is great, actually, if you think about your use cases up front and thoroughly. For most apps, that just isn't realistic and it is too easy to paint yourself into a corner. If you're not sure what you're doing, you are better off with a traditional database.
Lambda: Don't use it for your backend / API. There are too many weird limitations: request and response sizes, timeouts, etc. For handling "events" emitted by other AWS services, it is often fine (example: do something when there is an S3 upload.) I prefer ECS/Fargate for API.
I’ve a couple of apps doing a few million a day. I am using Hetzner and before that used DigitalOcean. Mind you, for close to a decade.
People are unnecessarily complicating stuff, and these clouds can go very expensive very quickly.
Recently, I came across a company and they were spending $20k a month on GCP. I am like, are you kidding me, $20K for the kind of stuff you do??? It seems you do not understand how CPU, RAM and Disk work to plaster such "autoscaling hyper solutions" burning money in cloud.
I moved their stuff out of the GCP managed solution and ended up with a $200-400 per month bill. The CEO can still not believe how it's even possible.
I suggested them move to Dedicated servers but they didn't want it, they said they must show they are on Hyperscaling cloud.
OK fine, we'll stay in Hyperscaler but not use any of their service other than VMs.
They racked up a ton of bills by using cloud monitoring, Datastore, and autoscalers (with no proper tuning), Kubernetes.
I replaced all of it with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and most stuff from Datastore to Postgres and Mongo with replicas. I added Redis.
I implemented a custom scaler where you can scale off of app metrics, not by just using a random peg on CPU.
I implement hot data reload by packing the data updates in gzip file, uploading to GCS and pulling from autoscaled units. Moved the stuff to Spot VMs.
The complexity of stuff in cloud is high for nothing.
By the time I joined, 18 months after development had started, a giant, complex, hideously tentacled software beast had been built that used every possible AWS service that the massive offshore team of developers could find to use.
It should have been built on a single Linux box by a single senior developer with Python and Postgres or nodejs or Ruby or whatever.
They went out of business after not too long and I couldn't help wondering if things might have been different if they hadn't spent a fortune building a giant money making machine for AWS, instead of making a web application on a Linux box.
Every AWS project I have worked on has had some significant work put into programming AWS instead of writing business functionality.
To be fair, if they had a AWS Solution Architect involved they heavily push you down this road and if they manage to get in management's ear they'll push the idea that server-less AWS features is vastly cheaper.
If you're only responding to a handful of requests that's true, but once things ramp up you get "nickel and dimed" for everything: API Gateway requests, lambda execution time, DynamoDB read/write units, CloudWatch logs, outgoing data, step function transitions, S3 requests.
I understand all those services cost money and they shouldn't be free, but I question if paying all those micro-transactions is worse then paying for your own VMs, especially once your customers complain about the cold starts and you think you can fix it with "lambda warming"
I agree that it's overcomplicated. Although having the self-service portal also for assigning IPs is useful. But most of it seems overkill. Although, being able to detach storage from VMs and such is also quite flexible. But still.
Our 64 core spot instances on windows were taking 8-10x longer than our developer machines with the same core count, and there was a bunch of engineering went into the scaling, queue management, etc. if we’d just had a single bare metal machine from hetzner we could have saved money _and_ reduced our iteration times.
At a previous bigger company, getting procurement to sign up to a new provider requires writing a business case, justifying the spend and then getting multiple competing quotes and speaking to their sales teams. Signing up to a new service takes _months_ even for $10/mo as they’ll negotiate for bulk discounts and the best possible terms for something that will literally cost less per year than one of meetings they hold to discuss the “value”. Meanwhile on AWS I can click a button in the marketplace and it gets thrown in the AWS account which is pre approved spending.
Watched one company end up with a $250k AWS bill when their credits expired (which they could not pay).
As an example, they needed a lot of proxy servers. Instead of just using a proxy service, there was a fleet of ec2 instances.
We use it because we don’t want to deal with slow procurement process. It kills all the momentum.
You removed all of their logging and all of their redundancy and reliability and replaced it with shitters that will all explode if the small providers one data centre goes down.
And if someone penetrates this mega server, they’ll be able to wipe all your logs or tamper with them, to hide the attack.
