8 ms·

The trend I've noticed is that AWS makes a lot of very half-baked services that appear to compete with third-parties, but provide about 10% of the features and

The trend I've noticed is that AWS makes a lot of very half-baked services that appear to compete with third-parties, but provide about 10% of the features and usability. Maybe they're hoping that's enough for the bulk of users (and maybe it is), but from what I've seen, if you want to do anything serious, you still have to use a third-party. Take CloudWatch for example. It's technically "competing" with Splunk, Datadog, and other logging/metrics services. But the usability of CloudWatch is beyond poor - it's slow, the UI is terrible, and has tons of limitations. It provides just barely enough usability that hobbyist users can use it. But most serious businesses will revert to Splunk or Sumo Logic or Datadog. Another issue I have with AWS is that they simply provide too many ways to do the same thing. I want to run a container. Should I use ElasticBeanstalk? ECS? Fargate? EC2 with Docker? I've been using AWS for years, so I get the subtle differences, but some users just want to click a button and be done with it, which is where third-parties can excel.

scarface74 8y ago
Another issue I have with AWS is that they simply provide too many ways to do the same thing. I want to run a container. Should I use ElasticBeanstalk? ECS? Fargate? EC2 with Docker? I've been using AWS for years, so I get the subtle differences, but some users just want to click a button and be done with it, which is where third-parties can excel. Or pay overpriced “Implementation Consultants”. I have no sympathy for people who don’t take the time to learn the subtleties of the platform they choose to use. On the other hand, I’ll gladly charge them a nice hourly rate to help them.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  In a lot of companies you simply don't get the time to study things. I am right now working on porting a project to the cloud that was previously supported (and fucked up) by our IT department but it's hard to do it right. Ths director has declared that AWS is best and there is a lot of pressure to show something soon or the move to cloud may get cancelled. There is no way to get something really that way but getting away from IT is already worth it even if the result is still not very good.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    I feel your pain. I was the dev lead at a company and responsible for a decently complex new green field project. They decided to “move to the cloud” at the time I didn’t know anything about AWS and the “consultants” that were brought in only knew networking and the best they could help us do is a “lift and shift”. I was neither given the time to research, given good consultants that knew anything about the development and Devops portions of AWS or given the access to a dev account to experiment and do proof of concepts. So so did everything like I would do on prem with a bunch of VMs. I asked them to set up a dev, qa, uat, and production subnet. All with multiple VMs. I used 7 VMs for Hashicorp’s Consul, 7 for Nomad, and 7 for Mongo. (1 for each non production environment and a cluster of 3 for production.) I also used Fabio. Between all of that I had my configuration key/value store, service discovery, job scheduling (Nomad), and data store. I also had build boxes for Team Foundation Server (or whatever MS is calling thier hosted TFS version these days with local agents.) It wasn’t until after I was getting ready to leave the company that I realized how dumb this setup was for an AWS hosted solution. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have done too much differently today for a self hosted solution. I left the company, self demoted to an individual contributor role at a smaller company that was “cloud native” and I spent the next year learning AWS inside and out and taking advantage of reimbursements for certifications. I’m still at the company now, but when and if so do decide to leave, I’m. It going back to being an architect for a company. Consulting is way more lucrative.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
fipple 8y ago
This is not unique, it is the “integrated” vs “best of breed” offering. It’s like the oldest business school IT case. Amazon isn’t trying to sell the best anything, they’re selling one spot where you can get everything you need even if some of it is crappy.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  "Overwhelming mediocrity"
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Software industry's evolution in a nutshell. New tools are this to old tools. SaaS are this to desktop software.
  - erikb 8y ago
    It seems like your qoute is a common saying but neither me nor google seems to really know it. So I would guess your downvotes come from not providing enough context about what you want to say.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  This makes a lot of sense because most of us aren't going to work with a different company for each and every part of our infrastructure. If it's super critical it be the best, I'm going to seek out the right tool for the job. If I just need to have something, at a basic level, I'd rather work with a company I already work with.
  - chrisfosterelli 8y ago
    Absolutely. I think the parent poster is massively overgeneralizing that CloudWatch is only good for "hobbyist users". Nearly every product I've worked on that's utilized AWS has sent to CloudWatch, because unless they have special needs CloudWatch doesn't meet then you might as well use it because nearly every AWS product and docs are already sending their logs there by default and it's one less infrastructure company to keep track of.
Spooky23 8y ago
Amazon’s goal with this is to check the boxes. Enterprise customers don’t give a hoot about quality, just compliance.
- megy 8y ago
  Not true, they clearly do care about quality. It works because if you are already using a bunch of AWS services, and then you need something that they are providing, you will give that a go first. If it doesn't provide enough, you will move to something else.
  - justicezyx 8y ago
    Dont you think your statement contradicts between the first sentence and the second?
    - inferiorhuman 8y ago
      Nope
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    They care about quality as long as it's "good enough". Many, many projects, will meet business or contract requirements with the lowest friction product. A great example is "IDS/IPS" or "Anti-malware". Unless specific metrics, requirements, or fine/fee structures exist, 9/10 times, people will check the box on the easiest to deploy.
- bg24 8y ago
