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I hate AWS so much. I spent 3 hours trying to get a bucket to host a static single page of html and failed completely. I use amazon polly. I wanted to know ho

I hate AWS so much. I spent 3 hours trying to get a bucket to host a static single page of html and failed completely. I use amazon polly. I wanted to know how many characters I was using each month. I spent 2 hours searching through hundreds of pages and literally couldn't find that information. I thought of trying to start a little text to speech service for dyslexics to make it easy to use Polly but one of the main thing putting me off is having to get my arms mangled in the AWS machine. The whole thing is so totally maddening. I would love to be able to sit in on their meetings where they talk about usability, what do they say? Do they think everything is fine? Do they know it's totally broken and don't care? Are they unable to hire a UX designer? What is the problem?

steve19 7y ago
I completely agree. I feel stupid everything I try use AWS. I have a pile of credits in my account that I am not using because I cannot bear to try (and fail... Again). It's maddening and they clearly do not care.
- mk89 7y ago
  What's your level of experience with ops/networking etc.? Because it all boils down to that. If you need a simpler service, maybe you could use digital ocean etc...
  - sho 7y ago
    Technically you're right of course but I think you miss the broader point. AWS is ludicrously complicated and overkill for most startups, like a corner store implementing SAP. The problem is it's the gold standard for "cloud" and choosing anything else (apart from GCS, perhaps) attracts the need for justifications and, ultimately, unwelcome accountability. "Nobody ever got fired for [choosing AWS]". I'd personally love it if AWS implemented a digital ocean-like "basic" interface which, realistically, covers 90% of startups' needs. Simple is good. If needed, they can switch over to "Fortune 500 mode" later.
    - lentil 7y ago
      > I'd personally love it if AWS implemented a digital ocean-like "basic" interface which, realistically, covers 90% of startups' needs. Simple is good. Have you looked at Amazon Lightsail? It might be closer to what you're after. https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/
      - isostatic 7y ago
        I use lightsail and route53. Oddly lightsail doesn’t show up on the “frequently accessed” shortcuts
    - itomato 7y ago
      Your startup on AWS is either capable of developing their platform in house or contracting one of many solution architects. They may be so lean they exclusively run lambda jobs and host from S3. This is a 24 hour learning curve.
    - enraged_camel 7y ago
      >> "Nobody ever got fired for [choosing AWS]". "Hey Joe, the app you built for Goldberg Partners uses AWS right?" "Yeah." "What does it do on AWS again? Store some files?" "Yeah, and a load balancer in front of a few containers that handle thumbnail generation for those images. Pretty standard stuff." "I see. What was their pricing like?" "Last time I checked, the billing page said something like $0.023 per GB for the first 50 TB or something like that, and $0.0116 per hour for the containers. I don't remember the load balancer pricing, but it should be pretty cheap, we don't have that much stuff on there." "Interesting, okay. Can you explain why they sent us a bill for $10,372.77?"
  - awinder 7y ago
    I think you’re right on. I worked as a lead for a startup that ended up with all these credits in SoftLayer years ago, and we steered into a Vyatta network setup that was fairly complicated and I had to really learn a bunch of networking in real-time. But understanding a lot of underpinnings made it super easy to map to aws primatives, and appreciated because what they do with vpcs/networking kills so much complexity. Usually when I’m getting into a new area of aws I try to find what they’ve built the technology with. Then I try to go get a good base in that technology, then figure out what AWS has done and understand why/reasoning. This also helps alleviate common concerns about only learning some aws stack. Learn both things, one might one day become less relevant, the other will help you build solid base understandings that last longer.
- vagab0nd 7y ago
  Just curious, where and how would one get credits in their AWS account?
mk89 7y ago
If you hate AWS so much, wait until you use Azure. Worst support ever. UI not in sync with the az-cli, documentation super chaotic, lots of basic features from AWS not yet supported in Azure. From my experience, AWS has up-to-date documentation pages for everything. And when something is hard to understand from their docs, you can find really everything you need by searching on Google. Literally, everything. And if you ask the support forum, you'll be provided with an answer in relatively short time. Competent answers most of the time. So, what's the alternative to the ugly AWS web console? Learn the basic concepts, and maybe use the aws cli. Speaking about the bucket -> https://medium.com/@P_Lessing/single-page-apps-on-aws-part-1-hosting-a-website-on-s3-3c9871f126 https://medium.com/@P_Lessing/single-page-apps-on-aws-part-1...
- redhale 7y ago
  My experience is exactly inverse to yours. IMO Azure's documentation, in general, is far superior to AWS's. And my experience with Azure support has been stellar.
  - toyg 7y ago
    Azure’s documentation is plentiful, which is good, but it’s also confusing (the same topic might be covered in different ways among two pages, some of it will likely be obsolete because last week the interface changed again, etc...) which is bad. Knowledge management is hard.
    - meddlepal 7y ago
