12 ms·
Amazon Introduces Re:Post, a “Stack Overflow” for AWS
- orf 5y agoWhy wouldn’t they just use a stack overflow subdomain for this?
- syspec 5y agoThat's not how you get promoted
- deanCommie 5y agoYou're thinking of Google, not Amazon.
- qqtt 5y agoAmazon has plenty of over-engineered crap made for optimizing promo docs.
- deanCommie 5y agoExample?
- peakaboo 5y agoBecause this will require an amazon login and be a walled garden they control 100%.
- SilasX 5y agoOr make their docs, tutorials, and UI better?
- halayli 5y agoI find AWS documentation to be one of the best out there. Consistent across all their products, very detailed and easy to navigate. I am curious what you found to be lacking in their docs.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoexamples of most/all of the parameters is lacking sample output/responses is almost always lacking, I usually need to perform an a cli call to see what the output will be. Their error messages/codes seem to vary with time / aren't consistent / aren't documented. There are about five different messages I get if my token has timed out I've seen. And I'm mostly an ec2/s3/r53 user, aka the oldest apis. What are the other ones like?
- StreamBright 5y ago> And I'm mostly an ec2/s3/r53 user, aka the oldest apis. What are the other ones like? Horrid. Try to use Athena + Glue + S3 and the fun is guaranteed. Add GDRP and least privileges principle to the mix and there is even more fun.
- indymike 5y ago> I am curious what you found to be lacking in their docs. The current version of the product.
- philliphaydon 5y agoThat’s very non specific. What exactly is lacking in all documentation right now.
- StreamBright 5y agoFor example a document explaining how to implement the least privilege principle for what any customer wants to on their platform. Well, I know the answer, there is no way for a customer to achieve this, so you have to engage the support.
- 5y ago
- jknoepfler 5y agoControl of content moderation, usage policies, and integration with their own internal support APIs I would guess. Personally, I don't understand why they don't have an open-source documentation repository, given that a lot of their docs are garbage or hard to find... It's pretty well known that the boto3 / terraform etc. docs are a better place to find API documentation than AWS
- dastbe 5y agothey do. the docs are open source and you can propose changes to them https://github.com/awsdocs https://github.com/awsdocs
- jknoepfler 5y agoshame on me, that news is three years old!
- cowsandmilk 5y ago> the boto3 / terraform etc. docs are a better place to find API documentation than AWS The boto3 documentation is AWS documentation…
- strictfp 5y agoNot Invented Here
- NicoJuicy 5y agoThey didn't re-invent something either. It's really is a copy-paste from stackoverflow
- duckmysick 5y agoI know this argument doesn't work well in this example since it's Amazon. But in principle, centralizing data on the internet around a few big services is not a good thing. These days forums and IRC channels are replaced with Facebook and Discord. An untold amount of code is hosted on GitHub. And now Stack Exchange is the go-to platform for Q&As. I understand it's convenient and those services have a network effect behind them. But something is lost. Something that made the internet great, where everyone hosted and shared their own content.
- GuestHNUser 5y agoI agree with your general point about avoiding centralized data, but StackExchange definitely stands as unique since all of its posts are in the creative commons. Due to that, I think SE is one of the few bastions for sharing knowledge since it doesn't own its users answers. Not saying that SE is the end all be all of QA forums, just that it's a much better centralized system than you are giving it credit.
- duckmysick 5y agoStack Exchange - or more precisely their moderators and power users - gets to decide which content is allowed and which isn't. For example which questions are marked duplicate (even if they aren't) or which questions are off-topic (even if it's not clear). And yes, theoretically the community can change the guidelines. But at one point the organizational inertia is so big, the proposition becomes "take or leave it". And it's not just Stack Exchange that has this problem. Wikipedia too.
- StreamBright 5y agoBecause amazon has a fork of everything worth something. The list would probably max out HN's max comment size.
- bewestphal 5y agoIf built right, this allows for better observability for their teams into important topics.
