14 ms·

I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

• _wire_ 5mo ago
  I love you baby, I need you! I'd never cheat on you! Come back! Hey good lookin'
  • renticulous 5mo ago
    Looks like a blogpost written to get attention and resolve his personal problem.
• andai 5mo ago
  At last my quest to find the stooge has come to a bitter end! I saw some 192 core instances on Vultr, but I haven't tried them yet. What are you doing with all them cores? I often fantasized about spinning up hundreds of nodes for various projects that needed number crunching. Then realized "wait I can just rent one big box for an hour" haha. It's really cool that we can do that now.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • andrewstuart 5mo ago
    >> 192 cores What are you doing with all them cores? The ancient forgotten art of Vertical Scaling.
    • rglover 5mo ago
      It's remarkably zen and effective.
• joefourier 5mo ago
  > Cloud computing was an absolutely mind blowing revolution - suddenly your startup could run its own computer systems in minutes without need to install and run your own systems in a data center. This was an absolute game changer, and I really drank the AWS Kool Aid down to every last drop then I licked out the cup. I was all in on AWS in a big way. Am I the only one who remembers that VPSes and dedicated hosting services were a thing before AWS came around? Yes you had to pay for a month at a time and scaling wasn’t as instant, but it wasn’t like the only option before cloud computing was having to drive to the datacentre and install your own server.
  • tiffanyh 5mo ago
    > suddenly your startup could run its own computer systems in minutes without need to install and run your own systems in a data center. The “in minutes” is doing a lot of the work in that sentence above. I also used dedicated servers in the late ’90s (and they still offer great value today). But before AWS, provisioning new hardware typically took days, not minutes. AWS changed that, and the rest of the industry eventually followed.
    • joefourier 5mo ago
      > I also used dedicated servers in the late ’90s (and they still offer great value today). But before AWS, provisioning new hardware typically took days, not minutes. VPSes and non-custom configs for dedicated servers were pretty instant as far as I know, I think the advantage of AWS was more that you could scale up and down much more easily since you weren’t locked down in a monthly contract, and that you could automate server provisioning through an API.
    • reliablereason 5mo ago
      No you could rent virtualised servers way before AWS. AWS simply had good marketing. The virtualised server thing was not a AWS thing, the thing that was were their other services. For example instead of renting a virtual server and installing a database on it. You could rent the database; that was sort of a new thing that AWS made in to thing. It was never cheaper what you paid for was a promise of fire and forget. You would no longer need to worry about any responsibility to update the server or the database cause the AWS crew took care of that.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  • rglover 5mo ago
    Not first, but it was the first with a planet-scale marketing budget. I miss the Media Temple days.
  • _puk 5mo ago
    If you recall AWS didn't scale instantly originally either. We had super bursty traffic, and had to go with Google Cloud (very early days! [0]) because you'd need to communicate with AWS and pre-warm the ELB capacity of your expected bursts. We did a dead launch to 60 million customers (0 to 60 million, no organic growth phase) this way. I wouldn't want to do that on a VPS. [0] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2013/11/?m=1 https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2013/11/?m=1
• h4kunamata 5mo ago
  AWS AIM is hot garbage, GCP might not be the coolest kid of the block but its AIM rocks. AWS CLI??? Holy guacamole, what a mess. AWS CLI looks what is now the digital identification to get the basics done. While GCP CLI is like "sure, here"!
  • cube00 5mo ago
    It's a shame GCP's console and their CLI are both so painfully slow. You're also putting your business at risk with Google randomly banning accounts and not providing timely appeals. [1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45798827
    • vrick 5mo ago
      I mean this article is about AWS doing the exact same thing.
  • liveoneggs 5mo ago
    it's funny how being used to something makes it easier to use
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• jfengel 5mo ago
  I don't work in that area, so I only touch AWS once in a while for personal fun projects. And every time it's a nightmare. I'm just banging out a server for my experimental card game, not setting up an new financial institution. Everything looks as if I'm preparing to scale to infinity tomorrow, with a staff of a thousand and a budget backed by VCs. Fortunately there's Netlify and similar, who put a gloss on it so that I don't have to boil the ocean. I figure that one of these days I might actually be forced to learn IAM and VPNs and God only knows what else. Meantime, every time I touch it my eyes bug out.
