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Show HN: Vantage – An alternative AWS console focused on developer experience
- jdmcd 6y agoWe've been using Vantage for a few months now and it's a really great layer on top of the AWS console. I particularly like the correlation of the metrics right in the dashboard - makes light-weight DevOps real easy.
- changxu 6y agoI got a demo of Vantage recently and being able to build dashboards for each environment (eg dev, staging, prod) seems really useful
- gagejustins 6y agoAt DigitalOcean (where I didn't overlap with Ben) we obviously thought a lot about how to improve the DX around interacting with cloud resources, both GUI-based and programmatically. Great to see someone taking that idea to its natural next step :)
- StratusBen 6y agoHi HN, Vantage is an alternative to the AWS console focused on developer experience and cost transparency. My background is in public cloud where I was the product lead for DigitalOcean’s Droplet product and at AWS on the container services product management team. Our team is 100% bootstrapped with two technical co-founders and a designer. Vantage is ReadOnly by default and is meant to work alongside your existing automation tools. We aim to help address two problems: (1) navigate and organize resources across multiple AWS services, regions and accounts in an intuitively designed experience and (2) show where your costs are coming from in a simple manner. Some of our users have described us as “Mint.com for AWS accounts.” In the future we are looking at automated recommendations to save you money, help identify orphaned resources and get into deployment of applications. In addition, we look to add support to other public cloud providers. For example imagine seeing your bandwidth usage on S3 and being able to automate a Cloudflare integration. Or see your Heroku and AWS resources in one place and get comparisons across providers. This post represents our first official “launch” and we are eager to collect feedback. Please have mercy :) Feel free to contact me directly at ben@vantage.sh if I can be helpful to you in your infrastructure journey.
- lawnchair 6y agoLooks nice! Surprised something like this hasn't come out sooner. The AWS UI is a hot mess. Good luck.
- adwww 6y agoCongrats on the product launch, looks a neat UI. AWS easily has the worst UX of the three major clouds I've used. From that perspective my favourite by far is GCP. Do you forsee supporting other cloud vendors? I guess there is a lot less demand for others, in terms both of number of users, and also Google and Microsoft UIs are a bit less awful to start with...
- StratusBen 6y agoThank you! Great question. We are planning on supporting GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean and Heroku in the future and have users who have actively been requesting support for all of them. Additionally - I think we can build a truly objective cloud console that shouldn't be relegated to just public cloud provider services. For example: Why can't scale.ai sit alongside ML offerings from AWS and GCP? Why can't Cloudflare see S3 egress and have Vantage facilitate an integration? Why can't you auto-replicate an environment from Heroku or DigitalOcean to AWS/GCP/Azure? These are some ideas we have going forward. Currently we have multi-account support for AWS and have been thoughtful with our architecture to quickly add other providers going forward so stay tuned :)
- ben-gy 6y agoGreat product - sorely needed for AWS - that said Heroku is an interesting choice... I’ve been using it for almost 10 years now and I’m not sure how much more room for improvement there is - maybe I’ve got blinkers on - what are the Heroku UI/UX pain points you’re seeking to solve?
- StratusBen 6y agoThank you! We aren't looking to add any UI/UX improvements to Heroku but are looking at facilitation of migrating (or replicating) Heroku accounts to one of the larger players like GCP/Azure/AWS. So essentially we'd look at your current Heroku setup and look to replicate it on a public cloud provider of your choice.
- dastbe 6y agofinally getting to see a demo of this, and all I have to say is freakin' boom
- grinich 6y agoCongrats on the launch!
- yevpats 6y agoLooks good, congrats! Open source alternative https://github.com/cloudquery/cloudquery https://github.com/cloudquery/cloudquery
- neom 6y agoThis is awesome. Putting yet another tool you don't have control over in your toolchain seems to be causing headaches for a lot of developers with big applications these days. Relying on other peoples services is always a risk, great to see there are OSS alternatives.
- ayewo 6y agoHey, don’t take the shine off StratusBen’s Show HN :) This is good to know, but I’m really curious how you found out about the OSS project? You are a contributor? Found out on Twitter?
