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Saw this article the other day, it didn't get upvoted much - I'm not sure why it's getting to the frontpage now, it really isn't saying anything at all. I agree
by scrollaway 10y ago
Saw this article the other day, it didn't get upvoted much - I'm not sure why it's getting to the frontpage now, it really isn't saying anything at all. I agree with the sentiment though.
I haven't been dealing with AWS very long but I keep hitting limitations. Stupid limitations.
Sometimes they're a big deal (IPv6 is not available natively. WTF, doesn't AWS run half the web?). Sometimes they're not a big deal, but still annoying (DNSSEC isn't supported by Route53). Sometimes, they're unbelievable (AWS Lambda is Python 2.7 only, no Python 3, in 2016).
Sometimes it's probably something that would be fixed with a single line of code (Ed25519 is not supported as a keypair). Sometimes, the product itself just sucks (Cloudformation), requires a Ph.D (IAM) or has ridiculous limitations (certificate manager). And sometimes, it's just the aws cli that, in between its million subcommands available, cannot do basic things like creating S3 redirect rules or update ACM certs.
But all the time, it's the web UI that sucks the most - I have to use a separate browser for cloudwatch logs and S3 because the native UI is just that bad. And god forbid you enable 2FA, you'll have to get your phone out twice a day.
These are all the limitations I hit in a few months using AWS. I wonder how many more I'll hit within the next year. Is Google actually any better? Seems to me it's just different kinds of limitations.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoThe reason why it's on the frontpage now is that a Google employee posted it, and probably had a bunch of other employees upvote it. Jason Ganetsky is the lead developer of the Pub/Sub feature talked about in the article (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-ganetsky-691aa43 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-ganetsky-691aa43) and almost all his submissions are Google announcements: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jganetsk https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jganetsk EDIT: While I enjoy the downvotes, I did some more research. This submission is not even the first dupe of this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lugassy.net https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lugassy.net The first share was by the author (reasonable and unsurprising), and the first dupe was by a user who is also almost entirely Google Cloud promotional submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vgt https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vgt His username is a hard string to search because it's short, but if you read a few comments, it doesn't take long to confirm vgt is another Googler working on GCE: https://twitter.com/thetinot https://twitter.com/thetinot Apparently, that promotional attempt wasn't too successful so they tried again today.
- ben_jones 10y agoI'd prefer not to attribute to malice what could as easily be coincidence. The biggest factor I see in the rankings of posts on various sites is the time of day in which it is posted and then directly related to that whether or not it received the critical mass early such that it can slingshot out of /new and start building an engaging discussion.
- sp527 10y ago> I'd prefer not to attribute to malice what could as easily be coincidence. Speaking as a former employee of another tech monolith specializing in marketing ploys, I can tell you unequivocally that this is a naive position to take.
- EwanToo 10y agoIt's clearly not a popular view, but Google have definitely got a lot more professional at promoting their products through HN and similar sites. I doubt they're that different from Amazon or other companies we regularly see at the top of the front page though.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- cagataygurturk 10y agoWhy do you think Cloudformation sucks?
- KirinDave 10y agoBecause massive json files with pseudo-invocation syntax and a ton of gaping issues that aren't readily solved by pre-existing template solutions pauses for breath and just bizarre decisions about holding and fielding and really poor integration with new services (you can tie ECS clusters in a knot with CF trivially) and API call limit hits KOing CF provisioning jobs and... I mean, what it's doing is hard and I use it over, say, Chef... but it's not a "good" product. Heck, you cannot even truly validate CF templates without running them. The CLI and builder just do a crude structural check pass. Got a case error in a nested structure? Too bad, the entire job is rolling back.
- scrollaway 10y agoWhile we're on the subject, I want to mention terraform (https://www.terraform.io/ https://www.terraform.io/). I'm not going to straight up recommend using it, but I will recommend checking it out. It's certainly a lot better than CF, but it still has really glaring issues and very much feels like alpha software (see discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12213935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12213935 and some of my complaints here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12214358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12214358).
- yeukhon 10y agoI am on the opposite fence. I also comment on the recent Terraform discussion. Basically the abstraction layer is too complex; why not template JSON and build the cloudformation stack? In the end, nested CF stack is still, a hard problem.
