davidgatti

I have a similar situation lots of online presence showcasing what needs to be showcased and I find nobody cares to take the time to check it.

I think the problem is with the popcorn and not the waves ^_^

This description is UE startups in a nutshell :) Countries like Poland for example, get massive amount of money from the EU, and there are business that specialize only in getting grants for people, which then they use to make a "company" for a year or two, and when the money runs out they close it and reopen another one with the next grant. With no revenue stream idea what so ever. In this type of country's if you have a EU grant base company, you are a meme.

Italy on the other hand, dose not use the grants, because here nobody have a clue what's the point of a company, what it means to work to build something successful, and if you talk to an Italian about the grind, or working a minimum of 16h a day, they look at you as a complete lunatic - while complaining that they don't have money. Well... Either you grind or you meet every day with your friends for an Aperitivo, and live the Dolce Vita.

That statement was related to the sentiment that there is no way to protect yourself or a team of people from AWS pricing, people were implying that there is no tool to help you limit or track expenses, which is not true, since there are plenty of tools to do that.

Anyway, life gose on, and it was overall a good chat :)

What do you think about this page: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/

It is very dangerous. If you select the full-stack tutorial you get: "Time to Complete 30 minutes". It should say: "30 min to ruin your life" ;)

If you want to really learn AWS, then this page should be used as a reference of how to design a stack. If I were you I would read the tutorials to see which services are needed for a solution, but before doing anything, I would read the docs for each of those services to really understand them, then I would go back to the tutorial and actually do it, and - MOST IMPORTANTLY - I would read the pricing page for each service that you are going to use.

Do you think it's irresponsible for AWS to encourage beginners to try their service when they apparently only intend it to be used by those with a computer science degree and 5-year apprenticeship under an experienced sysadmin?

100% - when I started working with AWS in 2016 I had a very hard time figuring it out, because I was looking for the simplicity the the marketing team was writing about. I really don't like what the marketing team tries to tell you, because it dose not exist.

Regarding an approach to learn about AWS, I would start with all the serverless services that they have, since the pricing for most of them is ideal for beginners (WARNING - read the pricing page for each since not all have a free staring plane, like S3 and DynamoDB) and for simple weekend projects.