- abarrettwilsdon 6y agoI use Vantage and it's definitely a good product and all but the real value is every hour you don't have to spend using AWS directly. I would pay _so_ much money to never have to use Cloudwatch and AWS Cost Management again. Thankfully, I qualify for the vantage free tier for quite a while longer.
- bberenberg 6y agoAm I understanding correctly that if I have over 500 a month in spend there is no free trial option? Also FYI the email verification hit my spam box on Gmail. Edit: Also is there any way to have multiple users on a Vantage account?
- StratusBen 6y agoIf you have over $500 per month of AWS spend, you are still free to use the product (no credit card required to get started) and everything will work but certain features will be restricted. For example, cost transparency reports will require an upgrade to use for spend over $500 per month. The specifics are detailed on our pricing page here: https://vantage.sh/pricing https://vantage.sh/pricing We are taking a look at what it would take to offer a free trial on our end in the future as well.
- bberenberg 6y agoMakes a lot of sense. Theres an interesting item I noticed: -You limit based on spend -You don't support all AWS Services -As a result you don't see all of our spend -Which means you actually limit based on spend of supported services? (I think?)
- StratusBen 6y agoThat's correct. It also aligns our incentives with insuring we do as good a job as possible with appropriately representing your costs :)
- msoliman 6y agoThis is a godsend. We're running multiple accounts and different regions on AWS, and I believe Vantage will be phenomenal. Excited to use it.
- poletopole 6y agoI was just thinking the other day whomever does this will be very rich. AWS’ console is the worst.
- stunt 6y agoEverything that AWS offers comes with lots of caveats. I'm happy that good competition from Azure is forcing AWS to simplify some of of their services and make things a bit more straightforward.
- dazzeloid 6y agoWithin 30 seconds of signing up for Vantage I discovered an old unused EC2 instance I was still paying $17/month for. This made me realize how weirdly hard it is to see a usable cost breakdown by resource on AWS...converted :)
- StratusBen 6y agoThis brought such a smile to my face. Thank you for sharing and happy we could help. A lot Vantage users have the use-case of using Vantage purely for "insurance" of things going awry like this.
- jensenbox 6y agoI think there needs to be better pricing. I know pricing is hard but there should at least be a call to action if you have much a much bigger spend than what is on the pricing page.
- StratusBen 6y agoThis was a miss for me personally. We added a few more Q&A around this but aren't pushing any changes to the site until after launch now. The answer is essentially we have custom plans available and you just need to contact support@vantage.sh - we just want to understand your scale and use case. In some cases we aren't the right fit right now. For example, we spoke to a company with ~$20M in monthly AWS costs and told them we need to get back to them before we can realistically support them. We'll hopefully have this updated tomorrow. Thanks for this call-out.
- trestenhortz 6y agoThat’s a mammoth task to take on. Which AWS services do you cover?
- scheub 6y agoThey have a page for this on their docs: https://docs.vantage.sh/supported_services/ https://docs.vantage.sh/supported_services/
- foreigner 6y agoI've always wondered why AWS doesn't just open source their console. it's such a usability disaster and there's so many developers that would love to contribute improvements to it. Wouldn't that make financial sense to Amazon?
- chippiewill 6y agoFrom Amazon's perspective being unable to easily see what resources you have in your account might be a feature, not a bug.
- itisit 6y agoAWS Cost Explorer easily reveals all resources in an account: https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-cost-explorer/ https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-cost-explorer...
- teemops 6y agoAWS Resource Groups and Tag Editor lets you get visibility across your AWS Account for all resources, but not across multiple accounts...
- londons_explore 6y agoDoes the dashboard use non-public APIs?