- scrollaway 10y agoWhy do you think the abstraction layer is too complex? I found terraform was essentially designed with AWS as a first-class citizen (if not for AWS in the first place), which means everything maps really well. I strongly dislike HCL, but that's essentially what it is - templated JSON.
- nicobn 10y agoDon't get me wrong, I love AWS. I use ~15 products almost everyday. I actually like how powerful IAM is. But yeah, CloudFormation just sucks. It does. It's painful because it's a really good idea but the configuration format is inadequate for the task. CF should have been implemented using a declarative DSL similar to Puppet from the start. I've been tinkering with the idea of creating a DSL with a JSON translation layer but I always assumed AWS would eventually move away from JSON anyway, making the effort futile. Four years later and still no improvements. Definitely my biggest disappointment with their platform.
- eropple 10y agoPlenty of those DSLs already exist, the cfer project[1] that I contribute to and SparkleFormation being two I can vouch for. I don't find CloudFormation particularly annoying or difficult, and certainly better than the alternatives (BOSH/Terraform/etc.), given such a wrapper, and cfn-init with CloudFormation metadata is miles ahead of "well, install Consul and connect to the cluster and eventually reach the state you want to be in" for my uses. [1] - https://github.com/seanedwards/cfer https://github.com/seanedwards/cfer [2] - https://github.com/sparkleformation/sparkle_formation https://github.com/sparkleformation/sparkle_formation
- jonaf 10y agoI maintain a ruby dsl as well at http://github.com/bazaarvoice/cloudformation-ruby-dsl http://github.com/bazaarvoice/cloudformation-ruby-dsl The format is a weak argument against cloud formation. It has some negatives. This one is easily overcome.
- ivarrian 10y agoAnd I salute you! We heavily use the Ruby DSL.
- justicezyx 10y agoI have to state that configuration is not easy. CF might suck, but imagine something easily to replace it and works better is close to be wishful thinking.
- api 10y agoI don't understand the AWS fetish either. I guess nobody ever got fired for using AWS. It's the IBM of the cloud. If you need managed services Azure and Google Cloud are largely better. If you just need compute and transfer Digital Ocean and Vultr absolutely destroy AWS.
- fauigerzigerk 10y agoDigitalOcean and Vultr destroy not just AWS on network traffic costs, they destroy all three of them by an absurd margin. I have no explanation for that huge gap. It's the great mystery of cloud computing.
- scrollaway 10y agoI've never heard of Vultr until today. Have you used it? Can you tell more about it?
- fauigerzigerk 10y agoI am using Vultr, but the particular project I'm using it for doesn't put a whole lot of strain on their infrastructure yet. So far it's been working well and support was very responsive on the one occasion when I needed their help.
- LusoTycoon 10y agoSamething as DigitalOcean without the hype. 5$ SSD VPS, 768M of Ram instead of 512 at DO, the reason I moved in at first. The popularity clearly helps DO keeping up with more 1 click apps and other features than Vultr, but they recently made available reserved IPs and Object Storage, so they continue to be a good alternative to DO.
- jfindley 10y agoAs others have said, similar to DO. It has a few more options available, though, including better support for booting your own OSes if you don't want to use a prepackaged one, and dedicated instances (last I checked DO didn't do either, but haven't looked for a bit, might be out of date). I've also found their support to be more willing to work with me to get things running how I want, but that's obviously just anecdotal.
- yeukhon 10y agoYes, some limitations and bugs are just ridiculously interesting. As a customer, I know my TAM would tell me this is much an organizational issue. One team pushed a feature, but the other team wasn't ready so the feature would just hold up in a pending state for months. I can't disclose which new feature's coming out, but essentially, yeah that feature won't come out until the other team gets their product updated. Another classic example is Directory Service's security group can only be found if you go to VPC / EC2 console page to search. The SG isn't even mentioned in the Directory Service console. I bought reserved instances for RDS and EC2, one of them accepts custom tagging, so you could name the purchase, but the other doesn't. If you use CloudFormation you want to make sure the resources are managed by the CFn. Your manual change could break the next CFn update. In some cases, rollback is not possible and will require AWS Support's intervention. Another example, say you have a cluster of 3 Cassandra nodes, you would build 3 EC2 from a single CFn stack. Well, time for server rotation (by that I meant taking the instance out and replace with a new one), one node at a time. Too bad you really can't out of the box. You have to build another stack with 3 instances, and then start configuring one node and swapping one node at a time plus changing the underlying dynamic inventory we got out of Ansible.
