6 ms·

I have less experience with GCP than AWS, but counting the number of features/services on AWS is definitely misleading. So many of the AWS services are effectiv

by cactus2093 6y ago

I have less experience with GCP than AWS, but counting the number of features/services on AWS is definitely misleading. So many of the AWS services are effectively abandoned and missing critical features that makes them completely unfit for production usage, and it can be really hard to find this out before you run into the problems yourself. And then out of nowhere 3 years later they'll pick up development on an old thing again and finally fix that critical issue and make it much better. So I'm not sure I'd call that being way ahead. My impression is that the stuff that GCP does have tends to be more capable and production ready (although I'm curious if others would disagree with that).

psanford 6y ago
What AWS services do you consider "abandoned"? The only one I can think of that might be in this category is SimpleDB. AWS recommends you use DynamoDB instead of SimpleDB for new applications. However, I wouldn't call SimpleDB abandoned. SimpleDB continues to work as it has for may years. One thing that AWS is amazingly good at is not breaking existing customers and their applications. Did you build an application 10 years ago based on SimpleDB? All the APIs you used 10 years ago are still there and available to your application today. Its really quite amazing how dedicated AWS is to not breaking existing customers.
- tehalex 6y ago
  Data Pipeline is abandoned - it is also miserable to work with. Otherwise yeah, there might be too many ways to do the same thing, but AWS generally has a stellar track record of supporting everything else they have made.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Data pipeline has been superseded by Step Functions.
    - kubanczyk 6y ago
      Did AWS announced it or are you announcing it? I'm searching just now over *.amazon.com and nothing comes up. The product pages also bear zero indication of that.
      - ForHackernews 6y ago
        SimpleDB is also not officially deprecated, but neither does Amazon ever work on it: https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ Amazon are like the anti-Google: rather than killing products, they're happy to have them limp along forever.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        No one “announced it”. Why would they? If Data Pipeline meets your needs, it still works. But, if you keep track of AWS and where all of the new features are being added, it’s clear that Step Functions is getting all of the new and shiny and can do everything Data Pipeline can do. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/implementing-dynamic-etl-pipelines-using-aws-step-functions/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/implementing-dynamic-et...
- cactus2093 6y ago
  Abandoned as in not being updated, and therefore falling behind all its competitors. Fair enough that services often continue to work the way they always have, but I'm thinking more of the case where you're actively developing something, and the AWS service has major bugs or is missing significant features that all the alternatives have which makes your job harder building on top of it. Elasticsearch was a famous example, it went years without any updates during which time upstream Elasticsearch itself improved dramatically. Then they picked it back up again once the elastic.io hosted product got good enough that it was a much better alternative. Another example is ECS, which was out in the wild for a couple of years with a very limited feature set while GKE was completely eating its lunch and upstream Kubernetes got a lot of major improvements. Then AWS released EKS which sort of seemed to replace ECS for a while, but they have gone back and forth now for a bit with ECS having some features that EKS didn't have (e.g. fargate for a long time) and vice versa. There are all sorts of other support bugs I've stumbled across in their forums, too many to recall. Often years old threads that have never really been addressed. Edit: another one that comes to mind is cloudwatch/the entire monitoring & logging stack. It's very basic, not really a viable alternative at all to something like splunk. As such an important thing, I always kind of expected it to get better but it just didn't, you had to export your own logs/events to a separate ES cluster, or to Redshift via S3, or something else, etc. Whereas GCP Stackdriver is a much better solution out of the box.
  - psanford 6y ago
    Your argument seems to be AWS isn't prioritizing the things that you think are most important. I think thats fair. But that doesn't mean the products abandoned or not being updated.
    - kords 6y ago
      Yup, today I was looking on some examples of AWS CloudFormation templates and I saw version 2010-09-09. Instantly, I thought the webpage I was reading must be old; so I opened the docs. In the docs, I see "The latest template format version is 2010-09-09 and is currently the only valid value." Last version was 10 years ago and this service is one of the core AWS services, so it's definitively not abandoned.
- trumpeta 6y ago
  Redshift for instance is still using Postgres 8 wire protocol
  - psanford 6y ago
    Redshift is definitely not abandoned. AWS just announced a bunch of improvements and new features at re:invent in the last 2 weeks[0]. Its not obvious to me why supporting a newer wire format would be a high priority for AWS. I think I would rather they work on things like native JSON/semi-structured data support[1] than a new wire format. [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/whats-new/ https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/whats-new/ [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/amazon-redshift-announces-support-native-json-semi-structured-data-processing/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/amazon-re...
    - Tostino 6y ago
      You will eventually run into issues when client interfaces start to drop support for old versions of the wire format to simplify their codebase.
