6 ms·

How AWS is losing the younger generation with complexity

39 points by ohjeez 11mo ago

techblueberry 11mo ago
Unpopular opinion: it’s good actually for their to be different solutions that meet different needs.
CharlieDigital 11mo ago
If you are on AWS and you are not using the (unfortunately named) Copilot CLI[0], you're opting in to the full complexity of AWS. Copilot fortunately makes most common scenarios waaaay easier to build, setup, and deploy including building staged environments following best practices for AWS (separate accounts; I know, in and of itself kind of a pain in the ass). It encodes the most common types of application backend deployments into simple patterns and makes it pretty easy to build full and deploy full application stacks (Route 53 -> CloudFront -> S3 (static FE) -> ALB + SGs + TGs -> ECS cluster (backend APIs) -> DBs) With the Copilot CLI, I find the experience on AWS significantly better and in some ways, more well-rounded than on GCP. GCP's Firebase tooling and CLI comes close, but alas, Firebase does not have the same level of extensibility that Copilot offers by allowing you to include both CDK and CloudFormation as extension points which then allows you to use Copilot to manage a good chunk of your AWS infra with a single, easy to use CLI. For simple apps, I prefer Firebase on GCP. For more complex apps, I think Copilot on AWS is really, really good. One caveat: ECS is much slower to roll nodes over to new versions compared to Cloud Run. Best I could achieve on it was ~180s for a Blue/Green rollover whereas Cloud Run does this in seconds. TL;DR: if you are not an enterprise and you are on AWS, your life will assuredly be better with Copilot instead of CDK, CloudFormation, or almost any other solution for deploying to AWS. [0] https://aws.github.io/copilot-cli/ https://aws.github.io/copilot-cli/
- add-sub-mul-div 11mo ago
  Yeah that name makes me think it's going to give me a dubiously working LLM solution that I don't understand, which is worse than a non-working solution because I at least recognize the latter as a problem.
  - CharlieDigital 11mo ago
    Yup; but they were first. Copilot CLI was around long before GH Copilot existed.
- lerp-io 11mo ago
  Certified amAz0n pRoNoUns : AlB TG K8 SG ECP GcP S3 S5 S7 K8 RollOver EcS COpIloT FiReBase CLI DBGs CloUdRuN!!!
- cedws 11mo ago
  TIL, that looks pretty nice. My go-to for when I want to 'just fucking run a container' is Fly.io, all you need to do is put together a TOML manifest. If your bill is under $5 they give a 100% discount too. (not affiliated with or paid by Fly.io)
  - CharlieDigital 11mo ago
    > TIL, that looks pretty nice It is very nice and is 1000% the easiest way to work on AWS, IME.
nasretdinov 11mo ago
And all this to build a website that can be run on a single server, and even not a beefy one :). SQLite + Go is arguably even easier to start with and it can get you surprisingly far
- clickety_clack 11mo ago
  You can buy a raspberry pi with 16GB RAM and 128GB of SD storage for $150, and point it at a VPS with a static IP for $5/mo. For personal projects (on top of the massive cost savings) it’s much more satisfying to own your own whole server rather than just figure out how to configure something like aws and risk the costs of misconfiguration.
  - pcdoodle 11mo ago
    What's the VPS for? Just for a IP that's not your own personal one?
    - clickety_clack 11mo ago
      Usually your ISP gives you a dynamic IP address if your on a domestic internet plan, so you can’t map your home to a DNS record. Reverse proxying into a VPS is generally cheaper than adding a static IP address onto your internet plan.
windex 11mo ago
complexity = money for AWS. At this point, I am actually scared I will end up misconfiguring something and stare at a 6 figure bill one morning. I'd much rather use other services or spin up my own than have very delicate discussions with pushy AWS sales guys first thing in the morning.
- j45 11mo ago
  Very well articulated. Software sales people are there for their goals first, and your goals second. If there's a more optimal way for them to reach their goals in the long run, unbeknownst to you, it will happen.
- simianwords 11mo ago
  > complexity = money for AWS why do you think so? this is a very incurious read into it because the space AWS works in is highly competitive.
  - exe34 11mo ago
    I'll give them the benefit of the doubt when they implement a tuneable spending limit, even if it includes infinity by default. until then, they're a business beholden to shareholder value.
    - nieksand 11mo ago
      What semantics do you expect when your spending limit is hit? Turning off all compute resources (EC2, Lambda, Fargate, etc) seems obvious, but what about systems managing state like S3, EBS, and DynamoDB? Should buckets, volumes, and tables be deleted?
      - catlifeonmars 11mo ago
