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I've used AWS for a bit over 9 months now and it's quite terrible to be honest. I don't need it for anything professional and it's quite terrible for just some

by tscs37 10y ago

I've used AWS for a bit over 9 months now and it's quite terrible to be honest. I don't need it for anything professional and it's quite terrible for just some amateur hosting plus the immense fees if you somehow manage to get decent traffic together. Once my reserved instances run out I'll probably either check out GCE or DO, either seems to be a better option, though GCE seems to be more expensive. Anyways, the console in AWS is a mess and I'm quite sure that I leaked my entire IAM settings to the internet because some switch somewhere isn't set right. Since everything recommends to setup IAM users you'll have to setup the permissions, a procedure which I enjoyed about as much as getting my fingernails slowly removed by a glowing red iron. Calculating any sort of sustained cost is a pain in the backplane if the total doesn't exceed three digits a month. And lastly the login process is probably the biggest pain I've encountered across many many providers. There are atleast 4 login forms I've discovered, 2 of which I have to use and one of those always asks for a captcha with such low quality that a brain-damaged AI running on my calculator could figure it out, not mentioning never knowing if the 2FA setup was correct or maybe probably blew up somewhere because giving some feedback from the UI is plain impossible. TL;DR Don't use AWS, anything else is better.

swozey 10y ago
I mean, you're basically setting up a datacenter if you aren't using Beanstalk. I see complaints all the time about how complicated the networking is, IAM, etc is. But it's far more simple dealing with VPCs then having to buy and hop onto a bunch of F5s/Brocades etc that tend to require their own network engineers on staff. The issue always seems to be that someone tries to move a company onto AWS but they lack the experience in actually running infrastructure to that degree. If you know Change Management you can figure out Cloud Formation templates, if you don't you're likely completely lost and rolling out instances by hand. If you don't know any network engineering you're likely going to have issues with load balancers and VPCs. You can really see the experience difference in people when you work on multiple AWS infrastructures. And that's the huge benefit to it. You can practically roll out whatever sort of infrastructure your business requires. If you're experienced enough you can basically do every single thing in AWS/GCP without having to hire ancillary staff (network engs, etc). I personally use Cloud Formation and create EVERYTHING by it. Load balancers, VPCs, instances, kubernetes, etc. But yeah, if you haven't touched CF before it can be like walking into a spider web of confusion - but believe me, I'd rather do that over again than take over someones hardware that has no APIs, no dashboards, no centralization. I spent years in datacenters where everything was done manually. I wouldn't ever want to go back now that I've learned to treat infrastructure as code. But hey, if you want to run Vsphere servers, manually configure instances and databases and not do any automation via AWS you can do that as well. That's why it's incredible.
- tscs37 10y ago
  I totally agree, AWS is great if you are basically screwing in the racks yourself anyway (metaphorically speaking). But for running a few hobbyist/amateur servers on it, it's absolutely horrifyingly complicated, especially when I'm not really a networking engineer, I like tinkering in the backend but not to that degree.
  - swozey 10y ago
    You could look into Beanstalk, it depends on what the code your app is written in, though. But yeah, I really wouldn't suggest AWS for something simple that DO or Linode could easily handle. GCP is also far more simplified than AWS if you haven't tried it. The way they do server auth via Google accounts (using gcloud) is pretty awesome and simple. You can make project-level SSH keys that are automatically placed onto every server and you can block specific servers from receiving them all through the UI. I do greatly miss AWS's breadth of service offerings, though.
  - joseph 10y ago
    AWS did just introduce Lightsail, which is for people who just want a VPS. It's funny because I worked for a VPS hosting company back when EC2 first came out. At the time I thought it was the death knell for that type of web hosting, but now ten years later Amazon is going to try and grab that same market.
- user5994461 10y ago
  > If you're experienced enough you can basically do every single thing in AWS/GCP without having to hire ancillary staff (network engs, etc). Disagree. You definitely need that staff. Just because it's point and click UI (or script and execute terraform) instead of physical cables doesn't mean you don't need highly skilled network guys to design and configure it.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
afarrell 10y ago
> it's quite terrible for just some amateur hosting. The developer experience when you just want a box on the internet to ssh into is pretty frustrating. DO is fantastic for this use case.
Thaxll 10y ago
DO is nothing for serious business, it's fun to use when you want to do a PoC at home. AWS is by far the most advanced platform when you need to do something backend related, they have large number of useful services.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Depends. We've been on DO for 3 years (we're slowly migrating to GCP for various reasons), and it's great if all you do is run your own VMs and manage everything yourself, and don't have a huge number of them. Bandwidth, CPU and local disk performance, reliability -- all on par with AWS based on my experience. Of course, DO only has VMs -- they don't have things like EBS (though some data centers now have attachable storage), any of the add-on services like S3, or ability to tweak performance by IOPS etc. DO is a bare-bones VM provider, and it is very good for what it is. It's not a toy.
  - Thaxll 10y ago
    It's not very good, it's average, the fact that the kernel version was set in the panel was a huge issue. You provide a VM and you can't upgrade the kernel wtf?
    - lobster_johnson 10y ago
      To be fair, that's no longer the case. I personally had no issues with that.
user5994461 10y ago
Short version: NEVER use AWS if you're not in a professional environment. Try Digital Ocean. That should be easier for you. Here's an article from the same blog to help you choose a cloud provider: https://thehftguy.com/2016/06/08/choosing-a-cloud-provider-amazon-aws-ec2-vs-google-compute-engine-vs-microsoft-azure-vs-ibm-softlayer-vs-linode-vs-digitalocean-vs-ovh-vs-hertzner/ https://thehftguy.com/2016/06/08/choosing-a-cloud-provider-a...
- tscs37 10y ago
  Thanks a lot!
mfrye0 10y ago
Yeah, I totally understand what you mean. I felt the same when I first got on AWS. What helped me immensely was taking a job where they had the whole stack on AWS, and I had the chance to learn by doing. Secondly, I signed up for this class on Udemy and that taught me the details of setting up a legit infrastructure. https://www.udemy.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/ https://www.udemy.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-asso... I agree it's challenging at first, but once you understand what's going on it's fucking awesome. You can configure every little thing and I have my system decently optimized to cost next to nothing.

