I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com/2026/05/i-returned-to-aws-and-was-reminded-hard.html

by andrewstuart • 2 months ago

854 646 2 months ago

fourlightyears.blogspot.com

_wire_• 2 months ago

I love you baby, I need you! I'd never cheat on you! Come back!

Hey good lookin'

renticulous• 2 months ago

Looks like a blogpost written to get attention and resolve his personal problem.

andai• 2 months ago

At last my quest to find the stooge has come to a bitter end!

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.

andrewstuart4• 2 months ago

> 192 cores What are you doing with all them cores?

The ancient forgotten art of Vertical Scaling.

rglover4• 2 months ago

It's remarkably zen and effective.

joefourier2• 2 months ago

Cloud computing was an absolutely mind blowing revolution - suddenly your startup could run its own computer systems in minutes without need to install and run your own systems in a data center. This was an absolute game changer, and I really drank the AWS Kool Aid down to every last drop then I licked out the cup. I was all in on AWS in a big way.

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.

tiffanyh• 2 months ago

suddenly your startup could run its own computer systems in minutes without need to install and run your own systems in a data center.

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.

joefourier2• 2 months ago

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.

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.

reliablereason• 2 months ago

No you could rent virtualised servers way before AWS. AWS simply had good marketing.

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.

rglover4• 2 months ago

Not first, but it was the first with a planet-scale marketing budget.

I miss the Media Temple days.

_puk2• 2 months ago

If you recall AWS didn't scale instantly originally either.

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.

[0] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2013/11/?m=1

flomo• 2 months ago

Am I the only one who remembers how shady a lot of those VPS/hosting companies were? Seemed to be a race to the bottom, so a 'good' outfit might suck or completely disappear a couple years later. (Also, pricing was all over the map, I had a client who was paying $150/mo for a VPS.) Hetzner survived, but for a long time they had a reputation as spamfarm. So I get the initial appeal of AWS, used tactically. But for larger companies, its something like IBM or Oracle, if you are price-sensitive, it's not for you.

h4kunamata• 2 months ago

AWS AIM is hot garbage, GCP might not be the coolest kid of the block but its AIM rocks.

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"!

cube003• 2 months ago

It's a shame GCP's console and their CLI are both so painfully slow.

You're also putting your business at risk with Google randomly banning accounts and not providing timely appeals. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798827

vrick• 2 months ago

I mean this article is about AWS doing the exact same thing.

liveoneggs3• 2 months ago

it's funny how being used to something makes it easier to use

jfengel2• 2 months ago

I don't work in that area, so I only touch AWS once in a while for personal fun projects.

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.

chuckadams4• 2 months ago

You can just spin up a raw VPS on EC2 or Lightsail, give it a public IP, and call it a day. You aren't required to implement every enterprise pattern in the book.

DaanDL• 2 months ago

But that's costly. Speaking of my own experience: going from a webapp fully hosted on an EC2 instance to a railway and vercel setup reduced my costs 10x.

themgt• 2 months ago

Congrats, your raw EC2-hosted 500MB WebGL experimental card game went to the HN Front Page! You now owe AWS $30k in egress costs.

embedding-shape3• 2 months ago

If there is any single service I'd avoid on AWS it's Lightsail, it'll cost you a lot more than almost anything out there, is slow as molasses (even tiny services can need tens of minutes to deploy) and you'll experience random failures not even AWS reps can explain to you. Avoid at all costs.

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.

te_chris2• 2 months ago

“EC2 or Lightsail”. And this right here is why I use GCP. Google got VMs right.

ipsento6062• 2 months ago

You can just spin up a raw VPS on EC2 or Lightsail, give it a public IP, and call it a day

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

benoau2• 2 months ago

What amazes me is how Heroku absolutely nailed what most web apps need nearly 20 years ago.

ChrisBland• 2 months ago

I miss heroku dearly. somewhere at Salesforce there is an exec who killed the product and shifted it to enterprise and is now looking at the vibe coding revolution seeing their opportunity missed.

djyde2• 2 months ago

I switched to Cloudflare and it's been a breath of fresh air - everything I need and the pricing is reasonable.

KptMarchewa• 2 months ago

it's only a nightmare if you had not to deal with Azure

MagicMoonlight3• 2 months ago

AWS is aimed at enterprise, not personal projects. Personal projects wouldn’t give them any meaningful revenue because the only thing that matters is cost.

faangguyindia3• 2 months ago

Why do people even bother with cloud?

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.

andrewstuart4• 2 months ago

I worked for a startup company - the founders were really nice people and had put their own money in - quite a lot of money - to get the software built for the vision they had.

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.

cube003• 2 months ago

hideously tentacled software beast had been built that used every possible AWS service that the massive offshore team of developers could find to use

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"

edg5000• 2 months ago

I think AWS is liked is because when AWS started, being able to get a new VPS up in minutes was still quite unusual. Many hosts would require about 24hr, I suspect, for getting a new VM up. At least those are some experiences I had. But nowaways, they are probably many options for getting a VM instantly.

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.

maccard8• 2 months ago

It’s flexible but slow. we ran our C++ CI/CD on AWS at a previous company, and we used spot instances with volumes attached and detached dynamically. The performance was absolutely abysmal because in effect you’re running compilation across a networked file system, no matter what AWS says your throughput is.

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.

maccard8• 2 months ago

At my previous startup: because AWS gave us a bunch of credits and helped us design the infra. It meant we ran for free what they designed for free.

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.

xmcp1233• 2 months ago

Have seen this repeatedly also.

Watched one company end up with a $250k AWS bill when their credits expired (which they could not pay).

4nonverbal-alit• 2 months ago

At my current team at a “bigcorp” I have noticed a similar pattern. We use aws not because it’s efficient in any way.

We use it because we don’t want to deal with slow procurement process. It kills all the momentum.

hibikir• 2 months ago

Many a big company migrated because they have those very same slow procurement problems with internal data centers. I saw multiple cloud migrations because internal friction was at a level that the price didn't matter: 6 months for the smallest VM kind of thing. Very adversarial relationships, often with very poor incentives, as the service setup costs for other business units were way inflated, but then the maintenance costs didn't pay enough. Paying 3x-4x more a year for just a semblance of reliability was seen as a big plus.

kriz9• 2 months ago

The ease of getting things set up quickly and usually for free when starting up is very tempting. Later, migration is usually considered risky and not worth it because of maintenance overhead - which I would argue has become very easy.

MagicMoonlight3• 2 months ago

This isn’t a like for like comparison though, is it.

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.

faangguyindia3• 2 months ago

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.

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.

esseph4• 2 months ago

How do you know all of those drives aren’t from the same batch?

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.

goosejuice2• 2 months ago

spending $20k a month on GCP
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.

esseph4• 2 months ago

many startups settle in on a ops solution before hiring ops

Sounds expensive

stickfigure2• 2 months ago

Grafana (and especially Loki) is hot garbage compared to what you get out of the box in GCP. I'm in a Grafana organization today and the sheer amount of developer and devops time it wastes is mind boggling.