If your storage servers go down, everything they have is gone. And these providers don’t offer the finest hardware. How do you know all of those drives aren’t from the same batch? They will be, because they’re a bulk buyer with a single data centre.
they'll never need it, a misconfiguration on those service ends up costing several grands.
>If your storage servers go down, everything they have is gone
It’s just logs for an app server, not some banking critical info that will cause a panic if lost. Most of what they are using for logging is for finding some errors, not for mission-critical things which must not be lost.
Because it's explicitly something you can request when doing your server order from your vendor. In this particular case several years ago, Nutanix did good.
> burning money in cloud
I suspect there's two reasons why this happens.
One is just the disassociation with opex that seems ever present in the VC model. The other is that many startups settle in on a ops solution before hiring ops and the cost of switching isn't that attractive until they're faced with a dwindling runway and a down round.
Sounds expensive
Those tend to be tricky hires on the small end since you tend to want jack-of-all-trades who either demands a premium salary or doesn't exist.
When you have 10 software engineers, having 1 dedicate 10-20% of their time is cheaper than hiring 1-2 FTEs that aren't writing code.
If you can get (and trust they do it right) developers to do AWS or Kubernetes, you should be able to trust them to do conventional Linux sysadmin on a bunch of dedicated boxes.
A full stack/backed dev is more than capable of learning both, but one of those has way more foot guns than the other.
A few years ago I worked at a place that was on AWS ECS and I think I can count on 1 hand the number of times I needed to SSH into a machine each year. Half of those times were SSHing into the singular VM we had that ran a Strong Swan IPsec tunnel to a vendor.
The current place I work we have bastions and EKS. Occasionally, I SSH into a bastion but usually just use Cloudflare Tunnels (they run as k8s pods and the control plane is private so the bastions are helpful for bootstrapping things). Out of that stuff, it's all been converted to immutable infrastructure and gets recreated once a month with the latest AMI. Probably could kill the bastions and run Cloudflare Tunnel agents on Fargate on ECS to eliminate all the o.g. sysadmin work but some people are nostalgic so I gotta wean em off VMs
You moved something from a single datastore to three different database technologies? I don't know your domain, but that sure doesn't sound like a complexity reduction.
what's bad about graphana? it's simply used for some alerts and monitoring, i've used it for really long time and it has never failed me not even once.
it's much simpler to query postgres or mongo compared to duplicating data dozens of times on datastore.
I can't really judge your database choices; I don't know your specific problems, we're just trading quips on the internet for fun. But man oh man grafana is disappointing.
I can stand something up on AWS in a couple hours and be fairly confident it will run reliably (assuming their service offering is actually decent--some suck)
We test backups and they never fail. Metrics and logs always work.
>People are unnecessarily complicating stuff, and these clouds can go very expensive very quickly.
I don't think that's the cloud vendors fault. They make it easy to stand up new services so people get overly enthusiastic and create convoluted architectures. Have Postgres but need full text search? OpenSearch is just a few clicks (well hopefully IaC config..) away, let's use that! When you're building yourself and need to setup the stack, instrument, monitor, configure backups the cost is high enough where you say "hey, maybe pg fts is fine for now"
This is the main reason; and it applies to developers (they need cloud buzzwords on their resume), it applies to managers (who in turn hire only those with said buzzwords) and it applies to company execs/CTOs who can brag about the complex (self-inflicted) problems their company is solving at the next cloud provider conference, so they can justify yet another VC round.
Run this for over a decade, and you'll end up in a situation where an entire generation of "engineers" is no longer capable of configuring a Linux box to serve some basic webapp and will make up whatever reasons to avoid even attempting to do so.
I think we spend around 5k in aws, and I’m pretty sure we could be much more performant for a fraction of that price.
The problem is, who is going to setup everything? Hiring someone would for sure cost more than 5k
But now you need staffing/headcount to be experts in, and maintain, upgrade and be oncall for this stuff?
Custom scalers? Running prometheus, grafana, etc?
DX is simple, integrations between the two, and the stack is well understood by the LLM.
Lovable uses supabase, and is surprisingly easy to eject from too; I've done the lovable to Vercel + supabase a couple of times, even managing to keep it syncing via the Git integration. You can get proper scalable infra and minimal vendor lock in whilst the vibe coder gets to play with the pretty.
