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In principle I really like this way of developing, and especially prototyping, but as it stands right now Google is doing a significantly better job with their

In principle I really like this way of developing, and especially prototyping, but as it stands right now Google is doing a significantly better job with their tools than Amazon. Amazon got the same guts, but their presentation of these tools is horrendous. It's aimed at the highly skilled developers who would get the concepts in a blink, with the only problem that these are the same people who can spin out servers with more pleasure and probably in the same amount of time. Google meanwhile, with their purchase of Firebase, makes some really appealing tools that are not just easy to use, but also easy to understand. Besides, their dev outreach is quite stunning, and so is the email support. Would love to see Amazon compete, but they have a long road ahead.</2c>

jedberg 9y ago
The value in serverless is not the serverless itself, but the ecosystem. If you've already got petabytes of data in AWS, you're gonna use Lambda. It's true that Google will win the truly greenfield serverless applications, but I suspect those are few and far between. In most cases people are trying to enhance what they already have which means needing access to what is already there.
ramblerman 9y ago
> Would love to see Amazon compete, but they have a long road ahead Amazon is absolutely dominating this space
factsaresacred 9y ago
Firebase is fantastic and that's because they built their toolset and UI before being acquired by Google. They recently Google-ified their website but it's still less of a mess than Google cloud console (which feels like navigating a helicopter's dashboard). First impressions matter and I think Firebase nailed it. The website presents the value clearly while also allowing you to get into the weeds if you need to. They ought to put their design team in charge of the rest of Google's cloud platform.
- kirillzubovsky 9y ago
  Agreed. Google cloud console is a mess. In 5 years Firebase acquisition cost would be considered peanuts for the value they've added to Google.
ranman 9y ago
> It's aimed at the highly skilled developers who would get the concepts in a blink, Do you have any advice on how we could make this stuff more accessible to new developers? When you say the presentation do you mean the overall marketing, the UX, or just the CSS?
- digger250 9y ago
  I think AWS needs a good UX designer. I find that using AWS can be overwhelming at first. Here's a few suggestions: 1. Take "Amazon" out of every product name. Have a look at this list for example: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws_service_limits.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws_service_lim... This adds nothing but clutter to the page. 2. Stop calling everything "Simple". If it's simple, people will be able to tell for themselves. Calling things simple potentially makes people feel dumb if they have a problem with it. 3. The sheer number of offerings (over 18 groups with multiple items) on the "Services" tab of the AWS management console is overwhelming. I'd have a designer see if there was a better way of organizing things.
- kirillzubovsky 9y ago
  All of the above. AWS is the Google Cloud right now, but it's missing the "Firebase" equivalent. I know a ton of people who have no problem spinning out an EC2 instance to scrape the web for all their needs in a heart beat, and yet I don't know many who just want to make software for people, without all the complexity of setting things up. Look at Firebase, they have "Authentication", "Database", "Storage", and "Functions". If I want to Auth users into my app, it's quite literally a one line of code. Meanwhile Amazon has "Cognito," which requires setting up identities, rules, connecting it to other AWS services ... head explodes. That's a small example, but AWS is built for some serious enterprise business, and if you want to make something like Firebase, you need to repackage it all, and dumb it down to a simple use case. Run whatever 265 services are necessary in the background, but give the user 1 thing to worry about. I fully understand that would be really hard to do, but that's the point. Gotta do the hard thing for the user, and they will come. As far as UX/css/visual, it's all of it. Like another commenter mentioned, in order to make things pleasant you gotta move away from the AWS style guide and towards something unique and friendly. Right now the entire AWS website look like it's been built in a spare time by a sys admin (because it probably has been). IMO it's okay to make "AWS Light" a stand-alone offering, like Heroku, but that means you need to commit to maintaining such a service, and from what I hear through the grapevine Amazon is quite happy to be the piping for the internet, without having to run the consumer side of things.

jedberg 9y ago

The value in serverless is not the serverless itself, but the ecosystem. If you've already got petabytes of data in AWS, you're gonna use Lambda. It's true that Google will win the truly greenfield serverless applications, but I suspect those are few and far between. In most cases people are trying to enhance what they already have which means needing access to what is already there.

ramblerman 9y ago

> Would love to see Amazon compete, but they have a long road ahead Amazon is absolutely dominating this space

factsaresacred 9y ago

Firebase is fantastic and that's because they built their toolset and UI before being acquired by Google. They recently Google-ified their website but it's still less of a mess than Google cloud console (which feels like navigating a helicopter's dashboard). First impressions matter and I think Firebase nailed it. The website presents the value clearly while also allowing you to get into the weeds if you need to. They ought to put their design team in charge of the rest of Google's cloud platform.

kirillzubovsky 9y ago
Agreed. Google cloud console is a mess. In 5 years Firebase acquisition cost would be considered peanuts for the value they've added to Google.

ranman 9y ago

> It's aimed at the highly skilled developers who would get the concepts in a blink, Do you have any advice on how we could make this stuff more accessible to new developers? When you say the presentation do you mean the overall marketing, the UX, or just the CSS?

digger250 9y ago
I think AWS needs a good UX designer. I find that using AWS can be overwhelming at first. Here's a few suggestions: 1. Take "Amazon" out of every product name. Have a look at this list for example: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws_service_limits.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws_service_lim... This adds nothing but clutter to the page. 2. Stop calling everything "Simple". If it's simple, people will be able to tell for themselves. Calling things simple potentially makes people feel dumb if they have a problem with it. 3. The sheer number of offerings (over 18 groups with multiple items) on the "Services" tab of the AWS management console is overwhelming. I'd have a designer see if there was a better way of organizing things.
kirillzubovsky 9y ago
All of the above. AWS is the Google Cloud right now, but it's missing the "Firebase" equivalent. I know a ton of people who have no problem spinning out an EC2 instance to scrape the web for all their needs in a heart beat, and yet I don't know many who just want to make software for people, without all the complexity of setting things up. Look at Firebase, they have "Authentication", "Database", "Storage", and "Functions". If I want to Auth users into my app, it's quite literally a one line of code. Meanwhile Amazon has "Cognito," which requires setting up identities, rules, connecting it to other AWS services ... head explodes. That's a small example, but AWS is built for some serious enterprise business, and if you want to make something like Firebase, you need to repackage it all, and dumb it down to a simple use case. Run whatever 265 services are necessary in the background, but give the user 1 thing to worry about. I fully understand that would be really hard to do, but that's the point. Gotta do the hard thing for the user, and they will come. As far as UX/css/visual, it's all of it. Like another commenter mentioned, in order to make things pleasant you gotta move away from the AWS style guide and towards something unique and friendly. Right now the entire AWS website look like it's been built in a spare time by a sys admin (because it probably has been). IMO it's okay to make "AWS Light" a stand-alone offering, like Heroku, but that means you need to commit to maintaining such a service, and from what I hear through the grapevine Amazon is quite happy to be the piping for the internet, without having to run the consumer side of things.