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Hi 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 pro

Hi 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 ago
Looks nice! Surprised something like this hasn't come out sooner. The AWS UI is a hot mess. Good luck.
adwww 6y ago
Congrats 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 ago
  Thank 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 ago
    Great 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 ago
      Thank 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.
raylad 6y ago
How does it handle credentials? What's the potential for Vantage being hacked and the hackers gaining admin access to your users' AWS accounts?
- StratusBen 6y ago
  The provided CloudFormation stack creates a Cross Account IAM Role with a list of read only permissions. We don't accept access keys or secrets. - A permissions overview is here (most aren't used for now). This list was made from the AWS-managed IAM policy of "ReadOnlyAccess" but whittled down to remove things like our ability to read from S3 Buckets or Databases: https://docs.vantage.sh/permissions/ https://docs.vantage.sh/permissions/ - The latest CloudFormation stack is here: https://vantage-public.s3.amazonaws.com/x-account-role-create-11132020.json https://vantage-public.s3.amazonaws.com/x-account-role-creat... As for security, we are leveraging best practices learned from our time at AWS and DigitalOcean. Every person on our team has spent time at a public cloud provider and applying what we've learned there to Vantage. We've also been in contact with certain AWS employees to ensure we have proper setups.
  - dastbe 6y ago
    for what its worth, there is a much better scoped ViewOnlyAccess managed policy that makes a much better distinction about what is reasonable read-only access (ecs:listClusters) and not reasonable read-only access (dynamodb:Query)
    - StratusBen 6y ago
      That's good feedback. Customers can also give us a Cross Account IAM role with whatever permissions they'd like and Vantage should work accordingly in a gracefully degraded fashion. For example: If you only want to give us access to EC2, things should theoretically work. To use a custom cross account IAM role all you need to do is email support@vantage.sh and we can help out with some other configuration details to get it going.
  - philsnow 6y ago
diveanon 6y ago
Product looks really nice, going to pitch this later this week to our accounting and devops teams. What made you decide to build this as a separate product instead of advocating for an improved ui while still at Amazon? I guess to put it bluntly, are their people at Amazon who defend the current state of the console?
- StratusBen 6y ago
  Great - feel free to email me if you need any help at ben@vantage.sh In all honesty it wasn't part of my purview while at AWS and I was happily focused on container services at the time (ECS/Fargate/EKS/etc). I think in order to make necessary changes at AWS on this level you'd really need a full reorganization of how teams are setup. We have a lot of liberties by starting fresh.
  - diveanon 6y ago
    Makes perfect sense. Good luck!
comex 6y ago
In case it helps, I tried to recount my thoughts in the first few seconds after clicking the link. "An alternative AWS console" - cool. I'd been wondering if there were any good ones. What does it look like? There's a video, but as usual I don't want to watch a product video; I don't want to disturb people by playing audio over the speakers, and it takes too long. I scroll down… nope, no screenshots. There's "Get Started for Free", but that's going to lead to some complicated setup process. Oh well, I'm not interested enough to investigate further. Pass. …Well, in reality I did investigate further, because I wanted to provide constructive feedback. It looks like there are some screenshots on the Features page, but they should be on the front page. Also, I didn't initially realize there was a Features page, because with my browser window at 900 pixels wide (half of my MacBook Pro screen), the site dumps the navigation links at the top into a hamburger menu, which I didn't notice and wouldn't want to click. Plus, even after clicking on the screenshots to zoom them, they are too small to comfortably read the text, because they're fit to the window width minus some padding. I'd have preferred if it just showed the screenshot at full size and let me scroll. I guess this sort of narrow (but not phone-level narrow) window size is uncommon, so it's probably not worth worrying about too much, but that is the experience I had. Also... I tried clicking Get Started for Free. It wants me to make an account. That's friction. Oh, now it wants me to confirm my email. More friction. Where's the email? Oh, it went to spam, with a scary message in Gmail [1]. Yikes… you should figure out what's going on with that. I confirmed my email and now it prompts me to link my AWS account. Well, finally. I would have been more likely to sign up (if I were just a potential user rather than someone trying to provide feedback) if clicking the button on the homepage took me directly to the AWS login. Well, I went ahead and connected… More issues with my browser width - the Plans page is kind of broken. [2] The service itself… seems fine for a launch. I like the easy-to-understand breakdown of the monthly cost! On the other hand, the service seems to just provide an overview rather than actually replacing the AWS console. Maybe there would be more functionality if I got off of read-only mode, but I couldn't figure out how. I proceeded to delete my account. It did not automatically delete the CloudFormation stack that the signup process had me create, which is unfortunate. [1] https://drop.qoid.us/fah8Eit5.png https://drop.qoid.us/fah8Eit5.png [2] https://drop.qoid.us/Ek9ieSoh.png https://drop.qoid.us/Ek9ieSoh.png
- 6y ago

lawnchair 6y ago

Looks nice! Surprised something like this hasn't come out sooner. The AWS UI is a hot mess. Good luck.

adwww 6y ago

Congrats 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 ago
Thank 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 ago
  Great 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 ago
    Thank 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.

raylad 6y ago

How does it handle credentials? What's the potential for Vantage being hacked and the hackers gaining admin access to your users' AWS accounts?

