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AWS Explained ELI5: User Interface was written by an interns intern with the only thing being consistent is how bad it is.

balls187 8y ago
Yet, it's still heaps above better than their nearest competitors in Azure and GCP. The UI is great for learning about services, but automating via CLI (or related services) is the ideal goal.
- dijit 8y ago
  Can't speak for Azure as I don't use it, but I really have to call bullshit on AWS UI being better than GCP. GCP is discoverable and follows the principle of least surprise quite consistently, and they show REST/CLI references for everything you're doing in the web UI too. I mean imagine you're a new user and ask yourself "what does route53 do?". Then ask yourself "what does cloud DNS do?"
  - whorleater 8y ago
    GCP's services are nicely named, but the console dashboard is still a mess, with them shifting around the items all the time. The half-foot into stackdriver is also kinda weird.
    - mooreds 8y ago
      For naming in AWS, this is a must have resource: https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    Amazed that S3's web UI fails at both pagination and search.
  - querulous 8y ago
    they're both wretched to use, does degree really matter?
    - dijit 8y ago
      It matters quite a lot when you claim one is "far superior" to others.
- kakwa_ 8y ago
  compared to Azure, the AWS UI is way behind. The AWS UI doesn't handle multiple subscription, it's somewhat annoying when you have multiple accounts (let say dev and prod ones). With Azure, you can federate several subscriptions. Having no consolidated view for all regions is also somewhat annoying, as it is to search a specific resource since these can only be searched in their corresponding panel (ec2 for instances and ELB, RDS panel for DB, IAM for certificates, etc). In contrast, the Azure UI allows you to search accross all resource types in one search box. There are other issues where I don't have a point of comparaison, but: If you have a lot of certificates/domains, selecting the correct certificate in an ELB or a cloudfront distribution serving HTTPS is a pain. Same with selecting security groups for an RDS instance or an ELB. The AWS UI is also painfully slow if you have a big account. The RDS panel used to timeout past 600 or 700 instances, it's a little better now (yay pagination \o/), but still quite slow (10 to 20 seconds to search for a specific instance). The EBS snapshot UI is not usable past 100000 snapshots. I do agree that as long the API is working, the UI is not critical (don't get me started on API throttling, which are really painfull to track down and handle). It would be nice however if it worked reasonnably well, a UI is still quite efficient when you have to explore and understand what is going on.
  - balls187 8y ago
    > The AWS UI doesn't handle multiple subscription, it's somewhat annoying when you have multiple accounts (let say dev and prod ones). It is annoying dealing with multiple AWS accounts. To mitigate this, you can supposedly use IAM to switch your current IAM User role to a role owned by another account.
- niemyjski 8y ago
  I strongly disagree, they have a good service offering but using the ui is a horrible experience. Also azure has a CLI and a much better ui / experience esp around filtering and not being overwhelmed with a million different options / pages made by developers with no usability or design experience.

balls187 8y ago

Yet, it's still heaps above better than their nearest competitors in Azure and GCP. The UI is great for learning about services, but automating via CLI (or related services) is the ideal goal.

dijit 8y ago
Can't speak for Azure as I don't use it, but I really have to call bullshit on AWS UI being better than GCP. GCP is discoverable and follows the principle of least surprise quite consistently, and they show REST/CLI references for everything you're doing in the web UI too. I mean imagine you're a new user and ask yourself "what does route53 do?". Then ask yourself "what does cloud DNS do?"
- whorleater 8y ago
  GCP's services are nicely named, but the console dashboard is still a mess, with them shifting around the items all the time. The half-foot into stackdriver is also kinda weird.
  - mooreds 8y ago
    For naming in AWS, this is a must have resource: https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english
- tomc1985 8y ago
  Amazed that S3's web UI fails at both pagination and search.
- querulous 8y ago
  they're both wretched to use, does degree really matter?
  - dijit 8y ago
    It matters quite a lot when you claim one is "far superior" to others.
kakwa_ 8y ago
compared to Azure, the AWS UI is way behind. The AWS UI doesn't handle multiple subscription, it's somewhat annoying when you have multiple accounts (let say dev and prod ones). With Azure, you can federate several subscriptions. Having no consolidated view for all regions is also somewhat annoying, as it is to search a specific resource since these can only be searched in their corresponding panel (ec2 for instances and ELB, RDS panel for DB, IAM for certificates, etc). In contrast, the Azure UI allows you to search accross all resource types in one search box. There are other issues where I don't have a point of comparaison, but: If you have a lot of certificates/domains, selecting the correct certificate in an ELB or a cloudfront distribution serving HTTPS is a pain. Same with selecting security groups for an RDS instance or an ELB. The AWS UI is also painfully slow if you have a big account. The RDS panel used to timeout past 600 or 700 instances, it's a little better now (yay pagination \o/), but still quite slow (10 to 20 seconds to search for a specific instance). The EBS snapshot UI is not usable past 100000 snapshots. I do agree that as long the API is working, the UI is not critical (don't get me started on API throttling, which are really painfull to track down and handle). It would be nice however if it worked reasonnably well, a UI is still quite efficient when you have to explore and understand what is going on.
- balls187 8y ago
  > The AWS UI doesn't handle multiple subscription, it's somewhat annoying when you have multiple accounts (let say dev and prod ones). It is annoying dealing with multiple AWS accounts. To mitigate this, you can supposedly use IAM to switch your current IAM User role to a role owned by another account.
niemyjski 8y ago
I strongly disagree, they have a good service offering but using the ui is a horrible experience. Also azure has a CLI and a much better ui / experience esp around filtering and not being overwhelmed with a million different options / pages made by developers with no usability or design experience.