      - trumpeta 6y ago
        This is already the case, sqlx has to now add specific support for Redshift, its not enough ti use the postgres driver as is
    - Androider 6y ago
      Amazon didn't touch Redshift for years and years, until suddenly Snowflake became a thing and then they remembered they had Redshift.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        Redshift has constantly been improved. One of Amazon’s major initiatives was to get off of Oracle and improving Redshift was a major part of that initiative.
- heartbreak 6y ago
  AWS OpsWorks Stacks is several major versions behind on Chef.
- longwave 6y ago
  Amazon CloudSearch hasn't had any serious updates in 6 years [1]. It is Apache Solr behind the scenes, but with a proprietary API on top. I suspect everyone with serious search requirements has moved to Elasticsearch or another product by now. [1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/latest/developerguide/document-history.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/latest/developerguid...
- plesiv 6y ago
  CloudFormation. The UI is lacking critical information about the resources that CF operates on and it's been like this for years.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    CloudFormation isn't abandoned and is continuously updated as AWS adds services and options in existing services. The AWS Management Console UI for CloudFormation might be largely abandoned, but the AWS Management Console component for X, in general, seems often to be only distantly related to X in terms of support; the main focus often seems to be on using the service via the API, SDKs, or (for setting up resources) CloudFormation, instead of the console UI.
    - cheeze 6y ago
      CloudFormation is... fine until you realize it's missing that resource that you need. CF is notorious for lagging behind products in terms of support. It's incredibly painful.
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        Oh, yeah, it lags and it is painful, but it is continuously moving forward (but chasing a moving target), even if the UI isn't (it's been probably more than a year since I looked at the UI.)
      - nuker 6y ago
        Cloudformation is the best tool for aws infra-as-a-code. Nothing is even close to it. It rolls back, no leftovers on delete, fast parallel ops, full control of resource properties. Yes, some things can be better, but above is priceless. 10yrs experience here.
        web007 6y ago
        Terraform is much, much better. I used CloudFormation for a few years and ran up against a lot of its limitations. Maximum file size. Maximum resource count. Automatic rollbacks of THE WHOLE STACK on any subsystem failure like unavailable instance. It has no templating built in, so doing ten things with minor differences means copying and pasting 10x or deploying your own templating solution to generate CF. And I did this back in the ROLLBACK_FAILED days, where if you did something that it couldn't automatically undo you were stuck - no way to roll forward or backward, just abandon innplace. The button for "Continue rollback" or whatever that came out 5-10 years ago was huge. Contrast that with Terraform: all of your points addressed, plus all of mine are non-problems. It lets you do some awesome things that are no doubt inspired by CF, but it takes them to an entirely new level. There are a few downsides too, but nothing compared to CF. You can build too-complex things much more easily in TF, so you have to be careful not to go overboard. It also bugs me that I can't spec a high-level thing like "compute with 4 cores and 32GB RAM, repeat 10x and put behind a load balancer with DNS name foo" and use it anywhere, I have to say google_compute or azure_load_balancer or aws_dns. That was the biggest disappointment coming out of CF and hearing how awesome this thing was, and then realizing it still left me vendor locked.
- Androider 6y ago
  I've worked with Cognito extensively, and it's effectively abandoned. This issue sums up some of the common frustrations https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/3495 https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/3495
- ma2rten 6y ago
  I hadn't used AWS in about 4 years, but I recently starting using it for a side project. I needed to process a big dataset and I wanted to use pyspark, so I gave EMR a try. I was impressed how easy it was seemingly to create clusters in the UI and then run jobs using an ipython notebook. That is until I realized that nothing worked. You had to use a version that was 5 versions behind the current version which is the opposite of what the documentation said which explicitly said not to use that version. Even then not everything worked out of the box.
  - jcims 6y ago
    We had to do a security review of EMR recently. I’m amazed it works at all. Hop on one of the cluster nodes and take a look at the processes running.
    - ma2rten 6y ago
      It was probably an issues specifically with notebooks.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
StreamBright 6y ago
I agree. We usually limit ourselves to a small subset of features we are using from AWS. The newer services tend to be less reliable, reasonable. I think part of it is the APIs being too complicated. Have you tried to use Kinesis low level API? You know what I am talking about. Ok, lets use the high level API. Well it is written in Java (and Java only) so you are going to be running a JVM on your end regardless. If you think I am joking: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/streams/latest/dev/shared-throughput-kcl-consumers.html#shared-throughput-kcl-consumers-overview https://docs.aws.amazon.com/streams/latest/dev/shared-throug... I would classify this as a critical issue, and this is part of the reason why we stopped using Kinesis entirely.
irrational 6y ago
Is this true? That isn't typically the Google way. Traditionally they build something and then let it linger for years before killing it. https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