Nobody wants to hear this, but as things stand, there's no escaping risk for vibe coders right now. Personally, I think AWS is still a good choice for the long run, but don't make the mistake of thinking current LLMs will actually be able to manage the environment on par with a decent infra engineer. That's one of their weaker areas right now. Good news is there are million managed service providers and AWS-competent humans still in existence. Also Premium Support is a good resource.
Whatever you do, make a lot of backups and store them on a different service somewhere. Then if you get to a situation where you need to do something with sensitive data, or need to raise money, engage with someone who can do a proper review.
The old rack/cage way was less convenient, but it came with a respect for our anatomy to run our stuff that I really miss.
Autonomy?
[autocorrect strikes again! :-)]
They made hosting their software hard, intentionally.
For example, prohibiting more than one node/replica, and being hostile to PRs/features that they consider their ”commercial offering”.
But the worst thing I’ve seen, for many software, is probably the hostility towards people who want to automate the software, for example putting the software in a container (10 years ago), then they refused to give support even if you had a valid paid contract.
AWS has much bigger mindshare, thats it. Google has a well deserved reputation killing products, but their actual products/APIs are so much nicer.
Haven't used Azure but I bet its much better integrated as well.
After wrestling with their garbage for weeks, we started over and built a VPS from scratch. Development and deployment proceeded without a hitch after that. The only vestige remaining was S3.
I'm in the midst of a new project now, and I'm not even considering Amazon, even for S3 this time. I'm going to use an S3-compatible layer just in case, but I don't want to give Amazon a dime anymore.
Lambda is incredibly simple to use, it just runs a function for you.
Not sure how you could burn so much with dynamodb. It’s serverless and incredibly cheap. Must have been doing something insane like a huge dataset where you scan through it over and over.
Being salty that Gary couldn’t sell enough of his paid service and AWS is competing with it isn’t a meaningful complaint. I want something in AWS, not on Gary’s servers.
Clearly there are many people - including me - who built highly scalable, available and near maintenance-free systems using DynamoDB for a ridiculously low cost.
I have no idea how you can actually burn more than $5 in development for DDB. If you don't make the effort to explore what a technology is built for and/or clearly didn't understand it, maybe you should holding back ranting about it. Unless you want to look like a fool.
Same goes for IAM. It's complex but still easily understandable to get the basics. Creating e.g. a rule where you can only read from a DynamoDB table but not delete entries or the whole table takes you under 10 clicks.
I've been holding Hacker News in too high of esteem for too long I think. Most people on here are amateurs at best. The complaints about AWS/Cloud and LLMs are getting too loud. Did the industry pull in too many inexperienced during covid and now we're witnessing the backlash or something?
I've been doing this a long time. Running hardware, running VPS in the cloud, and running on AWS. I'll never go back to hardware/on-prem.
That’s why it’s so far been hard to go past Outlook Plan 1 for (big scale) email hosting.
Completely agree about AWS, and we use Cloudflare now, but the jury is kind of out on whether CF is largely going the same way.
I lack that confidence with Amazon or Google support.
AWS IAM is extremely well designed when you compare it with the spaghetti monster IAM systems of other clouds.
Every time I try the new cool thing supposed to replace these services on some other provider - I understand how mature and polished the AWS ones are.
With that said, the rest 90% of AWS services like WorkMail, Cognito, API Gateway, are absolute hot garbage which no good meaning AWS expert will touch with a 10 meter stick.
Agree, so is STS and SDKs generally just work. I don't miss on-prem companies with legacy Auth where you maintained 100 service accounts for everything with very careful password vaulting and credentials management policies. So much easier to use IAM policies.
>are absolute hot garbage
I kind of like Cognito but both Cognito and especially API Gateway are somewhat convoluted to configure. They seem to work fine once you have them setup right, tho.
Talking about hot garbage... Not a fan of Redshift and Lake Formation at all. We switched to Snowflake, saved money, got better performance, and had a simpler setup. Really there was nothing about Redshift that was better. We're billed through Marketplace so there's not even a consolidated billing upside.
Imo Redshift is a relic of the past and has failed to modernize.