  • chuckadams 5mo ago
    You can just spin up a raw VPS on EC2 or Lightsail, give it a public IP, and call it a day. You aren't required to implement every enterprise pattern in the book.
    • DaanDL 5mo ago
      But that's costly. Speaking of my own experience: going from a webapp fully hosted on an EC2 instance to a railway and vercel setup reduced my costs 10x.
      • chuckadams 5mo ago
        Maybe so, but it's still not the complexity nightmare that some would have us believe it is.
      • liveoneggs 5mo ago
        t4g.nano is $3/m; a similar spec-ed fargate on ecs (just any docker container) is $10/m
        • jfengel 5mo ago
          This sentence beautifully encapsulates my point. I know that this is just ordinary jargon, but wow that's a lot all at once. And it does seem like something I need to know before I start.
• faangguyindia 5mo ago
  Why do people even bother with cloud? I’ve a couple of apps doing a few million a day. I am using Hetzner and before that used DigitalOcean. Mind you, for close to a decade. People are unnecessarily complicating stuff, and these clouds can go very expensive very quickly. Recently, I came across a company and they were spending $20k a month on GCP. I am like, are you kidding me, $20K for the kind of stuff you do??? It seems you do not understand how CPU, RAM and Disk work to plaster such "autoscaling hyper solutions" burning money in cloud. I moved their stuff out of the GCP managed solution and ended up with a $200-400 per month bill. The CEO can still not believe how it's even possible. I suggested them move to Dedicated servers but they didn't want it, they said they must show they are on Hyperscaling cloud. OK fine, we'll stay in Hyperscaler but not use any of their service other than VMs. They racked up a ton of bills by using cloud monitoring, Datastore, and autoscalers (with no proper tuning), Kubernetes. I replaced all of it with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and most stuff from Datastore to Postgres and Mongo with replicas. I added Redis. I implemented a custom scaler where you can scale off of app metrics, not by just using a random peg on CPU. I implement hot data reload by packing the data updates in gzip file, uploading to GCS and pulling from autoscaled units. Moved the stuff to Spot VMs. The complexity of stuff in cloud is high for nothing.
  • andrewstuart 5mo ago
    I worked for a startup company - the founders were really nice people and had put their own money in - quite a lot of money - to get the software built for the vision they had. By the time I joined, 18 months after development had started, a giant, complex, hideously tentacled software beast had been built that used every possible AWS service that the massive offshore team of developers could find to use. It should have been built on a single Linux box by a single senior developer with Python and Postgres or nodejs or Ruby or whatever. They went out of business after not too long and I couldn't help wondering if things might have been different if they hadn't spent a fortune building a giant money making machine for AWS, instead of making a web application on a Linux box. Every AWS project I have worked on has had some significant work put into programming AWS instead of writing business functionality.
    • 5mo ago
• tedivm 5mo ago
  > AWS stomped on open source projects - despite the clear desire of projects like Elasticsearch, Redis, and MongoDB not to be cloned and monetized, AWS pushed ahead with OpenSearch, Valkey, and DocumentDB anyway, capturing the hosted-service money after those communities and companies had built the markets; the result was a wave of defensive licenses like SSPL, Elastic License, RSAL, and other source-available models designed less to stop ordinary users than to stop AWS from stripping open-source infrastructure for parts, owning the customer relationship. This is completely backwards, at least with OpenSearch and Valkey. AWS didn't create the forks until after the upstream projects changed their license, so it's really weird to say that the forks "resulted" in the license changes when those forks where a response to the license changes. With Valkey in particular it was members of the former redis core development team that created Valkey.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • hankerapp 5mo ago
    A lot of these projects work on a business model where they open-source their core product, and provide advanced services, installation, maintenance or fully-managed services around their product. AWS was bypassing them by providing fully-managed services. On this, I am on the side of the people behind the projects. Basically AWS was eating their lunch. They had no choice but to change the licenses.