StratusBen 6y ago
The provided CloudFormation stack creates a Cross Account IAM Role with a list of read only permissions. We don't accept access keys or secrets. - A permissions overview is here (most aren't used for now). This list was made from the AWS-managed IAM policy of "ReadOnlyAccess" but whittled down to remove things like our ability to read from S3 Buckets or Databases: https://docs.vantage.sh/permissions/ https://docs.vantage.sh/permissions/ - The latest CloudFormation stack is here: https://vantage-public.s3.amazonaws.com/x-account-role-create-11132020.json https://vantage-public.s3.amazonaws.com/x-account-role-creat... As for security, we are leveraging best practices learned from our time at AWS and DigitalOcean. Every person on our team has spent time at a public cloud provider and applying what we've learned there to Vantage. We've also been in contact with certain AWS employees to ensure we have proper setups.
- dastbe 6y ago
  for what its worth, there is a much better scoped ViewOnlyAccess managed policy that makes a much better distinction about what is reasonable read-only access (ecs:listClusters) and not reasonable read-only access (dynamodb:Query)
  - StratusBen 6y ago
    That's good feedback. Customers can also give us a Cross Account IAM role with whatever permissions they'd like and Vantage should work accordingly in a gracefully degraded fashion. For example: If you only want to give us access to EC2, things should theoretically work. To use a custom cross account IAM role all you need to do is email support@vantage.sh and we can help out with some other configuration details to get it going.
- philsnow 6y ago

diveanon 6y ago

Product looks really nice, going to pitch this later this week to our accounting and devops teams. What made you decide to build this as a separate product instead of advocating for an improved ui while still at Amazon? I guess to put it bluntly, are their people at Amazon who defend the current state of the console?

StratusBen 6y ago
Great - feel free to email me if you need any help at ben@vantage.sh In all honesty it wasn't part of my purview while at AWS and I was happily focused on container services at the time (ECS/Fargate/EKS/etc). I think in order to make necessary changes at AWS on this level you'd really need a full reorganization of how teams are setup. We have a lot of liberties by starting fresh.
- diveanon 6y ago
  Makes perfect sense. Good luck!

comex 6y ago

In case it helps, I tried to recount my thoughts in the first few seconds after clicking the link. "An alternative AWS console" - cool. I'd been wondering if there were any good ones. What does it look like? There's a video, but as usual I don't want to watch a product video; I don't want to disturb people by playing audio over the speakers, and it takes too long. I scroll down… nope, no screenshots. There's "Get Started for Free", but that's going to lead to some complicated setup process. Oh well, I'm not interested enough to investigate further. Pass. …Well, in reality I did investigate further, because I wanted to provide constructive feedback. It looks like there are some screenshots on the Features page, but they should be on the front page. Also, I didn't initially realize there was a Features page, because with my browser window at 900 pixels wide (half of my MacBook Pro screen), the site dumps the navigation links at the top into a hamburger menu, which I didn't notice and wouldn't want to click. Plus, even after clicking on the screenshots to zoom them, they are too small to comfortably read the text, because they're fit to the window width minus some padding. I'd have preferred if it just showed the screenshot at full size and let me scroll. I guess this sort of narrow (but not phone-level narrow) window size is uncommon, so it's probably not worth worrying about too much, but that is the experience I had. Also... I tried clicking Get Started for Free. It wants me to make an account. That's friction. Oh, now it wants me to confirm my email. More friction. Where's the email? Oh, it went to spam, with a scary message in Gmail [1]. Yikes… you should figure out what's going on with that. I confirmed my email and now it prompts me to link my AWS account. Well, finally. I would have been more likely to sign up (if I were just a potential user rather than someone trying to provide feedback) if clicking the button on the homepage took me directly to the AWS login. Well, I went ahead and connected… More issues with my browser width - the Plans page is kind of broken. [2] The service itself… seems fine for a launch. I like the easy-to-understand breakdown of the monthly cost! On the other hand, the service seems to just provide an overview rather than actually replacing the AWS console. Maybe there would be more functionality if I got off of read-only mode, but I couldn't figure out how. I proceeded to delete my account. It did not automatically delete the CloudFormation stack that the signup process had me create, which is unfortunate. [1] https://drop.qoid.us/fah8Eit5.png https://drop.qoid.us/fah8Eit5.png [2] https://drop.qoid.us/Ek9ieSoh.png https://drop.qoid.us/Ek9ieSoh.png

6y ago