First, the comparison of running an Anthropic model in Bedrock vs. Claude Code is not apples-to-apples. With Bedrock pay API pricing (or whatever negotiated pricing AWS and the vendor agreed to), just like the other providers in Bedrock. You know what else is more expensive/token than a Claude Code subscription? API access for pretty much all of the other big providers. Whether we like it or not, Anthropic sees subscrition usage as different than API usage. This is not at all an AWS thing.
Second, regarding Lambda: the cold start criticism is fair but for heavy workloads usually isn't an issue and for light workloads there are some workarounds. But, if you have a discreet function that can exist outside of your app, Lambda still may be a better option here. As far as the "MASSIVE development complexity" I wish the author cited specifics. I feel like this can be true of any technology and depends on how you go about setting it up and implementing it. I've used Lambda for all sorts of use cases, including a full web application (I'd advise staying away from this one!) and there definitely is a sweet spot where it can work well.
Lastly, the whole bit about using AWS WorkMail would also suggest they never really "left" AWS. But maybe I misunderstood that part as I'm not very familiar with that service.
Hey good lookin'
but unlike OP I just accepted this fate and moved away from aws :)
AWS used to have a nifty tool called "policy analyzer" or something that monitored for permissions used by a role so you could scope it down. The other day I had the need for it and when I went to use it, found out they charge something like $9/resource. So I would pay $45/month for metadata monitoring on just 5 things? Nuts. If they knew how to build truly delightful products, they would make something like a role that starts with broad permissions and automatically scopes itself down after some point. And it would be free or at least really cheap.
DDB is hardly a database. The only reason I can think of to use it is for massive amounts of data whose schema and query patterns are guaranteed to almost never change, which is very rare. Need to sort data on a field? Then you have to create a 'secondary index', which is a copy of the table that they charge you for and that is not strongly consistent. Schema change? Good luck with that. And don't you dare ask to use a nice ORM library. But hey it's serverless.
Here's a good one: you stop an EC2 instance and its volume keeps running and you pay for that. If you detach the volume, you still pay. There is no way to 'archive' an instance. And the only way I found out about that was I got hit with a big bill for those volumes with the charge labeled 'EC2 - Other' lol. Not very 'customer obsessed' to me.
My gripes are clearly not important to them because this is old stuff. So all I can do is go somewhere else, which is fine with me
1. You need an "infinitely scalable" key/value store and have deep pockets[0]
2. you work at AWS and your deployment pipeline has so many stages and regions and fabrics that you can no longer even conceptualize what it means for there to be a "current version" of your software (the hell in which I live).
But for some awful reason it's sold as a general purpose "NoSQL Database." Pair that with the Pavlovian response developers have to the word "scale" and you've got an army of people using the worst possible tech for their usecase. Everyone eventually pairs DDB with Elastic whenever "Oh, wait, so we need to be able to query our data?" hits.
[0] And you ONLY need PK reads. Querying turns "infinite scale" into "infinite throttles."
I wish Azure just worked at all.
from the UI it is even worse
also how it is so slowwwwwww
This guy needs supabase or heroku or similar.
They have lost 3785.90 euros in sales due to their idiotic anti-user war.
Not to mention of all bad reputation that I gave them.
I agree with few of the things that have annoyed Andrew Stuart, and brought him to leave. I disagree with a few. Let's pick one: DynamoDB was brilliant. I even knew one of the key engineers behind it, Stefano Stefani, as brilliant as he was hilariously funny as a person. It solved large scale problems beautifully, much better than SimpleDB or a combination of that and S3 would be able to do.
But I really disagree with one thing:
> And recently I went back to AWS. WHAT?!?!? WHY? You might ask. To get some research done. Do a few tests, get in and out.
I would never trust a person doing this, and would never hire him/her ever.
I think you misunderstood the blog post. I was never employed by AWS, I was a customer.
Since there’s people here from AWS I’ll give some feedback that might prevent posts like this……. if you suspend/restrict someone’s account - put yourself in their shoes - they probably want it back on line real fast. AWS needs to analyse the customer experience of restricted accounts/suspended accounts.