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.

faangguyindia3• 2 months ago

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.

nijave5• 2 months ago

It's fairly easy to setup services without worrying about pages.

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"

atemerev2• 2 months ago

Credits. It wouldn't make sense without free credits. And when you are hooked, good luck in moving out.

noprocrasted6• 2 months ago

they said they must show they are on Hyperscaling cloud.

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.

puelocesar• 2 months ago

We are having this dilemma right now. I’m not involved in devops, but it’s quite annoying on how slow everything related to our backend is.

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

noprocrasted6• 2 months ago

If you can get that 5k/month down to let's say 1k, that's a saving of 48k over the course of a year. You can get a consultant/freelancer for half that sum that'll happily do it for you.

okdood64• 2 months ago

I replaced all of it with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and most stuff from Datastore to Postgres and Mongo with replicas. I added Redis.

But now you need staffing/headcount to be experts in, and maintain, upgrade and be oncall for this stuff?

kaydub5• 2 months ago

So you think your bespoke solution is less complex?

Custom scalers? Running prometheus, grafana, etc?

tedivm3• 2 months ago

AWS stomped on open source projects - despite the clear desire of projects like Elasticsearch, Redis, and MongoDB not to be cloned and monetized, AWS pushed ahead with OpenSearch, Valkey, and DocumentDB anyway, capturing the hosted-service money after those communities and companies had built the markets; the result was a wave of defensive licenses like SSPL, Elastic License, RSAL, and other source-available models designed less to stop ordinary users than to stop AWS from stripping open-source infrastructure for parts, owning the customer relationship.

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.

hankerapp• 2 months ago

A lot of these projects work on a business model where they open-source their core product, and provide advanced services, installation, maintenance or fully-managed services around their product. AWS was bypassing them by providing fully-managed services. On this, I am on the side of the people behind the projects. Basically AWS was eating their lunch. They had no choice but to change the licenses.

rpdillon7• 2 months ago

They have a problem with their business model, then. License changes to a formerly open source project are costly. The community reacts very strongly when license terms change after they've come to depend on a product, and they should.

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.

skywhopper• 2 months ago

Just because they picked a bad business model doesn’t mean they deserve to avoid competition. Don’t give away your source code if you don’t want someone else to provide hosting.

mpyne7• 2 months ago

They had no choice but to change the licenses.

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.

colechristensen• 2 months ago

A lot of these projects started as community driven and funded open source efforts that eventually the creators decided to make a professional services company as a sponsor -> that company takes over nearly all of the development -> they relicense when they realize the funding they raised isn't going to be paid back.

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"

0123456789ABCDE• 2 months ago

isn't it that a lot of these projects start as open-source, then try to bank on that free labor, by switching licenses?

ceejayoz9• 2 months ago

it's really weird to say that the forks "resulted" in the license changes when those forks where a response to the license changes

But those license changes were a response to how AWS was monetizing their work in ways unsustainable for the upstream projects.

jgalt212• 2 months ago

Yes, this was my impression as well.

embedding-shape3• 2 months ago

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.

stavros7• 2 months ago

Of course AWS didn't create the forks until the projects changed their license to disallow AWS from making money from their code! That's the whole point here.

jasonlotito2• 2 months ago

When they changed their license, they were no longer open source. They could have chosen open source licenses such as the AGPL, but they did not. They were a non-open source company at that point, and AWS was putting out a product build on open source. Simple as that.

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.

2ndorderthought• 2 months ago

Sometimes I wonder how much it would hurt Amazon to pay the creators and maintainers of OSS software they sell 1 cent per billing period of use(1 hr?). I also wonder how much money that would offer an oss team. To contribute risk free to improving the product

richwater2• 2 months ago

I think you would be surprised how many commits in OSS comes from paid workers of the various cloud companies and tech companies out there.

tcp_handshaker3• 2 months ago

I lost my sympathy for many of the open source projects philosophy, the first time I sent a patch to Redis, one of the committers took as its own, never replying to my messages, and patched it in its name. They deserve Valkey.

And I still remember JBoss and ahole Marc Fleury ...

paulddraper6• 2 months ago

You’re reading “cloned and monetized” as “forked.”

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.

hedora3• 2 months ago

First amazon was abusive. They abused their monopoly position to gain market dominance over upstream and didn’t contribute back monetarily or with code.

Next, upstream responded with a license change, then amazon escalated with the fork.

silverwind• 2 months ago

All those forks turned out to be inferior projects with substantially less contributions than the originals.

ccorcos• 2 months ago

While I'm a big fan of open source, I don't understand what the alternative is for this dilemma...

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...

neves• 2 months ago

As an user, this is what really annoys me:

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.

MagicMoonlight3• 2 months ago

These complaints are very weak.

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.

jerhewet2• 2 months ago

I wish our Lambdas would spin up faster, but otherwise I've been very happy with them over the past six years. We seldom run over the free tier limits, and when we do we get a bill for a couple of dollars. Dead simple to code for, dead simple to spin up a new instance or scale an instance if we need to.

djyde2• 2 months ago

I've transitioned between cloud services and self-hosting a few times:

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.

causal• 2 months ago

Yeah Cloudflare offering has become everything I wanted from AWS. So much simpler to deploy a basic full stack app + files. AWS has become considerably more difficult than self hosting.

AdityaAnuragi• 2 months ago

I agree, I'm starting to like cloudflare increasingly aswell

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!

adamddev1• 2 months ago

I've really enjoyed using CloudFlare and I've been impressed, but I'm afraid it will descend into a broken mess as they enthusiastically use more and more vibe-coding.

cube003• 2 months ago

I really wanted to like Cloudflare Workers and I'm sure there's good technical reasons but the way you need to use a Wrangler project to do things like enabling email felt too much like I was about to get locked into the platform.

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.

graemep2• 2 months ago

Even though they were containerized with Docker, managing them was still troublesome

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?

aleksiy123• 2 months ago

Went through a similar phase,

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.

pier252• 2 months ago

I've been using CF Workers since 2020 or so. The biggest con is that your app will be coupled to their infra. It's less coupled than eg Firebase but still.

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.

znpy2• 2 months ago

Of course I do not pay for premium support, so I have to wait the 24 hours that they said it would take them to reply. It's 3 days and AWS support has not replied.

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.

sudosteph5• 2 months ago

I worked for AWS Premium Support over a decade ago. Waiting 3 days or more, for a non-premium support customer would have been not unusual back then either. But at least the quality of response was typically pretty good, haven't seen what it's like lately.

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.

nijave5• 2 months ago

Imo AWS support is pretty decent compared to other vendors. Azure was by far the worst I've ever dealt with--engineers becoming adversarial and passing blame in tickets without actually resolving anything.

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.

znpy2• 2 months ago

Imo AWS support is pretty decent compared to other vendors.