  "Enterprise customers don’t give a hoot about quality, just compliance." This is a broad statement :-) Compliance is mandatory and often sales advantage for being able to sell to certain class of enterprises. IMHO, quality vs. rich feature set are different things and I see that being mixed up in the overall discussion. All AWS services exceed certain quality standards. Services are built to solve customer problems first. It's not unusual to find gap in feature set vs. competition. Disclaimer: I used to work for AWS, but do not work there anymore.
snaky 8y ago
> Maybe they're hoping that's enough for the bulk of users (and maybe it is) They should brand it 'AWS Basics'.
- redisman 8y ago
  There are many products that they sell as PaaS that are much more beginner friendly. Elastic Beanstalk seems like a good starting point for people looking for "basics"
  - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    It's a take on "Amazon Basics" from their retail presence; simple/lower-quality versions that are good enough for 90% of people.
talawahdotnet 8y ago
UI/UX is definitely not their strong suit and CloudWatch is one of the worst offenders. I really hope they aquire a company to deliver a completely revamped observability platform in the same vein as where Stackdriver is headed. They really seem to stuggle building things in house that have a great user experience. That being said, they excel at building things that are scalable, reliable and secure, and while you may only see that as 10% of the features, for a lot of ppl that is 80-90%, especially if data is involved. They do tend to improve their products over time as well and for better or worse I am sure a lot of those resourcing decisions are driven by data/revenue rather than how crappy the product is. At the end of the day this allows others to continue to compete with them, which is a good thing.
- jhall1468 8y ago
  A big part of that was because until recently Frontend Engineers were second class citizens at Amazon. It became easier and easier to work for a year here then move to Facebook/Google and a variety of unicorns and get a huge pay raise. Whether or not that's enough remains to be seen.
  - bitrrrate 8y ago
    It’s kinda crazy that the whole FEE thing was treated like a lightbulb moment for the company when everyone else in the industry had them.
    - jhall1468 8y ago
      Amazon moves incredibly fast when it comes to products and incredibly slow when it comes to employee growth. They are treating it like a lightbulb moment, but several of the people involved in this have been working on it for a decade. Reality is, they didn't want to pay FEE's big money because they weren't worth it, and now the company is starving for good UX and they want to pretend they invented a solution to the problem by creating a role that's existed at Google for more than 10 years.
  - talawahdotnet 8y ago
dana321 8y ago
Somebody noticed! I thought it was just me. Even their API interfaces are dated and cumbersome to use.
- greyskull 8y ago
  Could you elaborate? Genuinely curious.
  - coredog64 8y ago
    Not OP, but the problems I remember are: Inconsistent use of query parameters. Retrieving metrics for managed Elasticsearch requires more parameters than almost anything else. Inability to get arbitrary percentiles in the same query as “standard” percentiles. Documentation is awful. I found it was mostly good enough to get you to raw JSON output, and then it was on you to figure out how things worked. The delay is a killer. I understand eventual consistency is a thing, but that’s not really useful for metrics. Please, for the love of $DIETY, record them in a fast store and long term store and don’t make me wait 10-15 minutes for ELB metrics.
mr_toad 8y ago
> ElasticBeanstalk? ECS? Fargate? EC2 with Docker? Historical reasons. The technology has evolved, and AWS has simply continued to add new services. Sometimes there is overlap. Perhaps if they were starting from scratch they might offer only one product.
- redisman 8y ago
  Also companies get stuck in their stack and then demand features that don't really make sense for the core AWS product. Like "I wish my Lambda container would live forever"
nkozyra 8y ago
This is true, but 10% really isn't fair. They have nothing that is feature complete, but if it were just 10% they wouldn't get buyin.
auslander 8y ago
Splunk competes not with CloudWatch, but with Elasticsearch Service, that includes Kibana.
- grogenaut 8y ago
  take a look at insights
apotheosis 8y ago
There's also EKS now, which is competing directly with ECS / Fargate I guess?
- callumjones 8y ago
  It’s also them realizing people are willing to switch to Google for managed Kubernetes over using mediocre ECS.
clubm8 8y ago
>Maybe they're hoping that's enough for the bulk of users (and maybe it is), but from what I've seen, if you want to do anything serious, you still have to use a third-party. Or is it that they hope people would rather get everything from 1 vendor even if it's sub par? I've noticed for example, that Prime Video and Music are inferior Netflix and Spotify. But I could see myself, if I wanted to tighten my belt, dropping the latter two to save some monthly fees.
- arbie 8y ago
  Absolutely. Netflix in 4k is, what, $13? And Spotify is $10. Amazon Prime is getting to be a better deal every year, but not if you subscribe only for shipping speed.
oh-kumudo 8y ago
I think you would be surprised to see how the enterprise see simplicity as an important part of defining quality. Having to manage across multiple different system vendors is not a trivial task, if AWS offers a half baked, yet good enough solution, the customers at least will be willing to give it a try. Ultimately, the competitiveness of your service shouldn't be defined as whether Amazon choose to compete with you or not. If it is indeed the case, then that is something you need to rethink how to position yourself in the market.
zachguo 8y ago
This is so true. For example, AWS ElasticSearch, only a tiny fraction of plugins are supported, it doesn't even support gzip compression for requests and responses....
cammil 8y ago
This is what MVPs are all about, surely? Amazon may have vast resources, but they are not infinite. Amazon strategy seems sound from a business perspective.
tracker1 8y ago
> I want to run a container. Should I use ElasticBeanstalk? ECS? Fargate? EC2 with Docker? Depends on what you're trying to do... I find that dokku goes a long way if you just want to coordinate a few things on a small scale. It's also relatively easy to put 2-3 instances behind a load balancer and just doing blue-green deploys that way. Elastic Beanstalk was also pretty easy with a simple Dockerfile in place. In terms of having a modestly flexible service layer. I can't speak to the rest, but I just tend to avoid friction as much as possible for as long as possible. I'd rather have a good enough solution that I can work with quickly and not have to spend a lot of time/effort on over more complex solutions. I don't know what Samsung did with the stuff that was being done by Joyent, but theirs was always an interesting approach in my mind.