    • rpdillon 5mo ago
      They have a problem with their business model, then. License changes to a formerly open source project are costly. The community reacts very strongly when license terms change after they've come to depend on a product, and they should. Why do we apply this standard to MongoDB but not to Apache, Linux, Postgres, or MariaDB? One purpose of an open source license is to allow many providers to provide the service. As I've talked about here previously, Elasticsearch wasn't able to provide the service I needed, so I had to move to AWS. It's weird to me that the Hacker News community doesn't think that sort of competition is good. The narrative seems to be that all these businesses are somehow victims of AWS, when it seems the truth is much more straightforward: they provided open source software and people used it. The fact that their business had no working plan to actually monetize that foundation should not be taken out on the community.
• MagicMoonlight 5mo ago
  These complaints are very weak. Lambda is incredibly simple to use, it just runs a function for you. Not sure how you could burn so much with dynamodb. It’s serverless and incredibly cheap. Must have been doing something insane like a huge dataset where you scan through it over and over. Being salty that Gary couldn’t sell enough of his paid service and AWS is competing with it isn’t a meaningful complaint. I want something in AWS, not on Gary’s servers.
  • jerhewet 5mo ago
    I wish our Lambdas would spin up faster, but otherwise I've been very happy with them over the past six years. We seldom run over the free tier limits, and when we do we get a bill for a couple of dollars. Dead simple to code for, dead simple to spin up a new instance or scale an instance if we need to.
• djyde 5mo ago
  I've transitioned between cloud services and self-hosting a few times: 1. Vercel Phase My first project used Vercel. Since my project was Next.js, the experience was decent. But as my project gained some users, I found that even for projects under 100 users, I needed to pay $20 per month. Since my service didn't require high performance, this cost felt steep. 2. Self-host Phase (Hetzner + Coolify) Later, I started setting up my own server with Hetzner and deploying with Coolify. Since Coolify is open-source and free, I only had to cover the cost of a VPS (even $5 a month was sufficient). I could deploy PostgreSQL instances and run a web server on it. But later I discovered that even this way, I still had to spend a lot of effort maintaining PostgreSQL and Redis. Even though they were containerized with Docker, managing them was still troublesome. I needed to pass various system and environment variables between services, which was very tedious. 3. Cloudflare Phase So later I switched to Cloudflare. With Cloudflare Workers, I can deploy fullstack applications and use D1 Database and Cloudflare KV to replace Redis. These features can be called directly within the Worker without needing to pass environment variables. Plus, the local development experience is excellent and the pricing is very reasonable, so I've been using Cloudflare's entire suite ever since.
  • causal 5mo ago
    Yeah Cloudflare offering has become everything I wanted from AWS. So much simpler to deploy a basic full stack app + files. AWS has become considerably more difficult than self hosting.
    • AdityaAnuragi 5mo ago
      I agree, I'm starting to like cloudflare increasingly aswell Here are a couple reasons of mine (PS I'm still a little new) 1) V8 isolates for serverless functions to address cold start problems, sure the entire node env ain't there but libraries like Hono are designed to work in that env... Combine that with their near immediate start-up - simple lovely 2) UI, AWS to me feels soulless, like if there's an entire industry to make AWS UI not suck it's obvious their UI is just bad, upto the point where people pay a premium for a good UI. Cloudflare UI is so much nicer, atleast to me I recently developed a library and for that I made a landing page and documentation with Astro (no server just static stuff), and I was checking out how to deploy this and Vercel and Cloudflare, Vercel had a 100Gb/ month of bandwidth free which is nice, what's even nicer is cloudflare has infinite (practical infinite not the theoretical infinite ofcourse) And once again, that's just lovely to work with!