psanford 6y ago

What AWS services do you consider "abandoned"? The only one I can think of that might be in this category is SimpleDB. AWS recommends you use DynamoDB instead of SimpleDB for new applications. However, I wouldn't call SimpleDB abandoned. SimpleDB continues to work as it has for may years. One thing that AWS is amazingly good at is not breaking existing customers and their applications. Did you build an application 10 years ago based on SimpleDB? All the APIs you used 10 years ago are still there and available to your application today. Its really quite amazing how dedicated AWS is to not breaking existing customers.

tehalex 6y ago
Data Pipeline is abandoned - it is also miserable to work with. Otherwise yeah, there might be too many ways to do the same thing, but AWS generally has a stellar track record of supporting everything else they have made.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Data pipeline has been superseded by Step Functions.
  - kubanczyk 6y ago
    Did AWS announced it or are you announcing it? I'm searching just now over *.amazon.com and nothing comes up. The product pages also bear zero indication of that.
    - ForHackernews 6y ago
      SimpleDB is also not officially deprecated, but neither does Amazon ever work on it: https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ Amazon are like the anti-Google: rather than killing products, they're happy to have them limp along forever.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      No one “announced it”. Why would they? If Data Pipeline meets your needs, it still works. But, if you keep track of AWS and where all of the new features are being added, it’s clear that Step Functions is getting all of the new and shiny and can do everything Data Pipeline can do. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/implementing-dynamic-etl-pipelines-using-aws-step-functions/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/implementing-dynamic-et...
cactus2093 6y ago
Abandoned as in not being updated, and therefore falling behind all its competitors. Fair enough that services often continue to work the way they always have, but I'm thinking more of the case where you're actively developing something, and the AWS service has major bugs or is missing significant features that all the alternatives have which makes your job harder building on top of it. Elasticsearch was a famous example, it went years without any updates during which time upstream Elasticsearch itself improved dramatically. Then they picked it back up again once the elastic.io hosted product got good enough that it was a much better alternative. Another example is ECS, which was out in the wild for a couple of years with a very limited feature set while GKE was completely eating its lunch and upstream Kubernetes got a lot of major improvements. Then AWS released EKS which sort of seemed to replace ECS for a while, but they have gone back and forth now for a bit with ECS having some features that EKS didn't have (e.g. fargate for a long time) and vice versa. There are all sorts of other support bugs I've stumbled across in their forums, too many to recall. Often years old threads that have never really been addressed. Edit: another one that comes to mind is cloudwatch/the entire monitoring & logging stack. It's very basic, not really a viable alternative at all to something like splunk. As such an important thing, I always kind of expected it to get better but it just didn't, you had to export your own logs/events to a separate ES cluster, or to Redshift via S3, or something else, etc. Whereas GCP Stackdriver is a much better solution out of the box.
- psanford 6y ago
  Your argument seems to be AWS isn't prioritizing the things that you think are most important. I think thats fair. But that doesn't mean the products abandoned or not being updated.
  - kords 6y ago
    Yup, today I was looking on some examples of AWS CloudFormation templates and I saw version 2010-09-09. Instantly, I thought the webpage I was reading must be old; so I opened the docs. In the docs, I see "The latest template format version is 2010-09-09 and is currently the only valid value." Last version was 10 years ago and this service is one of the core AWS services, so it's definitively not abandoned.
trumpeta 6y ago
Redshift for instance is still using Postgres 8 wire protocol
- psanford 6y ago
  Redshift is definitely not abandoned. AWS just announced a bunch of improvements and new features at re:invent in the last 2 weeks[0]. Its not obvious to me why supporting a newer wire format would be a high priority for AWS. I think I would rather they work on things like native JSON/semi-structured data support[1] than a new wire format. [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/whats-new/ https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/whats-new/ [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/amazon-redshift-announces-support-native-json-semi-structured-data-processing/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/amazon-re...
  - Tostino 6y ago
    You will eventually run into issues when client interfaces start to drop support for old versions of the wire format to simplify their codebase.
    - trumpeta 6y ago
      This is already the case, sqlx has to now add specific support for Redshift, its not enough ti use the postgres driver as is
  - Androider 6y ago
    Amazon didn't touch Redshift for years and years, until suddenly Snowflake became a thing and then they remembered they had Redshift.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Redshift has constantly been improved. One of Amazon’s major initiatives was to get off of Oracle and improving Redshift was a major part of that initiative.