For example, I did build this project a while ago: https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email, if you scroll down to the pricing section you will see this:

``` All resources deployed via this stack will potentially cost you money. But you'd have to do the following for this to happen:

- Invoke Lambdas over 1,000,000 times a month - Send and receive over 1000 emails a month - Perform over 10,000 Get and Put operations and over 2000 Delete operations in your S3 Bucket - Exceed 100 build minutes on CodeBuild - $1 per active CodePipeline (must run at least once a month to be considered active)

The only payment you'll encounter from Day One is an S3 storage fee for emails and CodePipeline artifacts. ```

So you can have a stack that is actually doing something very useful that costs not even a $1 a month.

It is possible to pay $0 to AWS, but you need to first understand AWS to be able to do it, another trivial example of a tiny project that is useful and cost $0 to run: https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_secure301

The last point would be: don't listen to the marketing material - they are there to sell you AWS, marketing never cares about reality.

I also recommend this website https://awsvideocatalog.com - pick a service and watch all the keynotes AWS has on that service, if you'd spend 1h a day, in 6 months you'll know more about AWS then anyone else complaining here.

Maybe this is why AWS offers a “Free Tier”? https://aws.amazon.com/free/

People in this discussion are complaining that the free tire is misleading, plus not all services are covered. And it is true that if you turn on a bunch of server and you don't pay for a year, but forget about them, you will be charged the moment the year passes. Not to mention that you will be charged if you use the CPU of the free tire server to much - which probably very few people know about.

That’s not what AWS says https://aws.amazon.com/developer

And my point is that the marketing of AWS is misleading, they try to convince you that if you don't know anything about computers, but you know code, you will be able to manage AWS. This is very misleading because AWS tries to make you think that AWS is a service like Heroku, simple to use, and there is just one button to push to make it all work. Completely false. I've seen countless AWS accounts that were completely misconfigured by developers who thought that AWS easy to manage. A basic example is the autoscaling of EC2. People will go to the autoscaling section of EC2 "enable it" and be superseded when it dose not work. Where the reality is that you have to do 8 other things to make it work, not to mention the work that needs to be done in the OS itself.

1. yes I am, studying years to be a doctor, lawyer, Engineer etc from your point of view is also to much? Should you just start cutting people to figure out how a body works end expect for everything to be ok once you are done? The point being, yes you have to study to learn something, there is no way around it.

2. If money is a concern to you, then I should focus on learning how exactly the billing works and how to monitor correctly. This way you can build a product the right way, not to mention AWS by default has limits on their services set with limits that prevent you from doing something incorrectly. For example you can only make 5000 requests a sec on the API Gateway, you can only have 1000 concurrent lambdas, you can spin only 25 ec2 instances, ecc... (true, not all services have limits like this - but then again, if you want to use one, the first thing you should do is check the pricing page, this is what I do fro every new service that I'm planing to use).

3. AWS is not for developers, it is meant for SysAdmins and DevOps (true that some marketing materials are not clear on this), they should be the one configuring it to allow developers to host their code. If you want a turn key solution, then there are better solutions, like Heroku - incredibly easy to use and understand and have a much simpler billing structure.

With AWS you can do anything you want, AWS provides lego blocks, what do you build with it is up to your imaginations, and for sure it is not meant to be use directly by developers who have no idea how networks, computers, databases, cpu, ram, policies, storage etc works. Developers should focus on coding, and SysAdmins and DevOps should focus on managing the infrastructure.

And if you want to learn AWS because you want to be a SysAdmin, then it is true, that AWS could have a plan for beginners with even smaller default limits, and limits set on everything - this way you could more safely play with what they have. This would be a nice things to have in this case for sure.

But because they don't provide such thing, you need to be the responsible one, and start learning AWS the right way, and not get in gun blazing, and expect all will be ok. My recommendation is to learn one service at the time. If you do this, over the years the acquired knowledge will be gold. Plus the more services you learn the right way the easier it gets.

The same as it is not expected by anyone to know how to ride a bike or drive a car. Someone has to teach you or you have to go and take a course.

Same with any technology, you should read first all the documentation that there is, watch all the videos that AWS releases every year for free where they explain in detail every service that they have, and try to explain the best practices of it - this is all for free, or you could spend $1000 for a course, instead of risking to lose $10.000.

If you jump in to the water without knowing how to swim, and then get angry at the water because you drown - well...

After 18 years of age you become a grown up, because your parents are not responsible for you anymore. You become responsible for yourself. That is what distinguish a child from a grown up.

Of course a parent needs also to tech you responsibility and what it means.

Mine for example never did, and I had to learn life the hard way. At first I was blaming others, but then I realized that to really grow up, I need to stop blaming others and start owning my mistakes.

So, it is not expected for anyone to know everything, but it is expected that if you want to learn something new, you need to first research the topic.

Hmm not sure where the problem is. With IAM you can create a policy to limit the user to only use certain services, deploy only the cheapest type of instance type, limit the region, the time of day etc. All of this and more is built in to IAM by default. You can even create a CloudFormation as a internal product this way you can limit even more what people do, and budget for that. And on top of that you can make a Lambda that is triggered every 1h to shut down unused resources or send a warning to shut it down, if not, it will go down the next day.

The possibilities are endless. I personally don't see the IBM comparison.

Well, only because you had bad teachers doesn't mean the topic is bad. You had the misfortune to interact with people that don't understand the topic they try to explain. I try to give a simple explanation here: https://consulting.0x4447.com/articles/knowledge/should-i-go... - just as a starting point to at least get a frame of reference when to use and not to use Serverless. But hey I'm just a random person in a random location on this planet :)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgRepT4AO6mGsJaWsS_mHbA

Started a YouTube channel, where I show how I work on AWS. Completely unstructured, the video are just a memory dumps in a hope to give some frame of reference to new AWS people, or to give some ideas to those that already know a bit of AWS.

ps. Bread, I remember the days I eat it :D

Very nice, congrats! :)

Nice! Thanks for the extra details, very useful.

I agree 100%, this description are to simplistic - at the beginning the article should have a warning saying, that this view on what AWS has to offer is just for beginners to help them structure AWS in their heads, but then they should dive deep on their own. For example the S3 mentioned above.

It is nothing like an FTP. It is more of a database than a file storage now days. You can literally now use SQL to query data stored in S3 (S3 Select), and S3 is literally used as a database when you store JSON or CSV files. Which if this is all you have the costs are virtually non existent - but no body thinks about S3 this way. I personally had countless clients and developers use it as a FTP and be scared to make thousands of queries a sec - thinking they are dealing with a hard drive.

This type of thinking limits you for no good reason.

Yes, AWS is wast and complicated - and sure you need a starting point - but you need to be careful when you try to simplify AWS to much, because you'll limit yourself and other from taking advantage of what AWS can actually do for you.

I'm confused, why is this news? This is how its been for ever. I get my most interesting projects form upWork since I can check before applying what the job is about, which is something carder to do when you talk with a client of the street. Not to mention that you get guarantee pay every week. You don't have to spend time and energy to force the client to pay you. Which is the best part of upWork. Sure they get a 10% cut, but perennially is well worth it for the ease of mind.

And the tracking app also allows me to organize my work by living notes to the clients to let them know what I worked on. Which is always appreciated.

To sum it, up – not sure where the problem is. This is what it is, it works and if you are good you'll make plenty of money for yourself and upWork ;)

Native Apps FTW! :D

Nice redesign! :)

Uu is a sound that you make ^_^. I'm also surprised that I didn't know about the existence of Charles :D I will fix that ASAP. Thanks for the tip.

Where Paw is just used to make API call, and keep track of all the APIs a service has. Same as Postman, but native to macOS. Which I always prefer.

Thank you for your interest, very cool questions. Let me address them:

1. I use Foreman to land Env variables from a .env file which is not part of the repo. So no sensitive data will be stored in Git

2. UU years, I think 2 years, where last month I finally had the time to make VirtualBox the way I wanted it to work - never had the time to sit down few days and just do it.

3. Docker, I honestly recommend their documentation it is so well written and to the point that you will need just 2 weekends to know all you need. Very impressive. But sure, I'm might do an update on that :)

4. About the encrypted disc images, they are in the iCloud folder, so they are bucked up there, and are encrypted on their own so I don't care even if someone would get access to my iCloud account.

Hope this helps :)

You have a valid point. People that especially do video podcast could benefit from this technology like twit.tv.

O nice! Thank you for sharing :)