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.

cmiles8• 2 months ago

There was a time when AWS was truly innovative, but it’s long since transformed into Amazon’s cash cow and is behaving like such.

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.

morpheuskafka• 2 months ago

I am reminded why I left AWS and how I need to finish the job, get off AWS Workmail, move my domains from Route53 and never return.

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.

geoffbp• 2 months ago

Slightly different but related topic - for people who work with people vibe coding, what is the easiest way to allow that for non tech users (and reducing risk)? AWS or something like vercel? Coolify?

_puk2• 2 months ago

Vercel and supabase seems to be the norm around here.

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.

sudosteph5• 2 months ago

I'm old and bitter about this, but you're not reducing risk by going with PaaS, you're just outsourcing it. That recent "My AI Agent deleted my prod DB" story was only possible because the PaaS they were using allowed for 1-click permanent delete. At least AWS has a "prevent accidental termination" checkbox.

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.

rembal• 2 months ago

+1 on the IAM over engineering, though to AWS credit, I suspect it was evolved rather than design, and that's what you get when evolution has to maintain some level of backward compatibility (think humans still having to be able to lay eggs). Another thing that happens occasionally for saas companies is AWS creating a copy of their product in a bit sus way - but it's not a technical problem, it's a business model problem.

kikimora3• 2 months ago

This is unfortunately unavoidable for any system like IAM. All of them evolve into monstrosity because of so many conflicting requirements. Most importantly being simple and tractable on one end and being able to express any imaginable predicate on another.

viccis2• 2 months ago

And god help you if you want to use one of their many competing data engineering tools, all of which will be duct taped onto Glue and require not just IAM but also another layer of RBAC on top of IAM. Like you said with IAM, I think it just slowly evolved into the mess it is today, but it's rough. Trying to just run a simple Spark query using an S3 Table Bucket was enough to remind me why Snowflake and Databricks are printing money by making it a more user friendly experience.

aljgz2• 2 months ago

Years ago, I joined a company, took over a dev team and was asked to launch the product in 3 months.

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.

Lucasoato• 2 months ago

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 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.

bulletsvshumans• 2 months ago

They absolutely could calculate and put the price in the UI if they wished to. Other cloud vendors do.

finaard4• 2 months ago

I've been in a similar situation - a surprising amount of companies really just click to create instances. Last time I've encountered that at a customer I improved things a bit by creating templates, and scripting instance creation based on those templates - but ideally we'd have had the templates themselves as well as the network side generated by ansible.

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.

richwater2• 2 months ago

The faster people realize AWS hates the need for a UI, the better.

It should really be a read-only layer for metadata and logs.

lr1970• 2 months ago

pricing depends on so many factors like reserved/dedicated/spot/on-demand instances have all different prices.

Or you can have your own negotiated private pricing which is a whole different story in itself.

whateverboat• 2 months ago

I must disagree so heavily with you here. Prices can depend on so many factors, but.... when that particular account is choosing that particular machine, AWS knows what it will cost, and they can show it to them dynamically. It's very difficult to be convinced in this day and age that you cannot have a dynamic price chart right beside the machine sellector which is showing or calculating prices in real time for that particular product.

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.

sudosteph5• 2 months ago

I'm with you. Nobody serious uses the UI to make changes with AWS. At the very least, use the AWS CLI. IaaS is the norm though.

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.

swasheck4• 2 months ago

the pricing “API” is also a joke so it’s not like they have tried pushing people to apis and away from the console.

i just use vantage (https://instances.vantage.sh/) now. their api is functional and reasonable.

lambda2• 2 months ago

Tell me how I can easily determine the price from my IaC deployment as well.

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.

evilduck• 2 months ago

I mean, pricing depends on so many factors like reserved/dedicated/spot/on-demand instances have all different prices.

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.

chuckadams4• 2 months ago

AWS actually has a pretty good price calculator with some decent presets (but FFS, can I have an "uncheck all" button?) but of course it's an entirely separate app. Amazon naturally wants some friction to having this pricing information handy, though I suspect the main reason has to do with Conway's Law: AWS still ships their org chart.

zsoltkacsandi8• 2 months ago

I agree with you at some degree, but I would like to point out that AWS pricing is much more complicated that you can calculate how much will you pay from a static number showing up on the UI.

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.

PLenz• 2 months ago

If they can charge me for it then they can calculate it and show it to me. Anything else is obfuscation.

aljgz2• 2 months ago

Not showing the price was not "my problem". It was the sign of a product packed with traps, footguns and all kind of things that would go wrong and the blame goes to the user.

No thank you

windexh8er• 2 months ago

I don't think your comment hits like you think it does. I think your intent with "cheap" implies some level of being lesser. In my experience that is not the reality. Similar to opp I migrated a startup from 5x cost in AWS to DO years ago. In fact that "cheap" competitor was able to give them better performance, more reliability and more features for a lot less.

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-...

callmeal2• 2 months ago

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.

On Google cloud compute, the ui shows an updated 'cost' as you start building your machine.

tcp_handshaker3• 2 months ago

> 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.

This is false. The price shows up right away when you select a machine. I dont work for AWS...

nullstyle• 2 months ago

Not back when i was using AWS

Capricorn24818• 2 months ago

You can upload an image to imgur and show us. I don't see this.

dekhn• 2 months ago

I do see prices when I look at the instance selection box. "On-demand linux base pricing: 0.0104 USD per hour" for t3.micro (matching the published pricing). it does not show the full price (based on any additional volumes or other configuration details).

It gets far more complicated when you have reserved instances, and combine reserved instances with RAM sharing when working in a larger org.

aurareturn3• 2 months ago

Doesn't Amazon engineering culture have a very engineer-led product culture? Meaning, devs are often responsible for the UX and flow.

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

Y-bar• 2 months ago

Judging by how much things jump around on the screen when I navigate from one view to another I agree.

epistasis2• 2 months ago

I would argue that the intentions don't matter at all, the end result is all that matters both for the buyer and seller. In systems design, it is often said that The Purpose of a System Is What It Does. Good intentions can produce very bad systems with bad outcomes, and neutral/bad intentions can create good systems that benefit everyone.

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.

temp88302• 2 months ago

AWS UX isn't bad because engineers are bad at UX. It's because inside AWS it's every man for himself, and every team for itself. They don't collaborate, they don't talk, they compete to ship everything as quickly and cheaply as possible - quality, usability, and common sense be damned.

grogenaut• 2 months ago

I get why it's like this.

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

voncheese• 2 months ago

My point is that maybe it was intentional, but just bad UX culture.

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.

torginus4• 2 months ago

Personally I think 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.

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.

ricardobayes• 2 months ago

It just goes to show if you are the first big player in a space, you can have whatever UX. No UX will override that first mover advantage. I could cite countless examples, where the first commonly known company rules the space and no newcomer with a flashy UX can come close, no matter how hard they try.

pokot0• 2 months ago

Honestly UX became irrelevant in the last years (infra as code) and even more in the last year (coding agents). What you need is well structured API and a CLI that does not limit you. You can call it UX if you want, but the skillset is different.

