7 ms·

I know of no service that is more complex and off putting to newbies than AWS. I mean, wait, I need multiple accounts? Getting my team access to the one account

I know of no service that is more complex and off putting to newbies than AWS. I mean, wait, I need multiple accounts? Getting my team access to the one account we have took me 3 hours already! No wait, I need a design pattern for how to manage accounts of a SaaS service? I'm probably not the target audience here but I strongly get the impression that these patterns would not be necessary if AWS would get their shit together in terms of AWS Console UX design.

jimwalsh 9y ago
Use the Console to spot check things. But beyond that, the majority of your work in AWS should be scripted using the various APIs. At that point, using federated access or a proper IAM strategy makes that fairly painless.
dasil003 9y ago
AWS is not really SaaS or PaaS although they do offer some of those (eg. Elastic Transcoder, Elastic Beanstalk), they aren't best of breed. Rather, AWS is IaaS, and hence it has to remain extremely broad, flexible and scalable. The first thing to understand is AWS is defined by its APIs, the console is a sprinkle of convenience, but understand that it is intentionally a second-class citizen. As far as multiple accounts are concerned, this is a tradeoff you make for isolation and security. Knowing that fat fingering a staging change can not possibly impact production because the credential used in that case is literally for a different account is very comforting when you're running devops in an environment managed by multiple people. While a lot of the stuff Amazon gives you may seem complicated, or overkill, if it's something you need it tends to be quite a bit simpler than the off-the-shelf alternative (see: VPC versus private networking).
lazyant 9y ago
AWS is not for newbies, they released a paired-down version: https://amazonlightsail.com/ https://amazonlightsail.com/
- NDizzle 9y ago
  AWS is totally for newbies, so long as you aren't afraid of performing sysadmin work. You don't need to have some zany serverless infrastructure. The overhead in setting it up isn't worth the trouble.
  - cagataygurturk 9y ago
    Sure you can use AWS as newbie but I wonder how much money you burn because of not clicking one checkbox.
    - NDizzle 9y ago
      Checkboxes can be tricky! Why, I unmounted several local volumes when adding a Windows server to a failover cluster just last month...
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      > but I wonder how much money you burn because of not clicking one checkbox. Abstraction is no replacement for knowledge.
takeda 9y ago
As it was pointed out AWS is IaaS. I think the reason it might seem hard is because you probably don't have operational experience. You need to have that knowledge if you have your own data center. Sure, this all could be abstracted, and it kind of is if you use things like Beanstalk, but AWS provides great flexibility which can make difference how your application performs in the end and how easy it is to maintain it.
manigandham 9y ago
AWS is a critical service for most companies and access needs to be carefully managed. There are just natural complexities in managing access to sensitive info and controls in any company and probably needs to be solved at that level rather than a specific cloud vendor. Arguably Google Cloud is pretty well done, especially if you're already using their G-Suite service. What would make AWS easier for you and why did it take 3 hours to create accounts for your team?

jimwalsh 9y ago

Use the Console to spot check things. But beyond that, the majority of your work in AWS should be scripted using the various APIs. At that point, using federated access or a proper IAM strategy makes that fairly painless.

dasil003 9y ago

AWS is not really SaaS or PaaS although they do offer some of those (eg. Elastic Transcoder, Elastic Beanstalk), they aren't best of breed. Rather, AWS is IaaS, and hence it has to remain extremely broad, flexible and scalable. The first thing to understand is AWS is defined by its APIs, the console is a sprinkle of convenience, but understand that it is intentionally a second-class citizen. As far as multiple accounts are concerned, this is a tradeoff you make for isolation and security. Knowing that fat fingering a staging change can not possibly impact production because the credential used in that case is literally for a different account is very comforting when you're running devops in an environment managed by multiple people. While a lot of the stuff Amazon gives you may seem complicated, or overkill, if it's something you need it tends to be quite a bit simpler than the off-the-shelf alternative (see: VPC versus private networking).

lazyant 9y ago

AWS is not for newbies, they released a paired-down version: https://amazonlightsail.com/ https://amazonlightsail.com/

NDizzle 9y ago
AWS is totally for newbies, so long as you aren't afraid of performing sysadmin work. You don't need to have some zany serverless infrastructure. The overhead in setting it up isn't worth the trouble.
- cagataygurturk 9y ago
  Sure you can use AWS as newbie but I wonder how much money you burn because of not clicking one checkbox.
  - NDizzle 9y ago
    Checkboxes can be tricky! Why, I unmounted several local volumes when adding a Windows server to a failover cluster just last month...
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    > but I wonder how much money you burn because of not clicking one checkbox. Abstraction is no replacement for knowledge.

takeda 9y ago

As it was pointed out AWS is IaaS. I think the reason it might seem hard is because you probably don't have operational experience. You need to have that knowledge if you have your own data center. Sure, this all could be abstracted, and it kind of is if you use things like Beanstalk, but AWS provides great flexibility which can make difference how your application performs in the end and how easy it is to maintain it.

manigandham 9y ago

AWS is a critical service for most companies and access needs to be carefully managed. There are just natural complexities in managing access to sensitive info and controls in any company and probably needs to be solved at that level rather than a specific cloud vendor. Arguably Google Cloud is pretty well done, especially if you're already using their G-Suite service. What would make AWS easier for you and why did it take 3 hours to create accounts for your team?