- syshum 5y agoAs someone who does not understand why StackOverflow is so popular, find many of the posts there to be low quality, and believes that internet should be decentralized I think it is better for platforms to host their own communities instead of outsourcing it to places like StackOverflow, Discord, Reddit, etc
- schlotzisk 5y agoThe thing I'm wondering about is why they didn't make use of StackOverflows bew Collectives feature. Yes, launching your own thing gets somebody promoted, but in this case I think collaborating with SO could have made sense.
- amznbyebyebye 5y agolol poor guy who launched it slaving for the whole year thinks it will get him promoted. Wait till he goes through a cycle, gets shot down, demoralized, leaves AWS and they backfill with fresh meat. Cue the circle of life
- offbeatrock 5y agooh my god. I think i'm right before the "gets shot down" stage
- throwawayHN378 5y agoI have about 5k rep points on SO. Almost all from answering questions. Not a lot - but enough to know how to appropriately ask a question. My $0.02 is that the only questions that seem to get traction on SO are the questions that have been asked a million times in slightly different variations. I never get meaningful answers to novel questions even when the question is absolutely specific and reproducible
- duskwuff 5y agoBecause they want to own, operate, and moderate their own site. Having SO run the site wouldn't accomplish that.
- morpheuskafka 5y agoIt’s a little bit weird to call it part of the free tier in the post—I’d certainly hope a crowdsource, no SLA forum for their own product support is free!
- CottonMcKnight 5y agoSo, AWS is hoping to exploit developers' willingness to do free work in exchange for nebulous "reputation" points ("Klout", anyone?) that they have been convinced is worth something on their resumes. Instead of actually providing a real technical support team. Well, they've successfully convinced thousands of developers that AWS certifications are worth thousands of dollars, so I expect it might actually work.
- tokumei 5y agoAWS has good support if you’re a high-level customer. We have a rep we can arrange meetings with on a days notice if we need anything.
- sofixa 5y agoThey do provide a real technical support team, you just have to pay for it. And they state it will be driven by customers, partners and employees of AWS, so at least on paper they aren't fully relying on customers.
- CactusOnFire 5y agoI got one of the AWS certifications. I know it's a scam. HR teams don't. If ponying up $400 every 3 years gets me a more senior position with slightly better compensation, it's worth the ROI.
- yob28 5y agoI’ve never paid for one, get your company to pay the fees
- colechristensen 5y agoReally only applicable at certain kinds of company, leaning on certifications usually means it’s a very bureaucratic company or one with not enough competency to figure out if a candidate is any good. Likewise if a candidate has a lot of certifications there’s usually a question “does this person really know their stuff or are they just good at taking tests “
- NateEag 5y agoI asked a question about whether a recent outage was impacting SWF, as the status page showed that it wasn't. I got a confirmation from AWS staff in just a few minutes: https://www.repost.aws/questions/QUTPxjIgdcSWm6tTCacifdDg/is-swf-impacted-by-the-us-east-1-2021-12-07-outage https://www.repost.aws/questions/QUTPxjIgdcSWm6tTCacifdDg/is... So, one thing it has going for it is official AWS staff answering questions.
- manojlds 5y agoBut AWs staff will use this and provide more "authoritative" answers.
- 8organicbits 5y agoFascinating. Status page has been too painful recently with the inaccuracies or delays. This may be an alternative. (frustrated)
- feupan 5y agoThey just launched it. It’s pretty standard practice to have a few employees fill content websites with content to start them up. Let’s see how many of these employees are still at it in a few months.
- savant_penguin 5y ago
- joebiden2024 5y agoHow interesting. Amazon has an internal stackoverflow (Sage), wouldn't be surprised if they just forked and externalized it.
- Handytinge 5y agoIn fact the article confirms this :)
- joebiden2024 5y agoI read that as a different internal only system for AWS specific things.
- srvmshr 5y agoAny solution which sufficiently explains the jungle of AWS services efficiently, will be a big win for the community. I see the whole point of certification driven approval & self-styled AWS ninjas/ gurus/ experts as the failure of a system to efficiently provide its services to a commmon consumer. You shouldn't be needing a microdegree to run a service that you have taken up by own volition to build projects on
- whoevercares 5y agoThis is good, hopefully it makes it easier for internal team members to communicate with customers to resolve issues - the internal system has been very cumbersome
- theden 5y agoI think AWS has become the walmart of tech, or at least how I view walmart via popular media as an outsider of America. I don't know exactly what it is, but the vendor lock-in (in this case community lock-in), the extravagant and insular corporate events and tiers of users, the endless attempts at making everyone into a cog for their machine, the complete lack of self-awareness (from them and their evangelists) at how corporate-dystopian and drab they come across. In my opinion, don't give Amazon a second of your free time unless they're paying you.