scarface74 8y ago

Another issue I have with AWS is that they simply provide too many ways to do the same thing. I want to run a container. Should I use ElasticBeanstalk? ECS? Fargate? EC2 with Docker? I've been using AWS for years, so I get the subtle differences, but some users just want to click a button and be done with it, which is where third-parties can excel. Or pay overpriced “Implementation Consultants”. I have no sympathy for people who don’t take the time to learn the subtleties of the platform they choose to use. On the other hand, I’ll gladly charge them a nice hourly rate to help them.

maxxxxx 8y ago
In a lot of companies you simply don't get the time to study things. I am right now working on porting a project to the cloud that was previously supported (and fucked up) by our IT department but it's hard to do it right. Ths director has declared that AWS is best and there is a lot of pressure to show something soon or the move to cloud may get cancelled. There is no way to get something really that way but getting away from IT is already worth it even if the result is still not very good.
- scarface74 8y ago
  I feel your pain. I was the dev lead at a company and responsible for a decently complex new green field project. They decided to “move to the cloud” at the time I didn’t know anything about AWS and the “consultants” that were brought in only knew networking and the best they could help us do is a “lift and shift”. I was neither given the time to research, given good consultants that knew anything about the development and Devops portions of AWS or given the access to a dev account to experiment and do proof of concepts. So so did everything like I would do on prem with a bunch of VMs. I asked them to set up a dev, qa, uat, and production subnet. All with multiple VMs. I used 7 VMs for Hashicorp’s Consul, 7 for Nomad, and 7 for Mongo. (1 for each non production environment and a cluster of 3 for production.) I also used Fabio. Between all of that I had my configuration key/value store, service discovery, job scheduling (Nomad), and data store. I also had build boxes for Team Foundation Server (or whatever MS is calling thier hosted TFS version these days with local agents.) It wasn’t until after I was getting ready to leave the company that I realized how dumb this setup was for an AWS hosted solution. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have done too much differently today for a self hosted solution. I left the company, self demoted to an individual contributor role at a smaller company that was “cloud native” and I spent the next year learning AWS inside and out and taking advantage of reimbursements for certifications. I’m still at the company now, but when and if so do decide to leave, I’m. It going back to being an architect for a company. Consulting is way more lucrative.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