• znpy 5mo ago
  > Of course I do not pay for premium support, so I have to wait the 24 hours that they said it would take them to reply. It's 3 days and AWS support has not replied. The writing has been on the wall for a few years now, and this is particularly evident to those thar have worked at AWS: Amazon is in its day-2 era. Amazon being in its day-2 era means that most of what has been written in the past twenty years about Amazon is bot valid anymore. “Customer obsession” is literally their first leadership principle, and stellar support was their defining characteristic.
  • sudosteph 5mo ago
    I worked for AWS Premium Support over a decade ago. Waiting 3 days or more, for a non-premium support customer would have been not unusual back then either. But at least the quality of response was typically pretty good, haven't seen what it's like lately. They've always struggled to hire for those roles. The people who are best at Engineering Support also tend to be the people who move on to other roles after a year or two.
  • nijave 5mo ago
    Imo AWS support is pretty decent compared to other vendors. Azure was by far the worst I've ever dealt with--engineers becoming adversarial and passing blame in tickets without actually resolving anything. I've had some run-ins with poor AWS support and have even gotten bill credits/refunds when they offered incorrect advice. It really depends on the service but in general they're fairly good.
    • znpy 5mo ago
      > Imo AWS support is pretty decent compared to other vendors. yep, that's the point. it used to be stellar on its own, now it's only good when you compare it to other vendors.
• cmiles8 5mo ago
  There was a time when AWS was truly innovative, but it’s long since transformed into Amazon’s cash cow and is behaving like such. Innovation has ground to a halt of mostly just meh “hey us too” launches. Pricing and design patterns feel increasingly focused on locking you in. AWS folks tell me internally they talk a lot about making sure things are “sticky” with customers. The best engineering talent no longer wants to work there and it shows, especially in places like AI where AWS has just released wave after wave of discombobulated nonsense. As a core “rent-a-server” concept with a few add on services there’s still a lot of utility, but AWS is gradually becoming a boring baseline utility with a ton of distracting half baked stuff jammed on top. Most companies I talk to are no longer focused on single cloud and increasingly are bringing a lot of workloads back on prem or in colos. Not everything, but for a lot of stuff that just makes more sense and is a heck of a lot cheaper. The chips business in Annapurna is probably the most interesting thing and that plays to its strength of the boring low level infrastructure stuff. Nearly everything AWS tries to do beyond chips and rent-a-server plays is a hot mess. AWS isn’t going away, but its future looks a lot less exciting and inspiring than the story that got us to this point.
• morpheuskafka 5mo ago
  > I am reminded why I left AWS and how I need to finish the job, get off AWS Workmail, move my domains from Route53 and never return. Well, besides for the fact that the author's got suspended for no reason, WorkMail is being shut down March 2027 anyway. I recommend checking out Purelymail for a budget, batteries included option. Another option is to run your own server but have it use something like AWS SES to send externally, avoiding the IP reputation issue.
• geoffbp 5mo ago
  Slightly different but related topic - for people who work with people vibe coding, what is the easiest way to allow that for non tech users (and reducing risk)? AWS or something like vercel? Coolify?
  • _puk 5mo ago
    Vercel and supabase seems to be the norm around here. DX is simple, integrations between the two, and the stack is well understood by the LLM. Lovable uses supabase, and is surprisingly easy to eject from too; I've done the lovable to Vercel + supabase a couple of times, even managing to keep it syncing via the Git integration. You can get proper scalable infra and minimal vendor lock in whilst the vibe coder gets to play with the pretty.
  • sudosteph 5mo ago
    I'm old and bitter about this, but you're not reducing risk by going with PaaS, you're just outsourcing it. That recent "My AI Agent deleted my prod DB" story was only possible because the PaaS they were using allowed for 1-click permanent delete. At least AWS has a "prevent accidental termination" checkbox. Nobody wants to hear this, but as things stand, there's no escaping risk for vibe coders right now. Personally, I think AWS is still a good choice for the long run, but don't make the mistake of thinking current LLMs will actually be able to manage the environment on par with a decent infra engineer. That's one of their weaker areas right now. Good news is there are million managed service providers and AWS-competent humans still in existence. Also Premium Support is a good resource. Whatever you do, make a lot of backups and store them on a different service somewhere. Then if you get to a situation where you need to do something with sensitive data, or need to raise money, engage with someone who can do a proper review.
