Ask HN: Things you like or dislike about using AWS
24 comments
Registration is convoluted. It took days to sign-up as it displayed errors. Then something was "wrong". I opened a ticket, then I had to receive a call from a representative to help "fix that". They asked me several questions. Then I received an email telling me it will be resolved in 48 hours. Then I had to follow additional steps.
Several parts of the website display a "Create an AWS Account". I am fucking logged in. I have to click on "My Account", just next to a user creation button, for it to display spinning arrows to log me in (again?).
Once done, cluster creation took forever in a "Creating" status.
There's all that confusion about users and organizations. Root vs. IAM. Adding people or accounts to the "organization" is convoluted as well.
Coming from GCP, this fucking blows. I had non-technical people create service accounts and clusters and VMs on GCP and hook them to our product. I'm trying AWS/EKS and Azure/AKS for testing purposes for our product (which hooks to users' clusters, and I have to try this out). I can't find the web console and the docs talk about installing one.
I'm also doing this because my colleague had to test that, but his account was suspended for some reason.
This is the same frustration with any video player that is not YouTube. When I click, Pause. Don't make it full screen. Don't mute the sound when it was un-muted or un-muted when it was mute it. Just fucking pause. When I hit space, pause, don't scroll to the next thing. Don't automatically scroll. When I hit right or left, go forth or go back. Just don't be fucking stupid.
Several parts of the website display a "Create an AWS Account". I am fucking logged in. I have to click on "My Account", just next to a user creation button, for it to display spinning arrows to log me in (again?).
Once done, cluster creation took forever in a "Creating" status.
There's all that confusion about users and organizations. Root vs. IAM. Adding people or accounts to the "organization" is convoluted as well.
Coming from GCP, this fucking blows. I had non-technical people create service accounts and clusters and VMs on GCP and hook them to our product. I'm trying AWS/EKS and Azure/AKS for testing purposes for our product (which hooks to users' clusters, and I have to try this out). I can't find the web console and the docs talk about installing one.
I'm also doing this because my colleague had to test that, but his account was suspended for some reason.
This is the same frustration with any video player that is not YouTube. When I click, Pause. Don't make it full screen. Don't mute the sound when it was un-muted or un-muted when it was mute it. Just fucking pause. When I hit space, pause, don't scroll to the next thing. Don't automatically scroll. When I hit right or left, go forth or go back. Just don't be fucking stupid.
The bear trap that is the “free tier” tripping newcomers up right when they’re at their most enthusiastic.
I wouldn't say 'hate' but it's unnecessarily complicated, and the UI is complete trash.
ALSO they routinely send me a billing reminder telling me the invoice is 'overdue' BEFORE they even send the invoice, which frankly would make me move somewhere else if I had the time. It's maddening.
ALSO they routinely send me a billing reminder telling me the invoice is 'overdue' BEFORE they even send the invoice, which frankly would make me move somewhere else if I had the time. It's maddening.
UI is so bad that moving to terraform and the cli improved my productivity; TF in particular lowered my billing due to being able to clean up e.g. shutting down EC2 instances.
S3 is the only halfway usable service in the web - but only i you are doing something trivial like moving or copying files, not changing mime-type.
I really like DKIM setup for SES when using Route53
S3 is the only halfway usable service in the web - but only i you are doing something trivial like moving or copying files, not changing mime-type.
I really like DKIM setup for SES when using Route53
When you mention the UI do you mean the WebConsole.
I would agree on that WebConsole is a little confusing when it comes to using it
I would agree on that WebConsole is a little confusing when it comes to using it
I've some time to think about AWS issues. Yes, the WebConsole isn't just confusing - it's worse, it's near-useless. The redesign a couple years ago went from sorta-bad to extra white space awful requiring many extra clicks and scrolls - zero information density. Seventeen clicks to view graphs across 2 services. Another example are the emails - my AWS account is so old that I got one the other day about pre-VPC EC2 instances. A wall of text... with no action to take (since none were running). Finally - the biggest complaint - NO BILLING LIMITS
A new feature comes out but with no CloudFormation support so it’s basically unusable
Ui oh dear
I feel like everyone did not had a good experience with there UI component
I find the APIs bewilderingly complex. Typically takes me a lot trial and error to get things working. For example Lambda. Even S3, which I find to be one of the easiest APIs to use took several attempts to get basic things working.
I do understand that the complexity, including the authorization subsystem, are necessary in the long-term. But when you are just trying to whip something up to test an idea, I find it frustrating.
I do understand that the complexity, including the authorization subsystem, are necessary in the long-term. But when you are just trying to whip something up to test an idea, I find it frustrating.
Love the creativity and investment in client growth large and small. I simply could not prosper without their incredible facilitation tools (think serverless everything for the win). Hate the free-for-all aspect of serverless contributions which feels disorganized. It's hard to keep up on reference docs and best practices when there are a firehose of "solutions". The process seems to outrun the ability to document too. Extreme curse of abundance.
