Launched a service around automation for AWS tasks. Would love your feedback | Hacker News Reader

Launched a service around automation for AWS tasks. Would love your feedback

finally.io

9 pointsicecommander10 comments

Selecting anything from yellow droplist yields gigantic "PLEASE SIGN-UP TO PROCEED" popup that cannot be dismissed. Selected item is not getting selected, all other droplists are either disabled or obscured by the POPUP.

This is how you drive people off your website, not get them interested enough to sign-up for a trial account :)

We can't populate those other dropdowns at that time because they're based on real values. Here's what a filled-in set looks like: http://i.imgur.com/tMLtncD.png

Well then I would recommend a video or screenshot instead, or just populate with fake data. I personally just wanted to see what the possible values could be.

I know the service is new so I am giving you the benefit of the doubt. But if I came to your website from Google or a news article, I would be immediately turned off by that giant sign-up popup.

Thanks, we're going to address this in the next release.

No problem. I do see the service being useful and I think it has potential.

Product seems useful.

However, as someone who has launched multiple products with the aim of improving on something inside AWS (some successful, some not), I want to warn you about pursuing this type of AWS-centric business model.

I can tell you from experience that if you start to see traction, AWS will not hesitate to rip it off and incorporate it into their console. A quick Google search will show a rich history of treating their "partners" in this fashion.

Be careful, and good luck!

Is this creating autoscale groups and such on my behalf? Or is the automation being done by a service in finally.io?

Right now the automation is done by a service (no autoscaling groups are created on your behalf). Do you have triggers in mind that you would like to create autoscaling groups for you?

No I mean that AWS provides a lot of this sort of automation internally, for example by configuring autoscale groups to respond to various cloudwatch metrics. I was wondering if finally.io is a UI layer on top of the existing AWS tools.

Our initial set of automation rules consists of things that are not readily doable with autoscaling. We do use the AWS APIs but I wouldn't consider what we do to be a UI layer. We automate things that are currently hard or impossible to do with the AWS console. A great example of this is scaling RDS storage or DynamoDB capacity based on actual use (and not just as a one-off operation).

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