• rembal 5mo ago
  +1 on the IAM over engineering, though to AWS credit, I suspect it was evolved rather than design, and that's what you get when evolution has to maintain some level of backward compatibility (think humans still having to be able to lay eggs). Another thing that happens occasionally for saas companies is AWS creating a copy of their product in a bit sus way - but it's not a technical problem, it's a business model problem.
  • kikimora 5mo ago
    This is unfortunately unavoidable for any system like IAM. All of them evolve into monstrosity because of so many conflicting requirements. Most importantly being simple and tractable on one end and being able to express any imaginable predicate on another.
  • viccis 5mo ago
    And god help you if you want to use one of their many competing data engineering tools, all of which will be duct taped onto Glue and require not just IAM but also another layer of RBAC on top of IAM. Like you said with IAM, I think it just slowly evolved into the mess it is today, but it's rough. Trying to just run a simple Spark query using an S3 Table Bucket was enough to remind me why Snowflake and Databricks are printing money by making it a more user friendly experience.
• aljgz 5mo ago
  Years ago, I joined a company, took over a dev team and was asked to launch the product in 3 months. They were using AWS, so I logged in the account to add a few more machines. Right there, in front of my eyes, were the signs of an adversarial, abusive relationship. The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs. I had to have the two tables open, cross check the specs and price. If I had learned one thing from my past life was that if you see the signs of an abusive relationship, you have the option to walk out, and you don't, all that follows is your own fault. Created a DigitalOcean account, moved everything over. Set up our CI/CDs to deploy there, and spent the next two months on the product, launching one month earlier than promised. Some years before that I saw a video online where a person digs a hole near a river and puts a pipe connecting the river and the hole. The fishes push themselves hard in the pipe to get to their trap. Choosing the path of least resistance, and never backing off from a mistake: recipes to end up like those fishes. The video left a big impression on me.
  • Lucasoato 5mo ago
    > They were using AWS, so I logged in the account to add a few more machines. Right there, in front of my eyes, were the signs of an adversarial, abusive relationship. > The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs. I don’t want to be the one defending AWS, but I don’t think that this is a valid reason not to like them. I mean, pricing depends on so many factors like reserved/dedicated/spot/on-demand instances have all different prices. I don’t even think that using the UI to spin up the machine is the right way to do that in an enterprise setting, you should always do that through Infrastructure as Code, to know exactly what you have up and running, just by looking at that as you would with any program. I’d suggest to use the UI for simple testing, for which the costs are often (but not always) negligible. Jeff Bezos if you see this please send me some cash.
    • bulletsvshumans 5mo ago
      They absolutely could calculate and put the price in the UI if they wished to. Other cloud vendors do.
• dzonga 5mo ago
  the A.I (LLM) merchants will tell you - that AI is now writing software (agentic coding they call it ) - yet one they can't bill you properly or have a broken billing mechanism. their dashboards are trash & don't work - Google Cloud, AWS Console, Google Ads, Meta Ad manager I won't even mention the hyped up LLM vendors. but here we r - people being laid off due to A.I - money being funneled into Gigawatt datacenters
  • mcherm 5mo ago
    I don't think that's the real issue. The problems with billing and dashboards at cloud vendors are not new within the past few years, they have existed far longer than the LLM coding.
  • owebmaster 5mo ago
    The billing "problems" these companies have are working fine for them as they are there to increase revenue, not to improve user experience.