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

m463• 2 months ago

Some devs have a good product/UX sense but the vast majority are horrendously bad at UX.

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?

parliament322• 2 months ago

That's one of the things I like about Azure, they don't overwhelm you with listing prices beside every individual item as you're creating it, but they seem to always present a price on things that could be expensive. It's a good balance, I have yet to be surprised by a charge.

tcp_handshaker3• 2 months ago

Using Azure in 2026 should be a firing offense. How many cross-tenant incidents are enough for you? In 20 years of existence of AWS ( since 2006 and S3 ) show me ONE with AWS ... and I will publicly eat my hat here...

"Azure’s Security Vulnerabilities Are Out of Control" - https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/azures_vulnerabilities_ar...

e40• 2 months ago

You’ve got to be kidding. Azure is 10x the dumpster fire that AWS is. I have used both.

hypeatei• 2 months ago

So this project had a three month timeline and provisioning the cloud resources maybe took an extra hour or two because of crosschecking? I actually prefer the dedicated calculator pages and product pages because it gives you more insight into how things are billed. I think this is a strange thing to get hung up on, IMHO, especially as a lead / manager of developers.

ivan_gammel• 2 months ago

This is the only correct way to do it: choose infrastructure provider that can help you deliver. AWS is good, just not for everyone. It stands somewhere between services like Heroku and bare metal, abstracting a lot of maintenance, but offering some control over scaling architecture. Which means that as a cloud provider it helps to scale, not to build the cheapest and simplest setup possible. If you have VC money and pitch growth, AWS might be a safe choice - 2 years of startup credits they offer via accelerator programs help you not to bother too much about your infra budget and build first 18 months before you start optimizing spending (and then you know it, have good forecasting etc). If you are bootstrapped or indie developer, choose what you can afford and choose something simple. Hetzner, DO etc will work fine.

b40d-48b2-979e• 2 months ago

    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.

This is needlessly victim blaming and reductive. You're ignoring the dynamics of a relationship and how victims of abuse are often financially dependent on their abuser.

DANmode5• 2 months ago

[if] you have the option to walk out, and you don’t

Ignores nothing, and blames no victim.

It advises people to avoid becoming one when possible.

okeuro49• 2 months ago

When I log into AWS there is a big graph saying "Cost savings" and offers all the different ways to save money.

The idea that AWS is abusive seems a bit much to me. There is Amazon Lightsail for people who prefer pay-monthly upfront costs.

testbjjl• 2 months ago

Have you tried to use this feature? From my experience it’s typically reserved instances that provide discounts for longer contracts. It feels a lot like cable TV to me. I think the interface is difficult to use but am able to get what I want from the CLI and some scripts I have aliased.

clickety_clack• 2 months ago

People don’t seem to realize how simple pricing can be made for the user. I switched to digital ocean too, and it’s great. I think people think it’s not really engineering if it’s not complicated, so they stick with these insane AWS/GCP/Azure setups. But it’s not 2012 anymore, this stuff has been figured out and commoditized, and managing your cloud setup should be “easy” for 99% of products.

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”

zrobotics• 2 months ago

Plus, I've never understood the argument that cloud is better because you don't need to deal with the complexity of managing a server. Yes, it's a very deep topic and there's a lot of nuances to managing a Linux box serving web content, but we've been doing that for decades and there is tons of information and tooling available.

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.

cyberax9• 2 months ago

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'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.

mips_avatar• 2 months ago

They have to do that because their pricing is bad. Like if you want to run a custom vector db you can run it 20x cheaper on hetzner than aws.

ransom1538• 2 months ago

There will be no greater engineering feat than the ability to set a spending cap. FAANG is filled with brilliant people working alongside the smartest AI of our time, yet somehow the ability to set a spending cap has eluded some of the best engineers on the planet for over a decade.

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?

fragmede• 2 months ago

I had to have the two tables open, cross check the specs and price.

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.

wodenokoto• 2 months ago

Almost every organization I’ve worked for has setup their cloud such that:

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.

dzonga• 2 months ago

the A.I (LLM) merchants will tell you - that AI is now writing software (agentic coding they call it ) - yet one they can't bill you properly or have a broken billing mechanism.

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

mcherm• 2 months ago

I don't think that's the real issue. The problems with billing and dashboards at cloud vendors are not new within the past few years, they have existed far longer than the LLM coding.

owebmaster• 2 months ago

The billing "problems" these companies have are working fine for them as they are there to increase revenue, not to improve user experience.

xmcp1233• 2 months ago

Something that has always bothered me an outsized amount is Elasticache.

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.

zdc1• 2 months ago

Elasticache is definitely one of the services to consider self-hosting.

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.

dangoodmanUT• 2 months ago

GCP would be perfect if they didn't have a history of randomly dropping quotas on startups, causing them downtime

squirrellous• 2 months ago

What do you find appealing about GCP? I occasionally hear positive sentiment like this but don’t entirely understand the reason, mostly because I haven’t used non-GCP clouds professionally. Is it just the least bad of all the big clouds?

cynicalsecurity• 2 months ago

Preach, brother.

alde• 2 months ago

The set of core services on AWS remains amazing: EC2, S3, IAM, EKS, Route53, RDS etc.

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.

nijave5• 2 months ago

AWS IAM is extremely well designed

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.

djinn• 2 months ago

AWS has been systematically hollowed out of technical staff since 2023. Either through mass layoffs or via 2 cycles of performance improvement plans. Often I find most skilled peers in presales or support are not with AWS whilst the ones with most ambiguous work history have been retained at promoted.

Use AWS at your own risk, Paul Vixie is not there to save you.

sbinnee• 2 months ago

I also tried. Only service I use is s3 for personal backup. I pay around 15 cents per month.

finaard4• 2 months ago

My business email system still does not work.

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).

somewhatgoated• 2 months ago

I don’t get your point, what is the weird thing?

That he is complaining about his email being down or that he trusted AWS at all with email?

rkent• 2 months ago

The only way that email is down for days for a competent sysadmin is if their DNS is also with AWS, so I assumed that was the case. Assuming that is true, what is weird to me is that, after deciding he hated AWS and left it, that he still kept his business DNS (the most important service there is) with AWS.

panny• 2 months ago

new servers would be online somewhere else within hours of it going down

Yeah, no that's not how it works with email. You have to build reputation for weeks or receivers throttle you.

finaard4• 2 months ago

I'm not running a spam business. I've been operating my own mailservers (and related infrastructure) for more than 25 years now, without issues.

kassner• 2 months ago

It is pretty much unacceptable to have a domain bouncing emails, so I’d be out of the provider before the MX TTL even expires.