        I’ve seen this argument repeated a lot and I think it’s disingenuous. If AWS cared about simplifying billing they could figure out semantics that make sense. Just to throw out an example, they could allow account owners to either opt in or opt out of a hard cutoff. It’s clear they don’t have an incentive to fix this problem.
moonleay 11mo ago
Not surprising in my opinion. It is not hard to setup a VPS with whatever you want to deploy nowadays. 99% of the websites out there don't need to be able to infinity scale and it is way cheaper to host your stuff on a VPS, that doesn't have the risk of exploding in cost the way s3 does.
- aegypti 11mo ago
  They’re not going back to VPS setups sadly, the article is about deploy button dollar siphons like Vercel, Render, Netlify
arpit15191 11mo ago
I think AWS is still better in terms of customer support and help that they provide. You really need to keep an eye on the billing console when starting playing around with AWS, the free tier boundary line is pretty thin. for new accounts they have started to give 6 months free plus also some credits. They are trying their best to make it simpler.
jdsully 11mo ago
AWS is degrading on all fronts. If your a large scale business you almost certainly hit stock-outs during peak periods - the elasticity is a lie. If you are a mid scale its high prices and complexity, and finally if your just a beginner good friggin luck getting anything done now that they gutted free support and put near useless quotas on anything usable for modern AI development.
- simianwords 11mo ago
  when you have enough scale where AWS can't promise elasticity - they make it up with discounts high enough that it is not going to be cheaper to spin up your own infra.
- belter 11mo ago
  > AWS is degrading on all fronts. Try Azure...shared responsibility its shared data when another tenant keys leak into yours. Then go to GCP where your incident ticket gets answered by a documentation bot... You will crawl back to AWS praying for a good old fashioned throttling error.
prodigycorp 11mo ago
What are the no-anxiety, "so easy a caveman can do it" setups that ya'll are using now? I've been very happy with Railway (no affiliation). I got tired of vercel's cold starts and upsell button on every feature.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
sylens 11mo ago
GCP had second mover advantage in that they got to build a lot of constructs to segment identity and network access in ways that make sense. It's incredibly easy to give a service account access to conduct an action in every folder and project in a GCP org, compared with having to deploy a role to each account in an AWS org. VPCs being global and subnets being regional also make a lot more sense than having them be regional and zonal, respectively, in AWS. But the support I get from AWS is world class compared to GCP. My AWS account team is always proactively reaching out, not just for potential security risks but also with cost optimization advice.
- torginus 11mo ago
  Yeah, most people say that the best thing about AWS compared to the other 2, is that AWS works. Also AWS runs on AWS, unlike Google's and Microsoft's infra, which is apparently its own bespoke thing.
pomatic 11mo ago
Quite sure the complexity of AWS is forcing the SME types out - even the most basic operations require reference to chatGPT to find the details buried in the UI. It's gone from being 'good enough' - I mean the UI 15 years ago was basic, but adequate to labyrinthine. We don't have complex needs, they're met by AWS, but the combo of premium pricing and a diabolical UI will force our migration eventually.
more_corn 11mo ago
AWS is by far simpler than their main competitors gcp or azure. If you want simple you have to go up a layer to Heroku or Vercel.
torginus 11mo ago
Haha, this is weird. I'm old enough to know how to do servers tha old way, setting up nginx, memcached, LAMP stacks and whatever used to be the way to do servers. I am very not much an IaC/Docker/k8s/Amazon whatever thing native. To me AWS always felt like an equally complex way of doing the same things I always used to do. Now the next generation, who hasn't been indoctrinated into the 'cloud is the way to go, also microservices' mentality, and arriving at a time when the cloud providers aren't flooding everyone with free credits, courses and conferences to push their solutions, to them it looks like another legacy stack. Or maybe not legacy, but definitely it has a rugged everyday feel as opposed to having the air of 'future tech' around it.
slimebot80 11mo ago
Cloudflare workers are so simple to just use immediately.
2456750302 11mo ago
[dead]
erezcloud1live 11mo ago
We see the same thing in day-to-day EC2 ops: the pain isn’t “features,” it’s context switching across accounts/regions. We built a small Windows app that gives one EC2 pane + an AI command bar (plain English → guarded actions with audit). Not pitching—curious what guardrails you’d require (role scope? dry-run? cost hint before start/resize?). (Disclosure: I’m the founder of Cloud1.live.)