fipple 8y ago

This is not unique, it is the “integrated” vs “best of breed” offering. It’s like the oldest business school IT case. Amazon isn’t trying to sell the best anything, they’re selling one spot where you can get everything you need even if some of it is crappy.

paulddraper 8y ago
"Overwhelming mediocrity"
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Software industry's evolution in a nutshell. New tools are this to old tools. SaaS are this to desktop software.
- erikb 8y ago
  It seems like your qoute is a common saying but neither me nor google seems to really know it. So I would guess your downvotes come from not providing enough context about what you want to say.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
This makes a lot of sense because most of us aren't going to work with a different company for each and every part of our infrastructure. If it's super critical it be the best, I'm going to seek out the right tool for the job. If I just need to have something, at a basic level, I'd rather work with a company I already work with.
- chrisfosterelli 8y ago
  Absolutely. I think the parent poster is massively overgeneralizing that CloudWatch is only good for "hobbyist users". Nearly every product I've worked on that's utilized AWS has sent to CloudWatch, because unless they have special needs CloudWatch doesn't meet then you might as well use it because nearly every AWS product and docs are already sending their logs there by default and it's one less infrastructure company to keep track of.

Spooky23 8y ago

Amazon’s goal with this is to check the boxes. Enterprise customers don’t give a hoot about quality, just compliance.

megy 8y ago
Not true, they clearly do care about quality. It works because if you are already using a bunch of AWS services, and then you need something that they are providing, you will give that a go first. If it doesn't provide enough, you will move to something else.
- justicezyx 8y ago
  Dont you think your statement contradicts between the first sentence and the second?
  - inferiorhuman 8y ago
    Nope
- Spooky23 8y ago
  They care about quality as long as it's "good enough". Many, many projects, will meet business or contract requirements with the lowest friction product. A great example is "IDS/IPS" or "Anti-malware". Unless specific metrics, requirements, or fine/fee structures exist, 9/10 times, people will check the box on the easiest to deploy.
bg24 8y ago
"Enterprise customers don’t give a hoot about quality, just compliance." This is a broad statement :-) Compliance is mandatory and often sales advantage for being able to sell to certain class of enterprises. IMHO, quality vs. rich feature set are different things and I see that being mixed up in the overall discussion. All AWS services exceed certain quality standards. Services are built to solve customer problems first. It's not unusual to find gap in feature set vs. competition. Disclaimer: I used to work for AWS, but do not work there anymore.

snaky 8y ago

> Maybe they're hoping that's enough for the bulk of users (and maybe it is) They should brand it 'AWS Basics'.

redisman 8y ago
There are many products that they sell as PaaS that are much more beginner friendly. Elastic Beanstalk seems like a good starting point for people looking for "basics"
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  It's a take on "Amazon Basics" from their retail presence; simple/lower-quality versions that are good enough for 90% of people.

talawahdotnet 8y ago

UI/UX is definitely not their strong suit and CloudWatch is one of the worst offenders. I really hope they aquire a company to deliver a completely revamped observability platform in the same vein as where Stackdriver is headed. They really seem to stuggle building things in house that have a great user experience. That being said, they excel at building things that are scalable, reliable and secure, and while you may only see that as 10% of the features, for a lot of ppl that is 80-90%, especially if data is involved. They do tend to improve their products over time as well and for better or worse I am sure a lot of those resourcing decisions are driven by data/revenue rather than how crappy the product is. At the end of the day this allows others to continue to compete with them, which is a good thing.