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.

h1fra• 2 months ago

To this day I still don't understand why people love AWS. It's overly complex, full of dark patterns, and not even that good compared to alternatives.

eluded7• 2 months ago

I'd tend to agree with the author. If forced to choose a cloud platform though (and that often is the case) then AWS is probably the best of the bunch in terms of reliability. Have heard and experienced some real horror stories with Azure & GCP by comparison.

te_chris2• 2 months ago

GCP is miles better. Their IAM is at least understandable, for a start.

tietjens• 2 months ago

I would read a GCP horror story for fun. Any thing you can direct me to?

rglover4• 2 months ago

You can accomplish a lot by just having a basic knowledge of Linux sysadmin. I was clueless and then learned some systemd-and-curl-fu. Will never forget the "holy sh*t, this is deceptively simple" moment. A bit more research and I found that beyond convenience and specialty APIs, you really just don't need a lot of this stuff to run a healthy system (since reducing absolute cloud dependence, my reliability has gone through the roof).

sandruso• 2 months ago

100%. I'm not really sure why we all agreed that deployment is somehow the hardest thing that you need to outsource when setting the linux server is one the richest experience you can get and it will pay dividents forever.

pdimitar• 2 months ago

Stop with this "we" cliche already, please. I never agreed to it and I'm in the profession for 24 years. You don't speak for me.

Executives will always prefer to transfer liability and responsibility to someplace else.

Who's calling the shots in an organization? Engineers or executives?

noprocrasted6• 2 months ago

There's a multibillion dollar industry that lives only because they managed to successfully convince an entire generation of "engineers" to become helpless and not be able to serve an HTTP response using their own hardware even if their life depended on it.

da022• 2 months ago

How do you deal with the few minutes of downtime when you do kernel/OS/software upgrades?

juahan• 2 months ago

I’m pretty sure for most systems that does not matter in the slightest.

tekla• 2 months ago

How is this an issue in a world where load balancers exist? I was part of a Unicorn that ran prod on 8 boxes and literally never had customer facing outages due to infrastructure updates.

rglover4• 2 months ago

Depending on the deployment and any SLAs, I either don't worry about it (just do a late night rollout when nobody is on the system) or rely on my deployment architecture's sibling checks (I can see when a given machine is still versioning and requeue subsequent rollouts to other machines).

andoando5• 2 months ago

You spin up a second host and load balance

BirAdam3• 2 months ago

You put nginx or Haproxy in front of the hosts, drop the one that needs maint from the pool, and re-add once it’s ready.

gtowey• 2 months ago

Just wait until you learn about system tools like perf, gdb, bpf -- the amount of low-level detailed information you can get about running processes means you'll reduce the amount of guesswork involved with troubleshooting or performance optimization to a minimum.

sudosteph5• 2 months ago

I'm surprised by the author's hate towards DynamoDB. It's probably one of my favorite AWS Services. Great availability and no operational overhead. Cost was pretty minimal too each time I've used it, but you do need to spend some time architecting your data model up front, and that requires reading service docs and understanding it.

ufmace• 2 months ago

That's pretty much what I came into this thread to say. The thing I'd add is, DynamoDB is pretty nice if you understand how it's meant to be used - a relatively dumb key-value store with good persistence and table-size scaling to the sky. Definitely don't attempt to use it as a SQL database.

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.

andoando5• 2 months ago

With AI now writing queries is a joke. But you can just create a two column table: key, JSONB and call it a day and you get your easy document store + indexes, json search, relationsl goodness, and atomicity, consistency for free

sambellll• 2 months ago

Here to say the same thing.

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.

NohatCoder• 2 months ago

"~10k reads+writes per month"

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.

aorloff2• 2 months ago

Dynamo, and a lot of the other services mentioned (Lambda) have very specific use cases. Do not use happy fun key value store as your database.

ovao• 2 months ago

I'd say "use it as your database if you know your access patterns make it suitable/well-suited for its use as your database". Even then it will probably not be your only database — if it's part of your MSA/SOA.

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).

andoando5• 2 months ago

We used DynamoDB pretty much exclusively at Tinder, cause it was the founders choice early on. Horrible horrible choice and after 4 years working on it I dont see why you would.

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

rowanseymour• 2 months ago

IMO if you've got a use case that requires querying in so many ways that you need several indexes, then DynamoDB is probably the wrong choice. It excels at stuff like user specific histories that are well partitioned, read back in one way, and ideally can be written asynchronously by a separate writer process.

mastazi• 2 months ago

you have a limited number of global supported indexes, 5 iirc

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...

IsTom• 2 months ago

I might be holding it wrong, but last time I tried to use DynamoDB it made absolutely no sense performance-wise to me. Postgres on my laptop was many orders of magnitude faster for fraction of price. It seemed like it maybe might make sense when you hit multiple TBs of database data and can no longer run on a single server? But then the costs would be sky-high and you probably could engineer your way around this with this kind of money.

sudosteph5• 2 months ago

It's hard to do apples to apples performance with postgres - it really does depend on the data model and how you interface with it, but the thing about performance for DDB is that it can be very consistent. Pricing also depends a lot on your access patterns and data structures.

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.

rushcar• 2 months ago

When you do a DynamoDB write it's replicating that write to 2 other datacenters before ACK (for availability + durability reasons). Your local Postgres instance doesn't need to make any network hops at all.

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)

tootie• 2 months ago

This belies the fact that AWS is so far in the lead in cloud market share and even host so much of Anthropic's business. If you dabble, it's confusing. If you're an enterprise with a lot of expertise then it's indispensable.

sqircles• 2 months ago

The billing footguns are a major pain point for anyone that doesn't have the capital to just dump faith paired with a credit card into. This of course is not limited to AWS...

maptime• 2 months ago

How lambda is as bad as it is I have no clue. Not a lover of azure, but azure functions is such a nicer experience

amluto4• 2 months ago

My current favorites on AWS, in no particular order:

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.

fHr• 2 months ago

works for AWS quits the BS needs more money sells himself as a meat puppeteer once again to AWS big bs corpo is still the same surprisedpikatchu.jpeg ok

psanford3• 2 months ago

If you're using AWS Lambda then you have to work to keep convincing yourself this is better than your own web servers. Keep convincing yourself that using AWS Lambda is not a horrible mistake.

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.

[0] https://github.com/psanford/s3db

Neikius• 2 months ago

As you yourself said. Your load is so light you keep it in free tier. Their entire business model is for them to capture you while your load is light and then when you scale the price goes up.

psanford3• 2 months ago

I have also used lambda at scale in professional environments. I would not use a lambda for a webserver at scale, but having an s3 object trigger processing via a lambda function is a really nice flow.

sofixa• 2 months ago

But the price per unit of measurement goes down, so no, it's not "their entire business model".

kees99• 2 months ago

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).