- HNSucksAss 10y agoAmen. AWS is a mess. Their documentation is a pile of contradictory and outdated crap, and the Web UI is unbelievably bad. I mean... the S3 browser gives you no way to SEARCH FOR A FILE BY NAME. If you're a developer and you need to delete one file, you have to sit down and write code to do it. Or you have to page through perhaps thousands of pages of file lists and look for it manually. Have fun with that, especially if the filenames are GUIDs. And the "policies"... this is where it all comes together in a nexus of ineptitude. If you condemn AWS, you might hear, "But all these big companies use it..." Yeah, because all those companies are paying a shitload of money for a dedicated liaison to baby-sit this mess. Hell, Amazon can't even get the billing right. After numerous efforts, they've admitted that they can't remove my credit card from an AWS account without permanently removing it from my personal Amazon shopping account. WTF? After wasting days and days of dev time, I set up a server at Linode and moved our entire back end to it. DONE and DONE.
- karma_vaccum123 10y agoIs there any particular reason you need IPv6? I get the whole IPv4 exhaustion thing, but if AWS can figure out a way to get me an IPv4 address when I need it, this seems preferable to dealing with IPv6.
- q3k 10y agoFrom my experience, some (Virgin Media in IE) ISPs with IPv4 CGNAT have a slower/less reliable IPv4 connectivity than with native IPv6.
- flyt 10y agoIPv6 is provably faster, especially for mobile clients. iOS 9/10 also prefer it and the App Store has begun requiring apps to work on full v6 stacks, meaning any end points in AWS will require 6to4 somewhere.
- vacri 10y ago> And god forbid you enable 2FA, you'll have to get your phone out twice a day. How onerous, a security mechanism you actively turned on actually requiring you to do something. My car is just as bad - I drove it at a wall, and the front bit crumpled up! And if you're getting your phone out twice a day, then perhaps your work hours are a bit crazy (12 hours+) and the problem is less to do with AWS than your workplace?
- scrollaway 10y agoMy Google account is far more secure than my AWS account, but it can actually remember device-based 2FA for a month. Yes, how onerous, Google accounts are LITERALLY like a crashing car. And as someone who works at home, I work whenever the hell I want, get off my back and go troll elsewhere.
- killbrad 10y agoFar more secure how?
- rev_bird 10y ago>it can actually remember device-based 2FA for a month Call me crazy, but that seems like a totally different feature than what AWS two-factor auth is doing. AWS uses 2FA to validate users, while Google uses it to validate devices, and you're making it seem like Amazon is too dumb to use local storage for something. (Also, I don't think the parent commenter was comparing Google to a car crash. The analogy was that it seems weird to get mad about features performing their stated actions.)
- lobster_johnson 10y ago2FA that is long lived and only protects the device does not sound as secure for something this critical.
- vacri 10y agoWow. My apologies, I didn't realise your personal self-worth was so wrapped up in your google account. I wasn't even referencing google with the car thing, but the AWS mechanism doing what it's been activated to do. If you're that sensitive about lighthearted hyperbole, then perhaps you shouldn't use it in the first place.
- coredog64 10y agoThe Lambda UI used to be atrocious: You couldn't resize the multiselect for subnets. My main nemesis now is the ElasticSearch dashboard. Just opening it gives me a 50-50 chance of my browser tab crashing.
- monksy 10y ago> you'll have to get your phone out twice a day. I pull out my phone at least 6 times a day for that just to switch between accounts. Welcome to the wonderful world that agile/lean methodology has given us. They've delievered shit just to say they delievered something. They won't actually give you what you need until they get enough backing for it.
- feider 10y agoIt's ridiculous to blame agile for "delivering shit" (I'm not a huge agile fan neither) - after all it always comes down to the people involved not the methodology/process applied. A though experiment: do you blame democracy, because Trump is now a nominee? If you have lousy people, choice of process does not really matter.
- asdfologist 10y agoActually that would be a perfectly valid criticism of democracy. A dictatorship, for instance, is more robust to a generally lousy populace, though it suffers from other problems of course.
- gnur 10y agoIt is possible to link accounts so you get a simple dropdown that lets you select the account you want to use without logging out and in again.
- jacques_chester 10y ago> They've delievered shit just to say they delievered something. You're right. This never happened before the agile manifesto was published.