39 points by ohjeez 11mo ago

Unpopular opinion: it’s good actually for their to be different solutions that meet different needs.

If you are on AWS and you are not using the (unfortunately named) Copilot CLI[0], you're opting in to the full complexity of AWS. Copilot fortunately makes most common scenarios waaaay easier to build, setup, and deploy including building staged environments following best practices for AWS (separate accounts; I know, in and of itself kind of a pain in the ass). It encodes the most common types of application backend deployments into simple patterns and makes it pretty easy to build full and deploy full application stacks (Route 53 -> CloudFront -> S3 (static FE) -> ALB + SGs + TGs -> ECS cluster (backend APIs) -> DBs) With the Copilot CLI, I find the experience on AWS significantly better and in some ways, more well-rounded than on GCP. GCP's Firebase tooling and CLI comes close, but alas, Firebase does not have the same level of extensibility that Copilot offers by allowing you to include both CDK and CloudFormation as extension points which then allows you to use Copilot to manage a good chunk of your AWS infra with a single, easy to use CLI. For simple apps, I prefer Firebase on GCP. For more complex apps, I think Copilot on AWS is really, really good. One caveat: ECS is much slower to roll nodes over to new versions compared to Cloud Run. Best I could achieve on it was ~180s for a Blue/Green rollover whereas Cloud Run does this in seconds. TL;DR: if you are not an enterprise and you are on AWS, your life will assuredly be better with Copilot instead of CDK, CloudFormation, or almost any other solution for deploying to AWS. [0] https://aws.github.io/copilot-cli/ https://aws.github.io/copilot-cli/

add-sub-mul-div 11mo ago
Yeah that name makes me think it's going to give me a dubiously working LLM solution that I don't understand, which is worse than a non-working solution because I at least recognize the latter as a problem.
- CharlieDigital 11mo ago
  Yup; but they were first. Copilot CLI was around long before GH Copilot existed.
lerp-io 11mo ago
Certified amAz0n pRoNoUns : AlB TG K8 SG ECP GcP S3 S5 S7 K8 RollOver EcS COpIloT FiReBase CLI DBGs CloUdRuN!!!
cedws 11mo ago
TIL, that looks pretty nice. My go-to for when I want to 'just fucking run a container' is Fly.io, all you need to do is put together a TOML manifest. If your bill is under $5 they give a 100% discount too. (not affiliated with or paid by Fly.io)
- CharlieDigital 11mo ago
  > TIL, that looks pretty nice It is very nice and is 1000% the easiest way to work on AWS, IME.

nasretdinov 11mo ago

And all this to build a website that can be run on a single server, and even not a beefy one :). SQLite + Go is arguably even easier to start with and it can get you surprisingly far

clickety_clack 11mo ago
You can buy a raspberry pi with 16GB RAM and 128GB of SD storage for $150, and point it at a VPS with a static IP for $5/mo. For personal projects (on top of the massive cost savings) it’s much more satisfying to own your own whole server rather than just figure out how to configure something like aws and risk the costs of misconfiguration.
- pcdoodle 11mo ago
  What's the VPS for? Just for a IP that's not your own personal one?
  - clickety_clack 11mo ago
    Usually your ISP gives you a dynamic IP address if your on a domestic internet plan, so you can’t map your home to a DNS record. Reverse proxying into a VPS is generally cheaper than adding a static IP address onto your internet plan.

windex 11mo ago

complexity = money for AWS. At this point, I am actually scared I will end up misconfiguring something and stare at a 6 figure bill one morning. I'd much rather use other services or spin up my own than have very delicate discussions with pushy AWS sales guys first thing in the morning.

j45 11mo ago
Very well articulated. Software sales people are there for their goals first, and your goals second. If there's a more optimal way for them to reach their goals in the long run, unbeknownst to you, it will happen.
simianwords 11mo ago
> complexity = money for AWS why do you think so? this is a very incurious read into it because the space AWS works in is highly competitive.
- exe34 11mo ago
  I'll give them the benefit of the doubt when they implement a tuneable spending limit, even if it includes infinity by default. until then, they're a business beholden to shareholder value.
  - nieksand 11mo ago
    What semantics do you expect when your spending limit is hit? Turning off all compute resources (EC2, Lambda, Fargate, etc) seems obvious, but what about systems managing state like S3, EBS, and DynamoDB? Should buckets, volumes, and tables be deleted?
    - catlifeonmars 11mo ago
      I’ve seen this argument repeated a lot and I think it’s disingenuous. If AWS cared about simplifying billing they could figure out semantics that make sense. Just to throw out an example, they could allow account owners to either opt in or opt out of a hard cutoff. It’s clear they don’t have an incentive to fix this problem.