- NicoJuicy 5y agoWow. It really is a copy paste of StackOverflow :o
- simonebrunozzi 5y agoSuper smart move by AWS (I have a suspect it has to do with Adam Selipsky's recent appointment to CEO). Quite bad for the community at large: in a nutshell, knowledge and free sweat is going to be used as a funnel to AWS services.
- smegma2 5y agoWhat's bad for the community? If people are building things with AWS I prefer that they're productive with it. If this helps developer productivity then that seems like a win. You said that it will act as a funnel for AWS services, you mean that it will encourage people to use AWS? If people feels that it gives them value then I don't see the issue. Although I don't think this would be a major factor in choosing a cloud provider (anyway I can ask any questions on SO).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tibbar 5y agoThe AWS console UX is so bad that I would strongly prefer not to spend more time using similarly-designed products. To be fair, good design isn’t easy and it makes you appreciate the real Stack Overflow more.
- philliphaydon 5y agoI’ve never understood this. Azure is a billion times worse. AWS is rather painless. Just slow.
- tibbar 5y agoThe AWS console is designed so that you won’t use it at scale, since the “right way” is through terraform/cloudformation etc. This is the only explanation I have at this point for the lack of basic stuff like visualizations of running infrastructure. “If I were running it”, the console would have an entirely visual mode where you can drag and drop infrastructure that’s fully interoperable with a tabular view. It would allow you to see at a glance what you’re running and what it’s doing and what is costing money. The current manifestation as a bunch of tables listing individual items that have secret cross dependencies is just, so much less than what it could be.
- hericium 5y ago> the lack of basic stuff like visualizations of running infrastructure But... this would help Amazon's customers save money. > “If I were running it”, the console would have an entirely visual mode where you can drag and drop infrastructure Honestly, I'm glad that you're not running it. My main issue with their web console is that it forces you to close repeating modals/popups multiple times a day, even within the same account. Like when you open EC2 console and you have to click on a top modal praising new interface. Every refresh gives you this modal to close. Giving in and forcing yourself to use the new interface won't help much, as you'll have to start closing modals asking you to comment on its usability. This one won't reappear within same account when closed but this is just EC2. Enter billing console and you may find 3 modals on top on every sub-page: red one stating that you have payments past due, green one stating that you have no payments past due and blue one being an ad for a new Payments interface. All at the same time. Other services will nag you and force you to close more and more modals and popups every time you open some service's console. When I found myself mindlessly closing console[1] modals and popups without reading, I've got a strong "this is not right" feeling. [1] https://consle.aws.amazon.com/ https://consle.aws.amazon.com/
- mmahemoff 5y agoAnd people will keep using StackOverflow for AWS questions anyway. As long as StackExchange keeps publishing under Creative Commons, I don't know why anyone would bother making their own Q&A forum, even a platform as big as AWS. Programmers would rather have a one-stop-shop for all their questions, which often cut across multiple topics anyway.
- 41b696ef1113 5y agoAs a StackOverflow consumer who only lands their from search engines, I am tired of seeing what seems like legitimate questions closed for being opinions/already asked in prehistoric times/etc. If Amazon owns a platform, they can enforce their own standards which might allow for more relevant posts.
- addicted 5y agoStack Exchange is broader than SO and other sites have other rules.
- vyrotek 5y agoInteresting. Even Microsoft has a relatively new board which is similar. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/index.html https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/index.html
- charlieyu1 5y agoIt is quite empty. But I guess an empty board is still better than old Microsoft support forums
- kunchamharsha 5y agoI'd rather have stack overflow sweat a little more to create cloud community and contribute there than on AWS. Though the enterprise support is excellent on AWS, using its own customers to answer their questions is absolute free loading. There's nothing stopping them from adding the forum membership, as part of their business package deals down the lane.