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...

psanford3• 2 months ago

I do not trust a free-tier VPS with my data.

noprocrasted6• 2 months ago

You can also put these lambdas on a shared hosting provider as CGIs and get the exact same experience.

hhthrowaway1230• 2 months ago

https://world.hey.com/dhh/merchants-of-complexity-4851301b

high_byte• 2 months ago

similar thing happened to me. I'm not a heavy aws user but wanted to setup some s3 buckets few days ago but my account was suspended for the same reason

but unlike OP I just accepted this fate and moved away from aws :)

xrd• 2 months ago

There is one fortunate result that will come from the SaaSpocalypse combining with Mythos (color me skeptical but let's assume it is as powerful as Anthropic tells CIOs).

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.

aeagentic• 2 months ago

But is there a better one with same IaaC and API completeness?

hhh• 2 months ago

IAM is my favorite part of AWS.

mt_• 2 months ago

The well architected frameworks tells you to have separate accounts, your fault that you "tested" in a production environment. https://imgur.com/a/Smal9fL

stevepotter2• 2 months ago

I was such a fan of it that I ended up working there for 4 years. Now I avoid it and encourage others to do the same.

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

goostavos• 2 months ago

DDB has two use cases:

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."

stevepotter2• 2 months ago

Agree. I didn’t like being forced to use it. There was some edict based on some different past problems. My service was a devops thing and didn’t really have a data plane. A regular db would have been perfect but would have required some silly high level approval we weren’t willing to get. All that despite being told service teams are free to build how they want

mlhpdx9• 2 months ago

I’m not sure how someone can be an “AWS Fanboy”, drink in all the promise, and think IAM is evil. As far as I can tell it is the one glorious thing that separates AWS from others. IAM is the core that makes it sane.

Cyph0n• 2 months ago

I may be biased, but I find that GCP’s IAM story is simply way better.

mlhpdx9• 2 months ago

I find it really difficult to discuss the two with people because of the overloaded terminology.

fnord77• 2 months ago

Are the other two big providers any different?

raffraffraff2• 2 months ago

I always smile at posts like this. They're right and wrong at the same time. Systems should be "as simple as possible, but no simpler". And thinking that you can gloss over the detail is just going to create more hassle later on.

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.

cyberpunk• 2 months ago

Another point is that while it can be more expensive than self hosting, the savings are dwarfed by the engineering costs. A decent infrastructure engineer working for 2 man months on your “money saving” ovh setup costs you more than you can possibly save by not just using fargate or rds whatever.

noprocrasted6• 2 months ago

But unless you're on a PaaS, you have "infrastructure engineers" already. So why not at least let them make back their salary by making them built a cost-efficient infrastructure?

izacus• 2 months ago

This is rarely actually true but it's a common falsehood told by people who have financial interest of keeping everyone on AWS.

And that includes engkneers that only know how to use AWS and are terrified at having to learn something else.

amluto4• 2 months ago

How much would you pay for 2 months of infrastructure engineer time? And how many millions / tens of millions / hundreds of millions are you imagining being spent on overpriced AWS services?

(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.)

le-mark• 2 months ago

fought against X adoption because it was "too complex", only to slowly reinvent X badly

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.

ipsento6062• 2 months ago

This is a surprisingly common pattern in technology and software. Some things are definitively the “standard”

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

Aperocky4• 2 months ago

Some internal perspective - IAM has maybe thousands of options but fundamentally it is "what does this role have access to doing (action + resource)" + "who has access to this role". That is really it from a 10k foot level.

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.

paulddraper6• 2 months ago

that's because you have a service principle in your IAM trust relationship that allowed us access

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.

—

I have no doubt this makes some sense from someone inside the machine, but from the outside it’s not helpful nor useful.

amluto4• 2 months ago

but fundamentally it is "what does this role have access to doing (action + resource)" + "who has access to this role". That is really it from a 10k foot level.

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.

bkaraaslan• 2 months ago

One thing i would like to see in IAM would be sonething like verb actions, currently, if you want to give least privilage, you have to trial and error your api call until you get it right. Since aws have a very good api definition on all consumers (rest, aws-cli, boto uses same strucyure), i think it would be doable.

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

hedora3• 2 months ago

IAM is unnecessarily bad. I recently had to set a trivial policy, and was doing it correctly.

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.

hedora3• 2 months ago

I guess I should also point out that I’ve used AWS at extremely large scale in the past, which is why I’m running this subproject on another cloud.

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.

raffraffraff2• 2 months ago

You think that you're complaining about IAM, but really you're complaining about the web ui. I rarely use the web console, I use terraform or the cli. I'd you're vibe coding your infra with Claude, point it at the cli / terraform. Skip the ui.

joshcartme• 2 months ago

You could probably open the developer tools, find the console elements and extract the data from there to get around copy/paste limitations. I’m not familiar with the AWS console but let’s say it’s an input, select it in the dev tools and then in the dev tools console do $0.value

pseudohadamard2• 2 months ago

Agreed on IAM, and TFAs comments that once you see the horrendous complexity in IAM you start seeing it everywhere else in AWS as well. And with IAM, after all the effort you've put in, you can never really tell what is and isn't enabled. If you run your own server you can check permissions, run access-control audit scripts, and so on, and say with a pretty good level of confidence that X is possible and Y isn't. With IAM it's more like "I'm pretty sure I figured out the right silly-walk for X, but I have no way to tell what else might be enabled".

AWS: I came, I saw, I threw up in my mouth a little, I left.

Aeolun• 2 months ago

I think the big problems with amazon IAM is not that it’s inherently complex, it’s that every team in AWS came up with their own way to define permissions and the calls these allow you to make. So the API Gateway set of permissions uses a completely different method for no discernable reason.

hunterpayne6• 2 months ago

"who fought against Kubernetes adoption because it was "too complex", only to slowly reinvent Kubernetes badly,"

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.

atemerev2• 2 months ago

As if there's any alternative. Azure? That mess of everything smashed on top of each other that looks like it was vibecoded in a few month by hundreds of people at once, except that they looked like this from the very beginning where there was no AI? The one that makes you fill docx forms to enable quotas for some services? Or Google Cloud, which _looks_ like it might be simpler, but it has permissions for permissions to enable permissions, and endless micromanagement? I am trying things, but I always return to AWS :(

torginus4• 2 months ago

Imo lambdas are super cool, and the best way to have a no-headache fast-iteration time deployment service.

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.

kikimora3• 2 months ago

I second that. I use lambda as on demand server with one lambda handling entire web app.

petesergeant• 2 months ago

What is lambda adding in this situation that throwing a docker image up somewhere isn't?

torginus4• 2 months ago

Well, complexity and iteration time for example. For docker, you need something that runs it (like your own cluster of EC2 or ECS), a private registry you push to, a separate user that provisions the actual server, while iteration (code changes, or something as simple as changing an env var) - involves the cycle of upload new image, shut down the old containers, try to start up the new ones, with all sort of weird failure cases, like if your container depends on a dockerhub image like alpine, you can run into a ratelimit scenario with dockerhub,as AWS is too cheap to pay for dockerhub access, and doesnt have their own mirror, so your containers may fail to start unless you explicitly mirror your base image.