• xmcp123 5mo ago
  Something that has always bothered me an outsized amount is Elasticache. I will bite the bullet and pay for RDS because it adds a lot of value - scalability, a reasonably optimized config, backups I don’t have to worry about. But Elasticache is exploitatively priced with almost no value add. It is slower, less optimized, less stable, and only supports one DB compared to a vanilla redis install with zero configuration. There are some scalability improvements, but it’s extremely rare they’re even required because vanilla redis so wildly outperforms elasticache on a similar instance.
  • zdc1 5mo ago
    Elasticache is definitely one of the services to consider self-hosting. AWS doesn't add much in terms of APIs or polish. On the other hand, Redis/Valkey is one of the most simple services to self-host.
• dangoodmanUT 5mo ago
  GCP would be perfect if they didn't have a history of randomly dropping quotas on startups, causing them downtime
  • squirrellous 5mo ago
    What do you find appealing about GCP? I occasionally hear positive sentiment like this but don’t entirely understand the reason, mostly because I haven’t used non-GCP clouds professionally. Is it just the least bad of all the big clouds?
• cynicalsecurity 5mo ago
  Preach, brother.
• alde 5mo ago
  The set of core services on AWS remains amazing: EC2, S3, IAM, EKS, Route53, RDS etc. AWS IAM is extremely well designed when you compare it with the spaghetti monster IAM systems of other clouds. Every time I try the new cool thing supposed to replace these services on some other provider - I understand how mature and polished the AWS ones are. With that said, the rest 90% of AWS services like WorkMail, Cognito, API Gateway, are absolute hot garbage which no good meaning AWS expert will touch with a 10 meter stick.
  • nijave 5mo ago
    >AWS IAM is extremely well designed Agree, so is STS and SDKs generally just work. I don't miss on-prem companies with legacy Auth where you maintained 100 service accounts for everything with very careful password vaulting and credentials management policies. So much easier to use IAM policies. >are absolute hot garbage I kind of like Cognito but both Cognito and especially API Gateway are somewhat convoluted to configure. They seem to work fine once you have them setup right, tho. Talking about hot garbage... Not a fan of Redshift and Lake Formation at all. We switched to Snowflake, saved money, got better performance, and had a simpler setup. Really there was nothing about Redshift that was better. We're billed through Marketplace so there's not even a consolidated billing upside. Imo Redshift is a relic of the past and has failed to modernize.
• djinn 5mo ago
  AWS has been systematically hollowed out of technical staff since 2023. Either through mass layoffs or via 2 cycles of performance improvement plans. Often I find most skilled peers in presales or support are not with AWS whilst the ones with most ambiguous work history have been retained at promoted. Use AWS at your own risk, Paul Vixie is not there to save you.
• sbinnee 5mo ago
  I also tried. Only service I use is s3 for personal backup. I pay around 15 cents per month.
• finaard 5mo ago
  > My business email system still does not work. This is always the weird things in those rants. He's complaining that after 4 days his mails are offline. Now I'm doing a mix of physical servers in rented rackspace, and rented servers - but even there I can have billing mixups where they deactivate servers for no good reason. And to get email working again the limiting factor would be the DNS TTL - new servers would be online somewhere else within hours of it going down. (And yes, I tested that just last year - one hoster threatened cutoff due to non-payment on a paid invoice, which prompted me to move the mail server just in case while getting this resolved).
  • somewhatgoated 5mo ago
    I don’t get your point, what is the weird thing? That he is complaining about his email being down or that he trusted AWS at all with email?
    • rkent 5mo ago
      The only way that email is down for days for a competent sysadmin is if their DNS is also with AWS, so I assumed that was the case. Assuming that is true, what is weird to me is that, after deciding he hated AWS and left it, that he still kept his business DNS (the most important service there is) with AWS.
      • hluska 5mo ago
        If you would have read the article, you would know that the writer had DNS hosted at AWS, would have read why he made that choice and would know of his plans to migrate off.