- jvolkman 5y ago> For users who do choose to sign in, using their AWS account, there is the opportunity to create a profile, post questions and answers, and interact with the community. Which account? My org root account? Dev account for some product? Doesn't seem to support AWS SSO. The multi-account story is one of my least favorite things about AWS. It all just seems so kludgy.
- newjersey 5y agoCan confirm I cannot use my personal account I use to publish my Alexa skills. It says I need to give billing information to be fully registered with AWS. They have pretty much all my information because I gave them a lot of my personal information when I signed up to publish Alexa skills. Maybe this place isn't for random people like me to answer random questions we find but rather for AWS staff to not have to repeat the same answers a thousand times. » There is no requirement to sign in to AWS re:Post to browse the content. I wish they extended this to asking questions as well. Like I don't want to associate asking question to my work$. Why would I if questions are public?
- mellavora 5y agoAnd it is one of my most favorite. Contrast with the horror stories which show up here every now and then about Google, how a random post on YouTube leads to being locked out of email and the cloud hosting used to power your side-gig (or full time gig). Why should my on-line shopping account be linked to the work I do for client #1? Or client #2? or to (one of) my hobby and remote back-up solutions? One account for each use-category. Clear and clean firewalls.
- addicted 5y agoCan’t Amazon just pay Stack Overflow and use the tool they’ve built and license instead of stealing their design and UI and workflow for probably more money?
- temp8964 5y agoStackExchange has lots of sites (https://stackexchange.com/sites https://stackexchange.com/sites). Could they just create a site under the stackexchange network?
- dotancohen 5y agoLibreOffice also runs a Stack Exchange clone, actually a fork of the older open-source SE codebase I believe. It's horrible - no real experts frequent the forums. But the lack of some SE features highlight them. For one, I don't ever see if anyone replied to my questions or left a comment on my answers. I do get an email, but that is easily missed and destroys the ability to have a conversation. Because I'm always checking some site on the SE network for other things, I always see notifications there. Another missing SE feature is the Hot Network Questions. I used to hate that feature, it would distract me to no end. But now I see how it attracts people to new SE sites that they might have expertise in but otherwise not know about. I do see the need that it fill now.
- ddtaylor 5y ago> stealing their design and UI and workflow I don't think they own those things and therefore they cannot be stolen.
- kobayashi 5y agoYou can steal ideas to which one doesn’t have a legal right.
- albert_e 5y agoThe idea here a discussion forum where people with technical queries can ask for help and those with experience can offer help? The idea sounds older than the internet -- what is Stack Overflow's claim to originality here (with all due respect) that AWS is stealing?
- albert_e 5y agoThe login to re:Post is tied to one single (personal / org?) AWS account you currently operate? That seems rather clunky to me I prefer anonymity and no linkage to my actual AWS account
- fragmede 5y agoIn a world of suspended accounts and banning with no recourse, that seems like a setup. Say the wrong thing and you and all your EC2 instances and all the rest of your AWS usage is suspended? Hopefully they've worked out a workable policy for this. One wrinkle though is NDA'd information. It becomes very difficult to help with certain AWS issues without access to implementation details which they hide behind NDAs. This information is critical for dealing with a certain class of problem. Some answers will have to be very circumspect to the point of being unhelpful without access to the NDA'd information. > Help my Redshift loads aren't working because <details>! > Umm... yeah don't do that, do <fix> but I can't tell you why that fixes it or any information to help you reason about the system to avoid similar problems in the future. (But you can hire me as a consultant!)"
- grouphugs 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aitchnyu 5y agoWhich are the best examples of (private) SO clones? I've just heard of a few "if we build it they will come" stillborn deployments.
- ironfootnz 5y agoLOL, can’t believe people will invest time on this.
- nokya 5y agoDump question I guess, but I would like to follow what is said in the security & compliance section. There is a button "follow" that redirects me to a login page. I am supposed to provide credentials to either a "root" account or an "IAM" account. Assuming I have neither, I do not use AWS by myself and just want to take part in the discussion forums, should I create a root account or an IAM account?