Cloudformation works but is bit of a hog: it moves slowly and sometimes if it breaks down the only recourse is to delete all stacks and try again.
Customers are often alpha-testers of new products without it being clearly specified that the products are alpha quality. Then again, everyone in the industry does something like this, but the contrast between some rock solid AWS services and some others is quite stark.
And it's expensive.
But other than the alpha products, generally it works very well and is highly reliable.
Customers are often alpha-testers of new products without it being clearly specified that the products are alpha quality. Then again, everyone in the industry does something like this, but the contrast between some rock solid AWS services and some others is quite stark.
And it's expensive.
But other than the alpha products, generally it works very well and is highly reliable.
I hate the fear of experimenting with a feature and accidentally ending up with a big bill. Budget alarms aren't enough
Great: I trust Amazon to not arbitrarily deprecate services, the analytics services far surpass GCP (have yet to play with Azure), customer service is A+, the AWS blog is an incredible resource to learn new things, and as somebody mentioned the serverless design has been revolutionary
Bad: dumb service names, API’s are not at all easy to learn and much of the documentation is subpar (WorkDocs is the latest pain), feeling some unease with all the downed services this year
Bad: dumb service names, API’s are not at all easy to learn and much of the documentation is subpar (WorkDocs is the latest pain), feeling some unease with all the downed services this year
Like: Stability. Their scale-as-you-go foundational products (S3, EC2, DynamoDB, ...) are amazing, full stop.
Dislike: A billion products, most of them half-baked, terrible DX, terrible documentation, pricing all over the place. Examples: regular Sagemaker is much worse than a normal VM, Sagemaker Studio is so so. CloudFormation is not great and only works with AWS. Smaller products are even worse.
I try to avoid as much as I can dealing directly with AWS APIs (specially their web) and focus on third party tools like Terraform, Ansible, etc. It makes it tolerable.
Dislike: A billion products, most of them half-baked, terrible DX, terrible documentation, pricing all over the place. Examples: regular Sagemaker is much worse than a normal VM, Sagemaker Studio is so so. CloudFormation is not great and only works with AWS. Smaller products are even worse.
I try to avoid as much as I can dealing directly with AWS APIs (specially their web) and focus on third party tools like Terraform, Ansible, etc. It makes it tolerable.
Kubernetes is a lot easier to deploy in the cloud. AWS is good for that.
It's unappealing because it seems like AWS is all these unnecessarily complex APIs that can only be used in one place.
Like: When I was taking an AWS certification class I sometimes got giddy with excitement thinking about how easily I could build anything at any scale, paying no money down! Anything you need to create a technical product is there. Security can be complex but it is possible to enforce minimum access to every component in the architecture.
Also, there are plenty of resources available online for AWS, both official and unofficial.
Dislike: There is no truly safe way to experiment and play around, even in the free tier. I set up billing alerts, but even with that it can be tricky to identify exactly what is costing me money (EBS snapshots, NAT gateways, Route 53 hosted zones, etc)
Also, there are plenty of resources available online for AWS, both official and unofficial.
Dislike: There is no truly safe way to experiment and play around, even in the free tier. I set up billing alerts, but even with that it can be tricky to identify exactly what is costing me money (EBS snapshots, NAT gateways, Route 53 hosted zones, etc)
I like that it's generally fast to set up, has decent documentation/tutorials available, and is priced fairly cheap (for small projects).
I hate dealing with config issues and error messages. I'm currently facing an issue in a CloudFront distribution at home, and just got done a multiday issue with an SQS at work. The queue thing was very frustrating. The organization has standards for what needs to be set up, like encryption, access patterns, etc. I asked the group that owns our tools related to AWS if they had a template that follows best practices that I could look at - nope. Ok, then maybe theres a project I can look at as an example that follows our standards - nope. So as someone with mostly a developer background it was a lot of frustrating trial and error to fix an issue that I didn't even create.
I hate dealing with config issues and error messages. I'm currently facing an issue in a CloudFront distribution at home, and just got done a multiday issue with an SQS at work. The queue thing was very frustrating. The organization has standards for what needs to be set up, like encryption, access patterns, etc. I asked the group that owns our tools related to AWS if they had a template that follows best practices that I could look at - nope. Ok, then maybe theres a project I can look at as an example that follows our standards - nope. So as someone with mostly a developer background it was a lot of frustrating trial and error to fix an issue that I didn't even create.
Like: Even if it's my personal account, I have access to anything a serious business does.
Dislike: Due to expansive options, it can be tricky to combine pieces together.
Dislike: Due to expansive options, it can be tricky to combine pieces together.
