3 ms·

There are two "AWS". One consists of: - EC2, including scaling groups (but crucially do not attempt to use them for auto-scaling) - S3 - Route53 - RDS - Re

There are two "AWS". One consists of: - EC2, including scaling groups (but crucially do not attempt to use them for auto-scaling) - S3 - Route53 - RDS - Redshift - Maybe a few others I've forgotten or haven't used They all have their flaws, but if you stay on the beaten path, they basically work most of the time. Then there is the other AWS. It consists of all the other high level services you can pick from that enormous drop-down. I haven't tried many, but from my little experience and loaaaads of anecdotes from other people, _that_ AWS is largely unreliable rubbish. That is to say, stick to the extremely common low-level or otherwise foundational stuff unless you love pain and disappointment.

eropple 7y ago
I'd add a few to those. Fargate is remarkably trouble-free. ElastiCache is reasonably well-done Redis. SQS, EventBridge, and SNS are solid and unsurprising. Even DynamoDB is quite good so long as the implementor understands how to actually use it (most people don't, and instead just crank up the read units until AWS literally owns your company). But the thrust of your point remains: when you get into the nonsense factory, when you're trying to bolt together the higher level integrated services, it becomes an exercise in self-inflicted stochastic violence.
jjoonathan 7y ago
Yes, if you stay on the beaten path, invest time in figuring out the subset of functionality that actually works, and tease out through experimentation its major quirks, the basic AWS services can be made to work fairly reliably. I stand by my description of this state of affairs as "half baked." The true AWS advantage is that the boss can't get fired for choosing it so the individual contributors already have spending authority inside its walls. Unfortunately, that's a trump card.
- eropple 7y ago
  “Can be made to work reliably” is disingenuous. It just does.

eropple 7y ago

I'd add a few to those. Fargate is remarkably trouble-free. ElastiCache is reasonably well-done Redis. SQS, EventBridge, and SNS are solid and unsurprising. Even DynamoDB is quite good so long as the implementor understands how to actually use it (most people don't, and instead just crank up the read units until AWS literally owns your company). But the thrust of your point remains: when you get into the nonsense factory, when you're trying to bolt together the higher level integrated services, it becomes an exercise in self-inflicted stochastic violence.

jjoonathan 7y ago

Yes, if you stay on the beaten path, invest time in figuring out the subset of functionality that actually works, and tease out through experimentation its major quirks, the basic AWS services can be made to work fairly reliably. I stand by my description of this state of affairs as "half baked." The true AWS advantage is that the boss can't get fired for choosing it so the individual contributors already have spending authority inside its walls. Unfortunately, that's a trump card.

eropple 7y ago
“Can be made to work reliably” is disingenuous. It just does.