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Comment by Galanwe | Hacker News Reader

These arguments against AWS are boring. 99% of the negative comments are along the line of "so i have a dead simple product, I dont know anything about AWS, I logged in and it was super complicated and it seemed pricey".

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.

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I agree, this is a common story and your point stands for some significant percentage of the complaints.

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.

Prior to the RAM crunch you could buy 4 or 5 servers ~50k that would be more than capable to handle many enterprises needs. The thing is the industry has sorta lost the skill set to host and maintain them. The people who can do this still exist of course but they are outnumbered by the YAML jockeys 10 to 1.

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.

No, you misunderstand, it's not that we lack the knowledge or skills (we don't!) it's that the backbones and pipelines all converge on these hyperscalers and that's where you get the best throughput and least latency.

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.

This is borne out by the fact that there are alternatives that are:

- 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.

There's always someone making this claim when negative comments about AWS come up.

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.

Fully agreed.

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.

If you want to design TV remotes, you better learn Blender.

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!

If you want to do actual design, I'd recommend a parametric modeller. Blender really just doesn't cut it for that kind of thing, even with addons

I see a lot of learned helplessness around this stuff. People managed fleets of servers before the cloud you know, it's not impossible.

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

Nope. We have an incredibly complicated product, a bunch of actual experts and paid up high level enterprise support.

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.

> 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.

It'd still suck compared to a completely boring process you can just run on your desktop by ./'ing the executable and looking at the console output. Then chuck it in kubernetes as a ReplicaSet.

But that's not what this article is? The author is clearly a long time AWS user and former evangelist who has soured on it as it has become increasingly bloated.

The main issue with account suspension is not boring to me.

It's true the comments get it wrong. But their main point stands; they shouldn't use AWS.

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 ).

> 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.

Maybe but that doesn't mean that the AWS console isn't a royal mess.

The company I used to work for used AWS for the many CRUD websites they made for many small clients. Route 53, LAMP stack on Ubuntu on EC2, and synchronised the MySQL database to Elasticsearch for the search box on the front page of the site. That was it.

I suspect that they could have achieved that result far cheaper on a different provider.

AWS isn’t the best fit for everyone. But sometimes you don’t realize that until later down the line (or your business or the industry changes), at which point you’re locked in due to the many customer-hostile tactics they use to lock you in, such as high egress fees.

that's not a great argument: any professional who doesn't know their operating costs is barely a professional

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

To be fair Blender’s UI is very unintuitive and not as good as other 3D modeling software. Between 3Ds max, Maya, Houdini, XSI, Modo, Milkshape and others only Blender has felt painful to use.

Did blender charge you thousands of dollars when you touched it wrong when you tried to learn to use it? /s

> Did blender charge you thousands of dollars when you touched it wrong

No, but it did press charges. We settled out of court, but my wife left me over the whole affair.

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