      > some of it will likely be obsolete because last week the interface changed again, etc...) which is bad. One of the problems with the Azure documentation is that the API endpoints are versioned (?api-version=yyyy-mm-dd) but the documentation doesn't make it easy to find the relevant version or see the differences between versions. The interfaces don't change if you pin to a version. I've been deep diving on Azure for awhile (and have worked extensively with AWS and GCP in the past) and in general I find both Amazon and Azure's docs to have the plentiful but confusing problem. Google's documentation is slightly different... I can never seem to find what I'm looking for but when I do it's comprehensive and complete, but then I can't find it again the next time I need it. The big pain point with Azure is wrapping your head around Active Directory and AD IAM if you come from a non-AD world. I still vastly prefer Amazon's IAM system to Azure's (Google's is just a confusing mess and needs to be redesigned.)
stevekemp 7y ago
Uploading a single file to S3 seems like it should be a simple job, that is well-documented: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/user-guide/upload-objects.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/user-guide/uploa... There are parts of AWS that are hard to use, and non-intuitive. But S3 didn't ever seem to be one of them, though perhaps I'm forgetting how hard it was initially. You might consider a "friendly" system for static hosting if raw-S3 is too hard though, such as netlify. There are a lot of services out there which basically wrap and resell AWS services. (I run my own to do git-based DNS hosting, which is a thin layer upon the top of route53 for example.)
- sho 7y ago
  Ha, I can't upload anything into S3. I'm unable to, from memory, create or modify any of my own buckets. My account is in some weird half-suspended state from a past billing incident, long resolved, where things mostly work - but modifying S3 is not one of them. Support insisted everything was fine even as I uploaded videos of the failures and eventually I just gave up. I leave a few legacy things running there (billing works, of course) but these days just put personal stuff on Digital Ocean, which seems to meet basically all my needs without the complexity and cheaper to boot.
- m0xte 7y ago
  Uploading to S3 is easy until it isn't. It works pretty nicely for one-offs but when you have to blast a few hundred gigs into it or large files from a bit of software you wrote it's a royal pain in the butt. The phrase "multi-part upload" makes me cry inside.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Why is that hard? The CLI automatically does multi part uploads. It’s also simple with the various AWS SDKs.
    - m0xte 7y ago
      It looks like it works but it's not reliable so your reliability concerns then get externalised into your application which multiplies complexity terribly.
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
I’ve had these same experiences, only with GCP, not AWS.
m0xte 7y ago
For me that isn't the problem. It's mapping the several-thousand acronym riddled hairballs into reality. The reality matches no other reality which means the knowledge is probably useless in 20 years time, much as the knowledge I had of proprietary stuff then is useless now. My head has only a certain amount of space and motivation for ephemeral complexity hairballs like AWS. At this point I have to wonder if this is intentional. It makes it difficult to escape if all you know is AWS's reality abstractions.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Being in technology means constant learning. My knowledge of the intricacies of the 65C02 in the 80s, working with DEC VAX and Stratus VOS in the 90s, knowing MFC and DCOM in the 2000s, etc all useless. When I started learning AWS, it was quite simple mapping what I’ve done for over 20 years on prem from both a development and networking perspective.
  - mech422 7y ago
    >My knowledge of the intricacies of the 65C02 in the 80s, working with DEC VAX and Stratus VOS in the 90s VOS rocked! Loved the old Stratus boxes :-)
- itomato 7y ago
  The last point is echoed in every IaaS and CM product. As with any "convenience tech", learning the underlying protocols is essential.
- makebelieve 7y ago
  I second this. I found it easier to spin up servers on other services and run big install scripts than to try do decode Amazon's naming/acronym hell. The requirement to connect invented names to computational activity is big overhead. I guess each AWS service get's named it's own thing as it is developed and those names just stick forever. it is maddening. Reading the docs outloud often sounds like a weird technical Dr. Seuss. I've never looked at Azure, but since Microsoft has been the king of making up their own names for things, I expect it to be just as bad. I wonder how this naming issue comes about. If AWS devs and early adopters are doing this as their first big rodeo, then everything might seem new and they get to invent names - as if the computing were new. But after these devs and early adopters work on 2 or 5 of these kinds of projects in different environments they will see that special naming is a mistake, because it makes it incredibly hard to communicate about the same computing tasks using dozens of different names and acronyms. I know computing requires continuous learning, but specialized naming tends to obfuscate higher order abstractions. And if you grok the higher order abstraction and want to dev a system, then the naming and minute computing differences make development on any given service harder than it needs to be because it requires learning specialized lingo. As human beings we need to get much better at getting to standard names and conventions faster. It will speed all our development.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deanCommie 7y ago
Did you see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosting.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosti... I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, the cloud is a meaningfully different abstraction from hosting locally, and figuring out how to do things effectively with it end to end without prior experience is a little bit like going from Windows to Linux, or back. On the other hand, the use case you describe is one of the most basic, standard and well documented out there.