jhall1468 8y ago
A big part of that was because until recently Frontend Engineers were second class citizens at Amazon. It became easier and easier to work for a year here then move to Facebook/Google and a variety of unicorns and get a huge pay raise. Whether or not that's enough remains to be seen.
- bitrrrate 8y ago
  It’s kinda crazy that the whole FEE thing was treated like a lightbulb moment for the company when everyone else in the industry had them.
  - jhall1468 8y ago
    Amazon moves incredibly fast when it comes to products and incredibly slow when it comes to employee growth. They are treating it like a lightbulb moment, but several of the people involved in this have been working on it for a decade. Reality is, they didn't want to pay FEE's big money because they weren't worth it, and now the company is starving for good UX and they want to pretend they invented a solution to the problem by creating a role that's existed at Google for more than 10 years.
- talawahdotnet 8y ago

dana321 8y ago

Somebody noticed! I thought it was just me. Even their API interfaces are dated and cumbersome to use.

greyskull 8y ago
Could you elaborate? Genuinely curious.
- coredog64 8y ago
  Not OP, but the problems I remember are: Inconsistent use of query parameters. Retrieving metrics for managed Elasticsearch requires more parameters than almost anything else. Inability to get arbitrary percentiles in the same query as “standard” percentiles. Documentation is awful. I found it was mostly good enough to get you to raw JSON output, and then it was on you to figure out how things worked. The delay is a killer. I understand eventual consistency is a thing, but that’s not really useful for metrics. Please, for the love of $DIETY, record them in a fast store and long term store and don’t make me wait 10-15 minutes for ELB metrics.

mr_toad 8y ago

> ElasticBeanstalk? ECS? Fargate? EC2 with Docker? Historical reasons. The technology has evolved, and AWS has simply continued to add new services. Sometimes there is overlap. Perhaps if they were starting from scratch they might offer only one product.

redisman 8y ago
Also companies get stuck in their stack and then demand features that don't really make sense for the core AWS product. Like "I wish my Lambda container would live forever"

nkozyra 8y ago

This is true, but 10% really isn't fair. They have nothing that is feature complete, but if it were just 10% they wouldn't get buyin.

auslander 8y ago

Splunk competes not with CloudWatch, but with Elasticsearch Service, that includes Kibana.

grogenaut 8y ago
take a look at insights

apotheosis 8y ago

There's also EKS now, which is competing directly with ECS / Fargate I guess?

callumjones 8y ago
It’s also them realizing people are willing to switch to Google for managed Kubernetes over using mediocre ECS.

clubm8 8y ago

>Maybe they're hoping that's enough for the bulk of users (and maybe it is), but from what I've seen, if you want to do anything serious, you still have to use a third-party. Or is it that they hope people would rather get everything from 1 vendor even if it's sub par? I've noticed for example, that Prime Video and Music are inferior Netflix and Spotify. But I could see myself, if I wanted to tighten my belt, dropping the latter two to save some monthly fees.

arbie 8y ago
Absolutely. Netflix in 4k is, what, $13? And Spotify is $10. Amazon Prime is getting to be a better deal every year, but not if you subscribe only for shipping speed.

oh-kumudo 8y ago

I think you would be surprised to see how the enterprise see simplicity as an important part of defining quality. Having to manage across multiple different system vendors is not a trivial task, if AWS offers a half baked, yet good enough solution, the customers at least will be willing to give it a try. Ultimately, the competitiveness of your service shouldn't be defined as whether Amazon choose to compete with you or not. If it is indeed the case, then that is something you need to rethink how to position yourself in the market.

zachguo 8y ago

This is so true. For example, AWS ElasticSearch, only a tiny fraction of plugins are supported, it doesn't even support gzip compression for requests and responses....

cammil 8y ago

This is what MVPs are all about, surely? Amazon may have vast resources, but they are not infinite. Amazon strategy seems sound from a business perspective.

tracker1 8y ago

> I want to run a container. Should I use ElasticBeanstalk? ECS? Fargate? EC2 with Docker? Depends on what you're trying to do... I find that dokku goes a long way if you just want to coordinate a few things on a small scale. It's also relatively easy to put 2-3 instances behind a load balancer and just doing blue-green deploys that way. Elastic Beanstalk was also pretty easy with a simple Dockerfile in place. In terms of having a modestly flexible service layer. I can't speak to the rest, but I just tend to avoid friction as much as possible for as long as possible. I'd rather have a good enough solution that I can work with quickly and not have to spend a lot of time/effort on over more complex solutions. I don't know what Samsung did with the stuff that was being done by Joyent, but theirs was always an interesting approach in my mind.