        • finaard 5mo ago
          I assumed he just had DNS at AWS, but after re-reading I guess he has DNS _and_ domain registrations at AWS, which would be a special kind of stupid. That's something we were advising customers against already back when cloud wasn't a thing yet to enable fast transfers when stuff goes south (to clarify: DNS+domain at the same service can be OK, as long as you have nothing else there. As soon as you start having other stuff, keep the DNS there, but move the domain registration away. Depending on which domain make sure you have auth keys, access to the admin domain or whatever would enable moving the domain without registrar cooperation. In my hosting days I did my fair share of emergency transfers and infrastructure to help companies get their basics online again after a SNAFU - totally doable to have first mail coming in again within a working day)
• h1fra 5mo ago
  To this day I still don't understand why people love AWS. It's overly complex, full of dark patterns, and not even that good compared to alternatives.
• eluded7 5mo ago
  I'd tend to agree with the author. If forced to choose a cloud platform though (and that often is the case) then AWS is probably the best of the bunch in terms of reliability. Have heard and experienced some real horror stories with Azure & GCP by comparison.
  • te_chris 5mo ago
    GCP is miles better. Their IAM is at least understandable, for a start.
  • tietjens 5mo ago
    I would read a GCP horror story for fun. Any thing you can direct me to?
• thegrim33 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  • owebmaster 5mo ago
    What's your theory? US Americans don't like to complain? They are moderated? They prefer to pay an extra to help the cause?
    • empthought 5mo ago
      Hetzner astroturf?
      • brazukadev 5mo ago
        Are we getting paid for that? I need to collect my paycheck.
  • hluska 5mo ago
    And somehow, enough accounts are in on this that these stories make the front page and HN doesn’t have the data to catch that? You’ll have to explain that because it doesn’t seem very logical to me.
• rglover 5mo ago
  You can accomplish a lot by just having a basic knowledge of Linux sysadmin. I was clueless and then learned some systemd-and-curl-fu. Will never forget the "holy sh*t, this is deceptively simple" moment. A bit more research and I found that beyond convenience and specialty APIs, you really just don't need a lot of this stuff to run a healthy system (since reducing absolute cloud dependence, my reliability has gone through the roof).
  • sandruso 5mo ago
    100%. I'm not really sure why we all agreed that deployment is somehow the hardest thing that you need to outsource when setting the linux server is one the richest experience you can get and it will pay dividents forever.
    • pdimitar 5mo ago
      Stop with this "we" cliche already, please. I never agreed to it and I'm in the profession for 24 years. You don't speak for me. Executives will always prefer to transfer liability and responsibility to someplace else. Who's calling the shots in an organization? Engineers or executives?
    • noprocrasted 5mo ago
      There's a multibillion dollar industry that lives only because they managed to successfully convince an entire generation of "engineers" to become helpless and not be able to serve an HTTP response using their own hardware even if their life depended on it.
      • BirAdam 5mo ago
        It’s easy to convince developers of a thing if it starts with: “you don’t need to learn X anymore”
  • da02 5mo ago
    How do you deal with the few minutes of downtime when you do kernel/OS/software upgrades?
• screenstop 5mo ago
  [dead]
• sudosteph 5mo ago
  I'm surprised by the author's hate towards DynamoDB. It's probably one of my favorite AWS Services. Great availability and no operational overhead. Cost was pretty minimal too each time I've used it, but you do need to spend some time architecting your data model up front, and that requires reading service docs and understanding it.
  • ufmace 5mo ago
    That's pretty much what I came into this thread to say. The thing I'd add is, DynamoDB is pretty nice if you understand how it's meant to be used - a relatively dumb key-value store with good persistence and table-size scaling to the sky. Definitely don't attempt to use it as a SQL database. The best way I can come up with to rack up a $75 bill for some prototype code is to vibe-code a thing that attempts to treat it like a SQL database with JOINs and GROUP BYs etc. Or similarly write code against it absent-mindedly with about as much understanding as a 2-year-old free AI tool. Where it really shines is use-cases like I need like 1 or 2 simple relatively small tables of persistent storage and don't want to deal with a full RDBMS. Or I need 1 ridiculously huge table to be queried in a relatively simple way, and don't want to deal with fitting that data into a RDBMS.