Go back and read the support contact records of each customer account restriction/suspension - how long did it take AWS to respond, did the customer know clearly what steps to fix it. Etc etc
Also if the support form says they’ll respond within 24 hours then really there should be a response within 24 hours. Also there shouldn’t be special insider knowledge needed to “use the chat, they actually respond to it, versus the web messages”.
You might even get customer obsessed about it. :-)
It is not a good reason to look for employment to "get in and out". If I were your hiring manager, I would be upset to know.
Mike Culver, great guy and a bit of a mentor to me. Yes, very sadly he passed away several years ago now. RIP.
You keep mentioning employment… but I was a customer never an employee of AWS.
Please reread the post….
Reddit died quite a while ago and I was holding on to Hacker News, but with all the anti-LLM posts and the anti-cloud fud I see on here it's obviously not here either any more.
What is going on that all the "engineering" users are anti-engineering, against change and advancement?
You guys posting this shit have to realize you're working on podunk garbage coding projects right? If you're finding AWS overly complex this is sounding more like a YOU problem.
Those of you saying on-prem is better, you're saying a lot more about yourself, your experience (lack of) and the project you're working on than you're saying about cloud.
Like holy fuck, how can you hate lambda? It's STUPID simple wtf???
...
I was writing a long vent about GCP but the mix of issues we had, just in the last few weeks, was too identifying and I don't want to sour an already tremulous relationship, as much as I'd like to spill it all here.
Let's just sum it up with resource crunch and degraded services because, apparently, when one customer signs a $200B deal [1] all the "just a few $10M" get thrown to the wayside.
AWS is also affected. Time to go to Azure? I never thought I'd say those words.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2165585/anthropic-reportedly-agrees...
Why don't cloud services have reviews like amazon products.- I’m so tired of enterprise sales speak in corporate docs- just cut the BS and do straight talk
If you haven’t used a service you shouldn’t have to search reddit for dev experience on it
You mean the alarm that shows up with a notification bell in your console? Why not just post that?
> I am dreading having to "request quota" to be allowed to do that.
Why? It works fine. I've done it several times.
> IAM - the hideously complex auth and access rules system - this was invented by Lucifer sitting on his burning throne in the ninth level of Hell as the worst possible torment for those who have been sent below for using AWS.
It's literally a JSON policy document.
> - once I noticed the complexity of IAM I could not unsee the complexity everywhere in AWS.
All our policy actions are scripted at this point. You specify what functions the lambda calls and it builds the policy for you, sends it to IAM, and attaches it to the lambda.
Everytime I see someone complain about AWS I'm left wondering "did you read _any_ of the documentation? If you just want a linux server then run that but if you want out of the hassle of managing one then you need to learn just a _handful_ of new tricks."
If half the effort of complaining about AWS was spent reading documentation then most of these articles would never be published.
Put more bluntly, if you're using the AWS Console to spin-up/spin-down service instances you're doing it wrong.
CDK (atm) as limitations and it's also got a more imperative model. It's touted as being more familiar as it has multiple language support, but I don't think shoehorning declarative context into imperative languages works well.
If anyone can clone any SaaS, then there will be millions of SaaS that offer all the features you need.
How will you choose?
AWS and Microsoft (and all the big clouds) make it easy for their customers to get hacked, and Mythos makes it more likely the cadence will only intensify.
But, if I vibe code a hosting service which is pure rust and doesn't use any external libraries and never open sources my code, my attack surface is much smaller and I only have three customers anyway.
Hackers are lazy and will go for the pond where the most fish live. AWS will always have a lot of marks and a lot of holes.
AWS will be expensive because you are paying the tax they have to add to fend off the hordes. It'll be an intelligent choice to avoid working with Rome and find a little village in Bergen.
AWS CLI??? Holy guacamole, what a mess. AWS CLI looks what is now the digital identification to get the basics done.
While GCP CLI is like "sure, here"!
You're also putting your business at risk with Google randomly banning accounts and not providing timely appeals. [1]
We use fal heavily in our manual production pipeline and their cdn/storage speed is really bad. Like, my colleagues that generate videos in the platform sit on the platform sometimes wait for minutes before a generated 5-10 video downloads from the servers, the speeds are very slow. Sometimes it works but half of time i hear them b!tching about fal being slow, when i checked the network requests, the content that's getting fetched from the v3b.fal.media for example goes reeeeally bad