- ranman 6y agoI think that's a good idea and I wish they would do something like this. FWIW I disagree that the console is a usability disaster. We're very prone to hyperbole in this industry. It's definitely got a ton of room to improve but it's not the worst and it's usable. Hundreds of thousands of people use it all the time. I can give some background that might be helpful on why the UIs might not be open sourced. Each service team builds their own console. Most of the original AWS consoles were written in Java with GWT. Some eventually moved to Angular. There's a big push internally to use a more consistent and familiar UX experience across services. There's an internal UI/UX platform called Polaris (I'm not leaking anything here, you can see this in the source of some consoles and in the console.log statements that leak to prod) that most of the new services use. Most new services are built with React + Polaris. The console API for many new services is not the same API that is exposed to the SDKs/CLIs. These APIs aren't public or documented. If they open source every console, and people build on that, they're tied to supporting those APIs in perpetuity. That slows their pace of iteration on the console. If consoles are open source it could be another potential vector for service updates to leak through. Another concern is that releasing the UI kit for the AWS console is going to make it way easier for phishers to build out convincing lures. TBH I'm not super concerned about that. If I were AWS I'd open source the UI toolkit and give various service teams the option of open sourcing their console. From there I'd release a theme/color scheme for people who want to build extensions. AWS is very customer feedback driven. However, most of the customers providing feedback are not the ones using the console day-in-day out. The people actually using the console are not the ones talking to AWS. If you hit a UX issue then use that feedback button on the bottom left of the console and let them know.
- trestenhortz 6y agoHow does this work? Do you have servers that connect to AWS using my credentials?
- StratusBen 6y agoWe wrote up a quick overview of how Vantage works here: https://docs.vantage.sh/connecting/ https://docs.vantage.sh/connecting/ tl;dr: The Vantage application (hosted on AWS) interacts with your AWS account through something called a Cross Account IAM role that defaults to read only permissions.
- aynsof 6y agoCongratulations on the launch. This looks fantastic! AWS's release cadence is absolutely crazy - I can barely keep up with all the new releases. Are you planning on supporting all AWS services? If so, how are you planning on keeping up?
- StratusBen 6y agoThanks so much! We are letting our users dictate what services we support. We can typically add support for a new AWS service in a few hours at best or ~2 days at worst. The nice thing about Vantage is that its essentially a personalized console just for you - so even if we add support for a bunch of AWS services you'll have a console just for what services you're using. Also at one point we hope to hire some more engineers to assist with development progress.
- aynsof 6y agoThat kind of timeline is incredible. Are you able to share anything about your development processes that enable this?
- StratusBen 6y agoWe invested heavily in the tooling around how we interact with AWS from the get-go as we knew this would be a problem. That's all we're really publicly sharing right now :)
- VectorLock 6y agoAlthough this is a nice little simplified view into your AWS account I think calling it an "alternative AWS console" is misleading because you can't actually do anything with it, use it to make changes, etc.
- StratusBen 6y agoIt's a fair call out and something we've struggled with in messaging at this stage of the company. It's hard to keep messaging simple but also be succinct with what we are providing. We will be iterating on this over time. That being said - we are slowly adding management actions and I do believe we will be compatible with a number of AWS services in due time. For example, you can manage Route 53 record sets directly from Vantage. We wrote a post up on it here: https://medium.com/@bensign/raising-the-bar-for-the-route53-console-2343f0c9eae6 https://medium.com/@bensign/raising-the-bar-for-the-route53-...
- itisit 6y agoIn a sea of CMP options, what sets Vantage apart? Sincerely asking, as I cannot tell from the site's docs. And does Vantage leverage AWS Cost Anomaly Detection in any way?
- acnewyork 6y agoCongratulations on the launch. The cost estimation feature is awesome - very useful for people like me who are not very good at cleaning up resources. Also like the cross-region view without having to switch console regions. This looks promising - good luck!
- StratusBen 6y agoThanks!
- OutsmartDan 6y agoCrazy how you need a tool that reads another tool to figure out how much you're spending for the original tool. I'm sure there was a purpose for how the AWS console was originally built, but if someone spent this much time for an alternative, there's a clear problem in its original conception.
- k__ 6y agoI was a bit whelmed when I used it. I expeced an alternative to the AWS console, but got a monitoring dashboard. Didn't seem like I could do much with it besides looking at my resources.