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.

viccis2• 2 months ago

I agree. Web service hosted on Lambda that, for long running async tasks, uses FIFO SQS (optionally by way of FIFO SNS) connected to the task runner Lambda. Easy. It's not hard to deploy like OP claims. Build a Docker image, toss it in ECR, and use AWS CDK to do infra. Done.

raverbashing• 2 months ago

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.

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)

dakiol• 2 months ago

When are we gonna start hearing the same stories about Anthropic/Openai/etc? The whole AI thing kinda smells like the early days of AWS: everyone was getting onboarded, but later realized they'd built up a pretty big dependency that's not easy to shake

wg0• 2 months ago

I think one big decision AWS could have taken earlier is that of declarative medium for cloud resources. Cloud formation is not human friendly as JSON or YAML. Problem with terraform has been that it had to keep track of the state separately which AWS already had (like what resources have been provisioned against a particular account number) in their databases and further more, I NEVER liked HCL, it never made sense to me.

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

tailscaler20262• 2 months ago

Anyone considering leaving AWS and thinking they'll transfer all their data for free [1], I've got news for you: It's a lie.

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...

cryo324• 2 months ago

If you have a lot of data it's cheaper to lease a Direct Connect line into an AWS zone and suck it out through that.

layoric2• 2 months ago

I might be reading the pricing wrong but you have to pay per hour for the port plus per GB transfer? And looks like the cheapest is $0.02 per GB? Is that really the 'cheap' option? That looks fine for a TB or two, but still crazy when getting closer to PBs.

otterley2• 2 months ago

A week or so later, if they approve the request, you're not allowed to begin DTO until 60 days after the approval.

Do you have proof of this? That is not disclosed in their policy.

tailscaler20262• 2 months ago

I know it's not disclosed. That's why I left this as a warning to others. I can show screenshots of the conversations with AWS support?

Galanwe• 2 months ago

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.

smallnix• 2 months ago

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

pier252• 2 months ago

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

anymouse1234562• 2 months ago

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.

tempest_• 2 months ago

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.

regularfry4• 2 months ago

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.

senko• 2 months ago

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!

voidUpdate• 2 months ago

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

cryo324• 2 months ago

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.

tacticus• 2 months ago

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.

ray_v• 2 months ago

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

pseudohadamard2• 2 months ago

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.

bellowsgulch• 2 months ago

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

akvadrako• 2 months ago

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 ).

Hendrikto• 2 months ago

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.

gizzlon• 2 months ago

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

jph00• 2 months ago

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.

dijit3• 2 months ago

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.

padjo• 2 months ago

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.

archerx• 2 months ago

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.

dabinat• 2 months ago

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.

TRiG_Ireland• 2 months ago

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.

tonymet2• 2 months ago

Every single complaint has a simple fix: “just use EC2”

BirAdam3• 2 months ago

That’s what all of AWS’s inf is anyway. Each instance of a thing is just a premade EC2 instance (I am exaggerating but not by too much).

tonymet2• 2 months ago

Ec2 + open source app = 5x vcpu and iops billing

anymouse1234562• 2 months ago

Like OP, I was an AWS booster for many years (also a Heroku lover), but fell out of love about 10 years ago for the same reasons.

- 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]

oneneptune• 2 months ago

The value in paying someone is if you have enterprise requirements for physical data security. Then after that if you go the Hetzner route, you have to micromanage your underlying OS, Redis, DB, etc... and it's just more work.. and if you're in enterprise business it reduces friction a lot to just pay someone a trivial amount like $10,000 a month.

kaydub5• 2 months ago

I honestly can't believe most of the people posting aren't engineers or they work at small companies or something. They show their lack of experience when talking about how cheap Hetzner and DO are.

mavsman• 2 months ago

This title sounds like an employment experience post: "returned to" and "left" both pretty strongly insinuate joining AWS and leaving employment, not simply using it as a customer.

fafa092• 2 months ago

Interesting take on the migration.

fafa092• 2 months ago

same pain here

lowbloodsugar• 2 months ago

When it comes to email: “Don’t shit where you eat” is the closest analogy I can think of. Have your email somewhere else, it on any service that might decide to lock your account for any reason. Have your domain ownership somewhere else. And have already, or have a plan already, to move that somewhere if for some reason your email provider gets pissed at you.

hand2note• 2 months ago

Almost everything is true about Azure as well, especially obscure pricing and complexity in absolutely everything.

bironran• 2 months ago

GCP has it's own share of issues.

...

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...

vp4nkov• 2 months ago

Azure was affected by this already - small compute quota increases tickets I had opened last year took months to resolve, and they also took away ability to provision postgres in eastus entirely (we are under quota limit).

Canada2• 2 months ago

And because we have fallen for the convenience we have lost a lot of alternatives.

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.

jerhewet2• 2 months ago

anatomy

Autonomy?

[autocorrect strikes again! :-)]

Canada2• 2 months ago

Yes, thank you!!

exabrial• 2 months ago

We invested in colocation 2022-2024 for non-prod (log aggregation, Gitlab, warehouse databases, analytics loads, etc). Didn't know what kind of savings we accidentally set ourselves up for. Investing 3 months DO and AWS Bills permanently cut our spending, and since then has never seen an increase. If these systems go offline, it's an inconvenience but not a show stopper.

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.

AIorNot• 2 months ago

Yup -like the honesty

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

calmbonsai2• 2 months ago

The AWS UI should be, effectively, read-only for any infrastructure aside from setting up some initial roles and perms to manage all of it through an IAC system.

Put more bluntly, if you're using the AWS Console to spin-up/spin-down service instances you're doing it wrong.

alasano• 2 months ago

I've never enjoyed AWS more than with LLMs managing infra as code through sst.dev

calmbonsai2• 2 months ago

Try Terraform or CDK. I like Terraform scales better, but there are some real foot-gun gotchas with it. You do need "depends_on" https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/meta-argu... for efficient large-scale deployments and certain networking situations, it's also really awkward with high-level AWS abstractions such as Organizations, but otherwise solid tech.

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.

VerifiedReports• 2 months ago

I left because of their shitty or nonexistent documentation AND absurd complexity.

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.

gchamonlive• 2 months ago

AWS Lambda - yeah I really bought the sell on this - "its scalable!!!!", and I ignored the slow startup times, the MASSIVE development complexity.

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.

kaydub5• 2 months ago

Lambda IS super simple.

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.

recursive-call• 2 months ago

I was in a team that used aws once for their quantum computers. we had $100 of api credits. while still trying to get the code to work, we somehow used all of them, and then it didn’t even alert us that we were out of credits and just spent an additional $100 that we didn’t have. I would not touch this system again with a 10 foot pole…

themafia• 2 months ago

Somewhere in the depths of AWS some sort of security alarm had been triggered probably by the fact that my mostly dormant account suddenly started doing stuff with an expensive computer.