steve19 7y ago

I completely agree. I feel stupid everything I try use AWS. I have a pile of credits in my account that I am not using because I cannot bear to try (and fail... Again). It's maddening and they clearly do not care.

mk89 7y ago
What's your level of experience with ops/networking etc.? Because it all boils down to that. If you need a simpler service, maybe you could use digital ocean etc...
- sho 7y ago
  Technically you're right of course but I think you miss the broader point. AWS is ludicrously complicated and overkill for most startups, like a corner store implementing SAP. The problem is it's the gold standard for "cloud" and choosing anything else (apart from GCS, perhaps) attracts the need for justifications and, ultimately, unwelcome accountability. "Nobody ever got fired for [choosing AWS]". I'd personally love it if AWS implemented a digital ocean-like "basic" interface which, realistically, covers 90% of startups' needs. Simple is good. If needed, they can switch over to "Fortune 500 mode" later.
  - lentil 7y ago
    > I'd personally love it if AWS implemented a digital ocean-like "basic" interface which, realistically, covers 90% of startups' needs. Simple is good. Have you looked at Amazon Lightsail? It might be closer to what you're after. https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/
    - isostatic 7y ago
      I use lightsail and route53. Oddly lightsail doesn’t show up on the “frequently accessed” shortcuts
  - itomato 7y ago
    Your startup on AWS is either capable of developing their platform in house or contracting one of many solution architects. They may be so lean they exclusively run lambda jobs and host from S3. This is a 24 hour learning curve.
  - enraged_camel 7y ago
    >> "Nobody ever got fired for [choosing AWS]". "Hey Joe, the app you built for Goldberg Partners uses AWS right?" "Yeah." "What does it do on AWS again? Store some files?" "Yeah, and a load balancer in front of a few containers that handle thumbnail generation for those images. Pretty standard stuff." "I see. What was their pricing like?" "Last time I checked, the billing page said something like $0.023 per GB for the first 50 TB or something like that, and $0.0116 per hour for the containers. I don't remember the load balancer pricing, but it should be pretty cheap, we don't have that much stuff on there." "Interesting, okay. Can you explain why they sent us a bill for $10,372.77?"
- awinder 7y ago
  I think you’re right on. I worked as a lead for a startup that ended up with all these credits in SoftLayer years ago, and we steered into a Vyatta network setup that was fairly complicated and I had to really learn a bunch of networking in real-time. But understanding a lot of underpinnings made it super easy to map to aws primatives, and appreciated because what they do with vpcs/networking kills so much complexity. Usually when I’m getting into a new area of aws I try to find what they’ve built the technology with. Then I try to go get a good base in that technology, then figure out what AWS has done and understand why/reasoning. This also helps alleviate common concerns about only learning some aws stack. Learn both things, one might one day become less relevant, the other will help you build solid base understandings that last longer.
vagab0nd 7y ago
Just curious, where and how would one get credits in their AWS account?

mk89 7y ago

If you hate AWS so much, wait until you use Azure. Worst support ever. UI not in sync with the az-cli, documentation super chaotic, lots of basic features from AWS not yet supported in Azure. From my experience, AWS has up-to-date documentation pages for everything. And when something is hard to understand from their docs, you can find really everything you need by searching on Google. Literally, everything. And if you ask the support forum, you'll be provided with an answer in relatively short time. Competent answers most of the time. So, what's the alternative to the ugly AWS web console? Learn the basic concepts, and maybe use the aws cli. Speaking about the bucket -> https://medium.com/@P_Lessing/single-page-apps-on-aws-part-1-hosting-a-website-on-s3-3c9871f126 https://medium.com/@P_Lessing/single-page-apps-on-aws-part-1...

redhale 7y ago
My experience is exactly inverse to yours. IMO Azure's documentation, in general, is far superior to AWS's. And my experience with Azure support has been stellar.
- toyg 7y ago
  Azure’s documentation is plentiful, which is good, but it’s also confusing (the same topic might be covered in different ways among two pages, some of it will likely be obsolete because last week the interface changed again, etc...) which is bad. Knowledge management is hard.
  - meddlepal 7y ago
    > some of it will likely be obsolete because last week the interface changed again, etc...) which is bad. One of the problems with the Azure documentation is that the API endpoints are versioned (?api-version=yyyy-mm-dd) but the documentation doesn't make it easy to find the relevant version or see the differences between versions. The interfaces don't change if you pin to a version. I've been deep diving on Azure for awhile (and have worked extensively with AWS and GCP in the past) and in general I find both Amazon and Azure's docs to have the plentiful but confusing problem. Google's documentation is slightly different... I can never seem to find what I'm looking for but when I do it's comprehensive and complete, but then I can't find it again the next time I need it. The big pain point with Azure is wrapping your head around Active Directory and AD IAM if you come from a non-AD world. I still vastly prefer Amazon's IAM system to Azure's (Google's is just a confusing mess and needs to be redesigned.)