Pros: The APIs, while often frustrating, are better and more complete than any of the other cloud providers. Super rich variety of services, which again, are more mature than competitors. In general, I'd say that AWS is ~18 months ahead of their competition. That's over a decade in Scott McNealy's "Internet yrs = dog years" aphorism.
Cons: It's glaringly obvious that all AWS products are developed by independent teams with little coordination or style guide enforcement. Documentation ranges from excellent to completely unusable, which does not help the fact that AWS services in general has a far steeper learning curve than it should. (Security, for example is a nightmare unless you spend a LOT of time leaning crap almost no one should ever have to know.) Billing is non-transparent and far better billing tools are available for free through AWS partners, but effectively only to big companies.
The biggest negative by far, though, is this: AWS can no longer be trusted to act as an even-handed infrastructure provider. They have proven they are willing to persecute and try to kill customers who do things on AWS that Amazon judges politically incorrect. (Gab, Parler, and others less political - Until a couple of years ago, Amazon's politics did not cross into AWS. Those days are gone, and if you don't toe the Seattle Socialist line, you ARE toying with the risk of deplatforming.) In my mind, that means that only a fool would bet his business on staying in AWS' good graces over the long haul, especially if they're in industries like say, oil, beef, or manufacturing.
Cons: It's glaringly obvious that all AWS products are developed by independent teams with little coordination or style guide enforcement. Documentation ranges from excellent to completely unusable, which does not help the fact that AWS services in general has a far steeper learning curve than it should. (Security, for example is a nightmare unless you spend a LOT of time leaning crap almost no one should ever have to know.) Billing is non-transparent and far better billing tools are available for free through AWS partners, but effectively only to big companies.
The biggest negative by far, though, is this: AWS can no longer be trusted to act as an even-handed infrastructure provider. They have proven they are willing to persecute and try to kill customers who do things on AWS that Amazon judges politically incorrect. (Gab, Parler, and others less political - Until a couple of years ago, Amazon's politics did not cross into AWS. Those days are gone, and if you don't toe the Seattle Socialist line, you ARE toying with the risk of deplatforming.) In my mind, that means that only a fool would bet his business on staying in AWS' good graces over the long haul, especially if they're in industries like say, oil, beef, or manufacturing.
IAM.
In GCP you can create a project and give pretty indiscriminate permissions between entities at the project level. It's not the hardest posture in the world, but as long as the project is fine-grained and the stakes aren't too high, it's reasonable.
In AWS it seems you are stuck managing ARNs for every damn object if you want to have anything less than a free-for-all in the account. This is an incredibly intense level of bureaucracy. I can see how the project abstraction could break down for a proper enterprise, which might really need that arbitrarily complex spaghetti of individual objects connected to individual objects. But it would still be better if the default or happy-path approach favored the better engineering practice of self-contained systems connected over few and well-defined interfaces.
In GCP you can create a project and give pretty indiscriminate permissions between entities at the project level. It's not the hardest posture in the world, but as long as the project is fine-grained and the stakes aren't too high, it's reasonable.
In AWS it seems you are stuck managing ARNs for every damn object if you want to have anything less than a free-for-all in the account. This is an incredibly intense level of bureaucracy. I can see how the project abstraction could break down for a proper enterprise, which might really need that arbitrarily complex spaghetti of individual objects connected to individual objects. But it would still be better if the default or happy-path approach favored the better engineering practice of self-contained systems connected over few and well-defined interfaces.
No hard limits on spending, at least on non-business account.
I've read too many horror stories of nice stuff that goes totally wrong and now Amazon wants $30k from you.
I'd love to be able to set some hard spending limits and have all services just shut down if I ever reach them.
Otherwise experimenting on Aws is very risky, particularly if you'd like to use the pay-per-use services.
I've read too many horror stories of nice stuff that goes totally wrong and now Amazon wants $30k from you.
I'd love to be able to set some hard spending limits and have all services just shut down if I ever reach them.
Otherwise experimenting on Aws is very risky, particularly if you'd like to use the pay-per-use services.
Like: They are pushing the web and technology in general by inventing a ton of different services. This is really nice.
Dislike: Traffic price is just crazy high, it is simply impossible to start anything that is bandwidth-heavy, they might give you a good discount after you spend your first $100k but still there are many alternatives to the most popular AWS services like EC2: Digital Ocean, Vultr, OVH; S3: DO Spaces, Tebi.io, Wasabi, etc.
They need to reduce traffic price by a lot!
Dislike: Traffic price is just crazy high, it is simply impossible to start anything that is bandwidth-heavy, they might give you a good discount after you spend your first $100k but still there are many alternatives to the most popular AWS services like EC2: Digital Ocean, Vultr, OVH; S3: DO Spaces, Tebi.io, Wasabi, etc.
They need to reduce traffic price by a lot!
I would love to hear your experience regarding aws and what are something you hate or like about when it comes to using AWS