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.

mchl-mumo• 2 months ago

I looked up DigitalOcean and it looks like a good alternative. What downsides should I be aware of, from those who have made the switch from AWS?

mattbillenstein• 2 months ago

I tend to use a few services on each cloud as possible so it's easy to switch between them; spinning up an Ubuntu VM that's identical on nearly every cloud is a superpower.

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.

regularfry4• 2 months ago

Can report that exiting from Lambda to something more sane (like, say, a django task or api endpoint or something) is now pronounced "hey copilot, look in that directory and implement precisely the same functionality over here". Or thereabouts. A whole lot of things suddenly look a lot less locked in.

waterTanuki• 2 months ago

anyone building with AWS or any cloud provider should be setting up a forked pipeline for their data production: one goes to the cloud provider DB used for production, the other is a local-on prem DB you regularly backup and always have on hand should you need to leave the cloud.

zmmmmm• 2 months ago

I am curious the effect AI will have on these cloud offerings.

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.

aetherspawn• 2 months ago

The one thing that’s good about Microsoft is the support. You can get someone on the phone in less than an hour and they can actually fix the thing.

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.

trollbridge• 2 months ago

Yes. I feel confident recommending Microsoft 365 to clients because I know if something goes wrong it can actually get fixed.

I lack that confidence with Amazon or Google support.

pbgcp2026• 2 months ago

... skills issue. LOL. Good luck to making these tests easier on GCP / Azure. Or try to set up equivalent HW server without pulling your hair. Complexity is large part of why we, IT people, are paid those money. (Should've created *new AWS account* for those tests. AWS's automated security algorithms almost certainly flagged this abnormal behavior as a "suspected security breach" to protect the (long time dormant) user from potentially devastating unauthorized charges)

stiray• 2 months ago

Amazon is bad at their blocking of accounts. They blocked mine for no reason (want me to call some USA phone number which I wont) a few years back and I was writing down everything that I would buy at their store, but I bought it elsewhere.

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.

nicman23• 2 months ago

i mostly used the ec2 instances and the workflow to make a simple gpu instance from the terminal (terraform) is terrible in contrast to ie gcp.

from the UI it is even worse

also how it is so slowwwwwww

bbbflgllglhlld• 2 months ago

These fake open source rugpull companies deserve what Bezos did to them.

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.

thomas_witt• 2 months ago

It's hard to take the author seriously technically competent when reading "DynamoDB what a hot pile of garbage. I tried it and ended up with a $75USD bill by the end of the day."

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.

kaydub5• 2 months ago

Yup!

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.

nuker• 2 months ago

Complexity! Complexity!!

This guy needs supabase or heroku or similar.

imrozim• 2 months ago

Setting up AWS for my startup felt like a full time job gave up and just used a supabse. AWS complexity is real even for similar stuff.

fxtentacle• 2 months ago

"Maybe one day they will get around to unsuspending my account." is increasingly how support feels with all big cloud companies.

stuaxo• 2 months ago

The whole model of slicing the app into so many pieces (proprietary wrappers it seems like) to make more opportunities for billing is terrible.

cantalopes2• 2 months ago

sorry to hijack this but since we're talking the AWS egress exorbitant prices, could someone recommend a reliable production-tested s3 service that will not ruin me financially? i have been with hetzner and while their vps server are great, they are absolutely terrible at s3. random downtimes, incomplete uploads/downloads, capacity issues, terrible api key management, etc - but the failure rate is really high

ovaistariq• 2 months ago

Check out Tigris: https://www.tigrisdata.com/

cantalopes2• 2 months ago

It looks quite nice on the paper, but honestly, i have browsed the website and see fal.ai in the case studies which is a very red flag for me.

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

continueops_com• 2 months ago

Had a similar one. They switched off Lambda and SNS because of a potential credential leak — none had actually leaked — and I was without service for 48 hours. Same flavour as the post: the provider's heuristic was probably right to fire, but you only find out which of your things were load-bearing once they're gone.

simonebrunozzi3• 2 months ago

Hmm... I was very early AWS, and it might even be "the guy from the US" that spoke at the first AWS Melbourne event was me, back in 2010.

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.

andrewstuart4• 2 months ago

No it wasn’t you Simone. I don’t think you had joined AWS at this time. It was a nice guy I think named Mike. He has since passed away.

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. :-)

simonebrunozzi3• 2 months ago

There's many reasons to dislike a company or service. I know.

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.

AJRF2• 2 months ago

AWS / GCP / Azure aren't for individuals or small businesses. They won't tell you this anywhere, and they won't stop you from signing up - but they simply do not care one iota about users with anything less than $100k billing per month.

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.

throwaway20373• 2 months ago

All good points. What do you recommend for the "small potatoes"?

AJRF2• 2 months ago

Hetzner. You won't get much better support, and you will have to deal with EU legislative nonsense, but it won't be hard to do that if you are actually small.

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.

glemmaPaul• 2 months ago

I've been using Scaleway and cannot complain yet, don't know their region reach though..

coldpie• 2 months ago

I chose Digital Ocean. I just need a tiny Debian server I can run a couple self-managed services on and DO gave me exactly that for $4/mo.

I was with Azure before that and good lord was that a mistake. Miserable experience if all you need is a single VM.

hazmazlaz• 2 months ago

I built a small project on Cloudflare and it just works. I've had only one issue where I ended up contacting support and they were very prompt in addressing it.

icedchai2• 2 months ago

I'd go with a smaller VPS-focused provider like Vultr.

niutech2• 2 months ago

OVH - they are cheaper than AWS and bound by the EU privacy law (GDPR).

devin-20302• 2 months ago

Used to be different when AWS started properly 20 years ago with S3 and EC2. But yes they went from catering to startups to SMBs to enterprise.

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.

Our_Benefactors2• 2 months ago

What should someone use? Selfhost? Cheap VPS? Genuinely curious to hear your thoughts.

eddy-sekorti• 2 months ago

Hahaha good one, what was the reason, the complexity, the cost, or simply the clunkiness in the whole setup. I was using Heroku and moved to AWS for saving cost and now endup paying more and thinking about what to do. AWS gets expensive very qucikly.

etothet• 2 months ago

There are many reasons to dislike AWS and many reasons to stay away from it (and the criticisms in the article about support resonate with me), but a few things in the article stood out to me as a bit misleading:

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.

kaydub5• 2 months ago

Alright, so where are the good engineers these days?

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???

icedchai2• 2 months ago

I generally agree with this, especially the Lambda and DynamoDB advice.

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.

rewilder12• 2 months ago

Me reading this from a 100% Azure shop

I wish Azure just worked at all.

bytestrix• 2 months ago

I started using AWS for my project, at starting it looks deficult but it's really easy to use , ui is little complex but you'll get used to it

armaan23• 2 months ago

Hey Andrew I reached out internally at AWS to get traction on your ticket.

dirkg• 2 months ago

I have no idea why people dont use GCP more. Its made by and for devs unlike the hideous complexity and stupid UI in every layer of AWS.

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.

I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

Related Stories