heartbreak 6y ago
AWS OpsWorks Stacks is several major versions behind on Chef.
longwave 6y ago
Amazon CloudSearch hasn't had any serious updates in 6 years [1]. It is Apache Solr behind the scenes, but with a proprietary API on top. I suspect everyone with serious search requirements has moved to Elasticsearch or another product by now. [1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/latest/developerguide/document-history.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/latest/developerguid...
plesiv 6y ago
CloudFormation. The UI is lacking critical information about the resources that CF operates on and it's been like this for years.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  CloudFormation isn't abandoned and is continuously updated as AWS adds services and options in existing services. The AWS Management Console UI for CloudFormation might be largely abandoned, but the AWS Management Console component for X, in general, seems often to be only distantly related to X in terms of support; the main focus often seems to be on using the service via the API, SDKs, or (for setting up resources) CloudFormation, instead of the console UI.
  - cheeze 6y ago
    CloudFormation is... fine until you realize it's missing that resource that you need. CF is notorious for lagging behind products in terms of support. It's incredibly painful.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      Oh, yeah, it lags and it is painful, but it is continuously moving forward (but chasing a moving target), even if the UI isn't (it's been probably more than a year since I looked at the UI.)
    - nuker 6y ago
      Cloudformation is the best tool for aws infra-as-a-code. Nothing is even close to it. It rolls back, no leftovers on delete, fast parallel ops, full control of resource properties. Yes, some things can be better, but above is priceless. 10yrs experience here.
      - web007 6y ago
        Terraform is much, much better. I used CloudFormation for a few years and ran up against a lot of its limitations. Maximum file size. Maximum resource count. Automatic rollbacks of THE WHOLE STACK on any subsystem failure like unavailable instance. It has no templating built in, so doing ten things with minor differences means copying and pasting 10x or deploying your own templating solution to generate CF. And I did this back in the ROLLBACK_FAILED days, where if you did something that it couldn't automatically undo you were stuck - no way to roll forward or backward, just abandon innplace. The button for "Continue rollback" or whatever that came out 5-10 years ago was huge. Contrast that with Terraform: all of your points addressed, plus all of mine are non-problems. It lets you do some awesome things that are no doubt inspired by CF, but it takes them to an entirely new level. There are a few downsides too, but nothing compared to CF. You can build too-complex things much more easily in TF, so you have to be careful not to go overboard. It also bugs me that I can't spec a high-level thing like "compute with 4 cores and 32GB RAM, repeat 10x and put behind a load balancer with DNS name foo" and use it anywhere, I have to say google_compute or azure_load_balancer or aws_dns. That was the biggest disappointment coming out of CF and hearing how awesome this thing was, and then realizing it still left me vendor locked.
Androider 6y ago
I've worked with Cognito extensively, and it's effectively abandoned. This issue sums up some of the common frustrations https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/3495 https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/3495
ma2rten 6y ago
I hadn't used AWS in about 4 years, but I recently starting using it for a side project. I needed to process a big dataset and I wanted to use pyspark, so I gave EMR a try. I was impressed how easy it was seemingly to create clusters in the UI and then run jobs using an ipython notebook. That is until I realized that nothing worked. You had to use a version that was 5 versions behind the current version which is the opposite of what the documentation said which explicitly said not to use that version. Even then not everything worked out of the box.
- jcims 6y ago
  We had to do a security review of EMR recently. I’m amazed it works at all. Hop on one of the cluster nodes and take a look at the processes running.
  - ma2rten 6y ago
    It was probably an issues specifically with notebooks.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

StreamBright 6y ago

I agree. We usually limit ourselves to a small subset of features we are using from AWS. The newer services tend to be less reliable, reasonable. I think part of it is the APIs being too complicated. Have you tried to use Kinesis low level API? You know what I am talking about. Ok, lets use the high level API. Well it is written in Java (and Java only) so you are going to be running a JVM on your end regardless. If you think I am joking: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/streams/latest/dev/shared-throughput-kcl-consumers.html#shared-throughput-kcl-consumers-overview https://docs.aws.amazon.com/streams/latest/dev/shared-throug... I would classify this as a critical issue, and this is part of the reason why we stopped using Kinesis entirely.

irrational 6y ago

Is this true? That isn't typically the Google way. Traditionally they build something and then let it linger for years before killing it. https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/