moonleay 11mo ago

Not surprising in my opinion. It is not hard to setup a VPS with whatever you want to deploy nowadays. 99% of the websites out there don't need to be able to infinity scale and it is way cheaper to host your stuff on a VPS, that doesn't have the risk of exploding in cost the way s3 does.

aegypti 11mo ago
They’re not going back to VPS setups sadly, the article is about deploy button dollar siphons like Vercel, Render, Netlify

arpit15191 11mo ago

I think AWS is still better in terms of customer support and help that they provide. You really need to keep an eye on the billing console when starting playing around with AWS, the free tier boundary line is pretty thin. for new accounts they have started to give 6 months free plus also some credits. They are trying their best to make it simpler.

jdsully 11mo ago

AWS is degrading on all fronts. If your a large scale business you almost certainly hit stock-outs during peak periods - the elasticity is a lie. If you are a mid scale its high prices and complexity, and finally if your just a beginner good friggin luck getting anything done now that they gutted free support and put near useless quotas on anything usable for modern AI development.

simianwords 11mo ago
when you have enough scale where AWS can't promise elasticity - they make it up with discounts high enough that it is not going to be cheaper to spin up your own infra.
belter 11mo ago
> AWS is degrading on all fronts. Try Azure...shared responsibility its shared data when another tenant keys leak into yours. Then go to GCP where your incident ticket gets answered by a documentation bot... You will crawl back to AWS praying for a good old fashioned throttling error.

prodigycorp 11mo ago

What are the no-anxiety, "so easy a caveman can do it" setups that ya'll are using now? I've been very happy with Railway (no affiliation). I got tired of vercel's cold starts and upsell button on every feature.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

sylens 11mo ago

GCP had second mover advantage in that they got to build a lot of constructs to segment identity and network access in ways that make sense. It's incredibly easy to give a service account access to conduct an action in every folder and project in a GCP org, compared with having to deploy a role to each account in an AWS org. VPCs being global and subnets being regional also make a lot more sense than having them be regional and zonal, respectively, in AWS. But the support I get from AWS is world class compared to GCP. My AWS account team is always proactively reaching out, not just for potential security risks but also with cost optimization advice.

torginus 11mo ago
Yeah, most people say that the best thing about AWS compared to the other 2, is that AWS works. Also AWS runs on AWS, unlike Google's and Microsoft's infra, which is apparently its own bespoke thing.

pomatic 11mo ago

Quite sure the complexity of AWS is forcing the SME types out - even the most basic operations require reference to chatGPT to find the details buried in the UI. It's gone from being 'good enough' - I mean the UI 15 years ago was basic, but adequate to labyrinthine. We don't have complex needs, they're met by AWS, but the combo of premium pricing and a diabolical UI will force our migration eventually.

more_corn 11mo ago

AWS is by far simpler than their main competitors gcp or azure. If you want simple you have to go up a layer to Heroku or Vercel.

torginus 11mo ago

Haha, this is weird. I'm old enough to know how to do servers tha old way, setting up nginx, memcached, LAMP stacks and whatever used to be the way to do servers. I am very not much an IaC/Docker/k8s/Amazon whatever thing native. To me AWS always felt like an equally complex way of doing the same things I always used to do. Now the next generation, who hasn't been indoctrinated into the 'cloud is the way to go, also microservices' mentality, and arriving at a time when the cloud providers aren't flooding everyone with free credits, courses and conferences to push their solutions, to them it looks like another legacy stack. Or maybe not legacy, but definitely it has a rugged everyday feel as opposed to having the air of 'future tech' around it.

slimebot80 11mo ago

Cloudflare workers are so simple to just use immediately.

2456750302 11mo ago

[dead]

erezcloud1live 11mo ago

We see the same thing in day-to-day EC2 ops: the pain isn’t “features,” it’s context switching across accounts/regions. We built a small Windows app that gives one EC2 pane + an AI command bar (plain English → guarded actions with audit). Not pitching—curious what guardrails you’d require (role scope? dry-run? cost hint before start/resize?). (Disclosure: I’m the founder of Cloud1.live.)