- StratusBen 6y agoOut of curiosity - what else would you like to do? We're always open to feedback. The only write actions we have are around Route 53 detailed here but we're adding more soon: https://medium.com/@bensign/raising-the-bar-for-the-route53-console-2343f0c9eae6 https://medium.com/@bensign/raising-the-bar-for-the-route53-...
- k__ 6y agoI guess, I would like to do what I can do with the actual AWS console. Provision and update my resources. Otherwise it's, like I said, only another monitoring dashboard. I mean, that isn't bad, it's probably doing a good job at that. But I guess, I simply expected more interactivity from an AWS console replacement, haha
- random5634 6y agoIsn't it supposed to be read only for security - that's at least a big benefit in my book. Ideally without dynamodb query permission either. etc
- k__ 6y agoSure, totally understand that. It's just not what I think about when I read AWS console replacement.
- synunlimited 6y agoAny thoughts on a self hosted version? (I didn't look too closely at all the marketing stuff if this is already addressed) Would be nice to put something like this up behind our own VPN auth etc
- StratusBen 6y agoWe have been asked about this a bunch, yup. It isn't something we're going to get done in the near term but if you'd like to discuss, I'd be happy to chat about it. Feel free to email me at ben@vantage.sh
- pvsoriano 6y agoThis looks great! Looking forward to trying this out.
- marstall 6y agovery cool view on my checkered history of failed and abandoned personal projects lol. nice to have it confirmed they're not still costing me money though! one question. I have a couple projects on Amplify that don't pop up on my Vantage dashboard. Is it just a subset of AWS services that are included?
- a012 6y agoI admit that I love this UI for cloud management, and I'd love more to be able to use it with GCP too because accessing GCP console is another kind of pain compared to AWS.
- StratusBen 6y agoGCP support is on the way. To learn more please email support@vantage.sh!
- isatty 6y agoCongrats on launching a product. I think it’s a great idea for small - medium sized shops to use this. I used to be an SRE at a large company with a gigantic AWS account. While the console can be a mess, it’s really information dense and once you are familiar with it, you can find a lot of stuff. It also meant that it was easier to use awscli because you knew what was available without reading the docs. I honestly don’t need things to look well designed with lots of white space at the expense of lowering the information density. Cost saving views displayed in plaintext above resources are cool, but not better than the billing console which can be fairly powerful.
- ak007 6y agoAny plans to offer this as an AWS Marketplace offering ?
- beshrkayali 6y agoThis is pretty nice, but it's not really an "alternative" to the console, is it? It's a pretty nice complementary monitoring dashboard though. Pricing wise, I have to be honest, I don't see myself paying $50 a month for a monitoring dashboard, as a solo dev or a small company. Out of curiosity, why do you hide YouTube player controls on home page?
- rswail 6y agoHiya, interesting offering and exploring it now :) How does this compare to, for example, stax.io which does similar cost transparency but also offers compliance monitoring and other elements? The company I work with as a $250K/month spend on AWS and uses stax to hassle people to delete unused things :)
- vldr 6y agovery annoying that the embedded video has no controls. I want to know how long it is before I start watching (it's 2:19)
- georgedegennaro 6y agoI've thought about the idea of re-implementing the AWS console, especially for the ends of a 'focused'/gated experience in the data science field; my reasoning was every service has an API and there is a JavaScript SDK, why not just reimplement the console to my tastes/goals? I'm curious what your architecture/design looks like and whether you ran into any sharp edges: ie is Web UI for a cloud platform really as simple as writing JS to call rest APIs? Also, I'm wondering if the community has any other open source alternatives I could toy around with and peek under the hood.
- samridh90 6y agoCongrats on the launch! Curious, how do you plan to handle CF template upgrades when you need additional permissions as you enhance the product?
- StratusBen 6y agoWe have some logic built into the app already for this. Vantage is aware of what permissions it has and what it needs to perform certain actions and will inform the user of what additional permissions are required. We have dynamic instructions generated to the user to assign these permissions manually for now.
- samridh90 6y agoThanks for taking the time to reply, all the best with Vantage!