Amazon seriously need to hire some good UI designers. They produce great stuff but it all looks like it was designed by developers in 1980.
AWS just builds the basic UI's to make it possible for people to do simple things. If you get deep into the weeds, you'll need to use the API directly, i.e. for installing an SSL cert on your CloudFront distribution, or launching a 2K node computing cluster.
If you don't like the UI, make your own and sell it to people. That has become a viable business model for various startups, or launch your own hosting company on top of EC2 like Heroku.
Or ask Amazon to hire some good UI designers.
AWS is in a race to the bottom, cutting prices all the time. Hiring 50 UX devs to rewrite their web interfaces doesn't comport with Jeff's lean vision.
Not that it matters, but I think they use GWT.
I understand their desire to create unique "products" that people can use in a conversation (e.g. "Have you considered Route53 for your DNS?"), but ultimately mixing common and niche things together and giving everything confusing names is likely doing Amazon more harm than good.
That all being said, Amazon are slowly improving. See this page[0]. They now have a list of their products and how they fit into different categories. But the console can still be a jumbled mess of different acronyms and made up words.
"I need to host a web app" "Okay there's Azure Web Apps for that"
"I need to store lots of files" "There's Azure Storage/Blob Storage for that"
"I need a SQL Database" "There's Azure SQL for that"
"I need a VM" "There's Azure Virtual Machines for that"
"I need a Data Lake" "There's Azure Data Lake for that"
"I need a Data Lake" "There's Azure Data Lake for that"
"I need a Data Warehouse" "There's Azure Data Warehouse for that"
"I need a Cache" "There's Azure Redis Cache for that"
I could go on, but you get the picture. Cute names are not the way to go when you're offering dozens of services which may overlap with eachother somewhat. I can just scroll down a list of things MS offers on Azure and be able to easily pick out the things I need to use by their names alone.
So it's just deeper down the rabbit hole.
> Not that it matters, but I think they use GWT.
the problem is I think it's much more difficult to iterate with this kind of abstractions.
An internal tool like Asgard doesn't have the same need a customer-facing tool like the AWS Console does to be user-friendly, either.
This used to be the case - new features usually launched API-only and console came later - but I think Amazon has woken up to the fact that many customers want to play with it easily before they go automating everything using the API.
I've been wondering about this recently myself. It does seem to be the case sometimes. Any idea why, or if this has ever been studied?
Function ugly app - Ehhh I could research better fonts, but sans serif will work - let's go code some new featues.