stevekemp 7y ago

Uploading a single file to S3 seems like it should be a simple job, that is well-documented: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/user-guide/upload-objects.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/user-guide/uploa... There are parts of AWS that are hard to use, and non-intuitive. But S3 didn't ever seem to be one of them, though perhaps I'm forgetting how hard it was initially. You might consider a "friendly" system for static hosting if raw-S3 is too hard though, such as netlify. There are a lot of services out there which basically wrap and resell AWS services. (I run my own to do git-based DNS hosting, which is a thin layer upon the top of route53 for example.)

sho 7y ago
Ha, I can't upload anything into S3. I'm unable to, from memory, create or modify any of my own buckets. My account is in some weird half-suspended state from a past billing incident, long resolved, where things mostly work - but modifying S3 is not one of them. Support insisted everything was fine even as I uploaded videos of the failures and eventually I just gave up. I leave a few legacy things running there (billing works, of course) but these days just put personal stuff on Digital Ocean, which seems to meet basically all my needs without the complexity and cheaper to boot.
m0xte 7y ago
Uploading to S3 is easy until it isn't. It works pretty nicely for one-offs but when you have to blast a few hundred gigs into it or large files from a bit of software you wrote it's a royal pain in the butt. The phrase "multi-part upload" makes me cry inside.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Why is that hard? The CLI automatically does multi part uploads. It’s also simple with the various AWS SDKs.
  - m0xte 7y ago
    It looks like it works but it's not reliable so your reliability concerns then get externalised into your application which multiplies complexity terribly.

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

I’ve had these same experiences, only with GCP, not AWS.

m0xte 7y ago

For me that isn't the problem. It's mapping the several-thousand acronym riddled hairballs into reality. The reality matches no other reality which means the knowledge is probably useless in 20 years time, much as the knowledge I had of proprietary stuff then is useless now. My head has only a certain amount of space and motivation for ephemeral complexity hairballs like AWS. At this point I have to wonder if this is intentional. It makes it difficult to escape if all you know is AWS's reality abstractions.

scarface74 7y ago
Being in technology means constant learning. My knowledge of the intricacies of the 65C02 in the 80s, working with DEC VAX and Stratus VOS in the 90s, knowing MFC and DCOM in the 2000s, etc all useless. When I started learning AWS, it was quite simple mapping what I’ve done for over 20 years on prem from both a development and networking perspective.
- mech422 7y ago
  >My knowledge of the intricacies of the 65C02 in the 80s, working with DEC VAX and Stratus VOS in the 90s VOS rocked! Loved the old Stratus boxes :-)
itomato 7y ago
The last point is echoed in every IaaS and CM product. As with any "convenience tech", learning the underlying protocols is essential.
makebelieve 7y ago
I second this. I found it easier to spin up servers on other services and run big install scripts than to try do decode Amazon's naming/acronym hell. The requirement to connect invented names to computational activity is big overhead. I guess each AWS service get's named it's own thing as it is developed and those names just stick forever. it is maddening. Reading the docs outloud often sounds like a weird technical Dr. Seuss. I've never looked at Azure, but since Microsoft has been the king of making up their own names for things, I expect it to be just as bad. I wonder how this naming issue comes about. If AWS devs and early adopters are doing this as their first big rodeo, then everything might seem new and they get to invent names - as if the computing were new. But after these devs and early adopters work on 2 or 5 of these kinds of projects in different environments they will see that special naming is a mistake, because it makes it incredibly hard to communicate about the same computing tasks using dozens of different names and acronyms. I know computing requires continuous learning, but specialized naming tends to obfuscate higher order abstractions. And if you grok the higher order abstraction and want to dev a system, then the naming and minute computing differences make development on any given service harder than it needs to be because it requires learning specialized lingo. As human beings we need to get much better at getting to standard names and conventions faster. It will speed all our development.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

deanCommie 7y ago

Did you see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosting.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosti... I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, the cloud is a meaningfully different abstraction from hosting locally, and figuring out how to do things effectively with it end to end without prior experience is a little bit like going from Windows to Linux, or back. On the other hand, the use case you describe is one of the most basic, standard and well documented out there.