by tscs37 10y ago

swozey 10y ago

I mean, you're basically setting up a datacenter if you aren't using Beanstalk. I see complaints all the time about how complicated the networking is, IAM, etc is. But it's far more simple dealing with VPCs then having to buy and hop onto a bunch of F5s/Brocades etc that tend to require their own network engineers on staff. The issue always seems to be that someone tries to move a company onto AWS but they lack the experience in actually running infrastructure to that degree. If you know Change Management you can figure out Cloud Formation templates, if you don't you're likely completely lost and rolling out instances by hand. If you don't know any network engineering you're likely going to have issues with load balancers and VPCs. You can really see the experience difference in people when you work on multiple AWS infrastructures. And that's the huge benefit to it. You can practically roll out whatever sort of infrastructure your business requires. If you're experienced enough you can basically do every single thing in AWS/GCP without having to hire ancillary staff (network engs, etc). I personally use Cloud Formation and create EVERYTHING by it. Load balancers, VPCs, instances, kubernetes, etc. But yeah, if you haven't touched CF before it can be like walking into a spider web of confusion - but believe me, I'd rather do that over again than take over someones hardware that has no APIs, no dashboards, no centralization. I spent years in datacenters where everything was done manually. I wouldn't ever want to go back now that I've learned to treat infrastructure as code. But hey, if you want to run Vsphere servers, manually configure instances and databases and not do any automation via AWS you can do that as well. That's why it's incredible.

tscs37 10y ago
I totally agree, AWS is great if you are basically screwing in the racks yourself anyway (metaphorically speaking). But for running a few hobbyist/amateur servers on it, it's absolutely horrifyingly complicated, especially when I'm not really a networking engineer, I like tinkering in the backend but not to that degree.
- swozey 10y ago
  You could look into Beanstalk, it depends on what the code your app is written in, though. But yeah, I really wouldn't suggest AWS for something simple that DO or Linode could easily handle. GCP is also far more simplified than AWS if you haven't tried it. The way they do server auth via Google accounts (using gcloud) is pretty awesome and simple. You can make project-level SSH keys that are automatically placed onto every server and you can block specific servers from receiving them all through the UI. I do greatly miss AWS's breadth of service offerings, though.
- joseph 10y ago
  AWS did just introduce Lightsail, which is for people who just want a VPS. It's funny because I worked for a VPS hosting company back when EC2 first came out. At the time I thought it was the death knell for that type of web hosting, but now ten years later Amazon is going to try and grab that same market.
user5994461 10y ago
> If you're experienced enough you can basically do every single thing in AWS/GCP without having to hire ancillary staff (network engs, etc). Disagree. You definitely need that staff. Just because it's point and click UI (or script and execute terraform) instead of physical cables doesn't mean you don't need highly skilled network guys to design and configure it.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

afarrell 10y ago

> it's quite terrible for just some amateur hosting. The developer experience when you just want a box on the internet to ssh into is pretty frustrating. DO is fantastic for this use case.

Thaxll 10y ago

DO is nothing for serious business, it's fun to use when you want to do a PoC at home. AWS is by far the most advanced platform when you need to do something backend related, they have large number of useful services.

lobster_johnson 10y ago
Depends. We've been on DO for 3 years (we're slowly migrating to GCP for various reasons), and it's great if all you do is run your own VMs and manage everything yourself, and don't have a huge number of them. Bandwidth, CPU and local disk performance, reliability -- all on par with AWS based on my experience. Of course, DO only has VMs -- they don't have things like EBS (though some data centers now have attachable storage), any of the add-on services like S3, or ability to tweak performance by IOPS etc. DO is a bare-bones VM provider, and it is very good for what it is. It's not a toy.
- Thaxll 10y ago
  It's not very good, it's average, the fact that the kernel version was set in the panel was a huge issue. You provide a VM and you can't upgrade the kernel wtf?
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago
    To be fair, that's no longer the case. I personally had no issues with that.

user5994461 10y ago

Short version: NEVER use AWS if you're not in a professional environment. Try Digital Ocean. That should be easier for you. Here's an article from the same blog to help you choose a cloud provider: https://thehftguy.com/2016/06/08/choosing-a-cloud-provider-amazon-aws-ec2-vs-google-compute-engine-vs-microsoft-azure-vs-ibm-softlayer-vs-linode-vs-digitalocean-vs-ovh-vs-hertzner/ https://thehftguy.com/2016/06/08/choosing-a-cloud-provider-a...

tscs37 10y ago
Thanks a lot!

mfrye0 10y ago

Yeah, I totally understand what you mean. I felt the same when I first got on AWS. What helped me immensely was taking a job where they had the whole stack on AWS, and I had the chance to learn by doing. Secondly, I signed up for this class on Udemy and that taught me the details of setting up a legit infrastructure. https://www.udemy.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/ https://www.udemy.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-asso... I agree it's challenging at first, but once you understand what's going on it's fucking awesome. You can configure every little thing and I have my system decently optimized to cost next to nothing.