    • andoando 5mo ago
      With AI now writing queries is a joke. But you can just create a two column table: key, JSONB and call it a day and you get your easy document store + indexes, json search, relationsl goodness, and atomicity, consistency for free
  • sambellll 5mo ago
    Here to say the same thing. I built an app a few years ago and needed some sort of DB to store around 50 million records that had ~10k reads+writes per month with 1 index. It cost me something like $50 to load it up initially, and then something stupid like 10 cents/month to maintain.
    • NohatCoder 5mo ago
• tootie 5mo ago
  This belies the fact that AWS is so far in the lead in cloud market share and even host so much of Anthropic's business. If you dabble, it's confusing. If you're an enterprise with a lot of expertise then it's indispensable.
• sqircles 5mo ago
  The billing footguns are a major pain point for anyone that doesn't have the capital to just dump faith paired with a credit card into. This of course is not limited to AWS...
• maptime 5mo ago
  How lambda is as bad as it is I have no clue. Not a lover of azure, but azure functions is such a nicer experience
• amluto 5mo ago
  My current favorites on AWS, in no particular order: 1. IAM and policies. I’m not convinced that anyone knows how IAM rules and policy rules interact. There’s a flow chart that appears to be incomplete. There is not obviously a complete enough spec that one could, say, write a test suite to confirm that the actual behavior follows the spec. LLMs, of course, don’t know either because the training data does not exist. 2. Utter nonsense pricing. The cost of listing an S3 bucket goes up by an order of magnitude if you set the default storage class to archive despite this having nothing whatsoever to do with the operation in question. (But GCS adds two orders of magnitude for the same offense.) Conclusion: NEVER EVER set your default storage class to an archive tier. 3. Boto. It’s an Unbelievable Piece Of Crap. It’s not a library at all — it’s a meta-library that generates itself at runtime because someone had fun doing that and because Python didn’t stop them. Python type checkers, of course, just give up. And Boto is, um, a community project that AWS claims not to care about. Which is, of course, why its maintainers refused to fix an interop bug with GCS (I fully documented the entire bug for them, and the fix would have been the removal of a bit of pointless code). 4. Egress pricing. And the way it multiplies if you use any advanced VPC features. Why on Earth is it cheaper to sent an object to S3 from my own machine than to send the same object to the same endpoint from within a different AWS region nearby? 5. Authentication. It’s so bad that they invented Identity Center to try to unsuck it. But if you use Identity Center you get logged out even while actively using the console, and you get a helpful link to the WRONG PLACE to sign back in. Because of course core AWS isn’t even aware that Identity Center exists. I don’t even use AWS very much. I’m sure I would fall in love with more of it if I did.
• fHr 5mo ago
  >works for AWS >quits the BS >needs more money >sells himself as a meat puppeteer once again to AWS >big bs corpo is still the same surprisedpikatchu.jpeg ok
• psanford 5mo ago
  > If you're using AWS Lambda then you have to work to keep convincing yourself this is better than your own web servers. Keep convincing yourself that using AWS Lambda is not a horrible mistake. lol ok. I have ~50 lambdas running in my personal aws account. Some of them are webservers running behind an api gateway or using a lambda function url to expose them to the internet. Some are running on a schedule, some are triggered from s3 events. The cost to run these for me is less than the cost of the cheapest vps (my total requests per month stay under the free tier limit). There is also zero maintenance I need to do for these functions (ok, this year I did have to find-replace al2 to al.2023 in my terraform config). I don't have to worry about making sure the os is patched for the latest vulnerabilities. And I don't have to worry about the specific hardware my code is running on at any time. Doing maintenance for old projects sucks. It is great to have servers I deployed years ago continue to chug along without me needing to think about it. Now, all of my lambdas are written in Go and I suspect if I was using one of the manged runtime libraries I would find the language upgrades to be quite annoying. Go also helps quite a lot with cold start times. Then again maybe I have just drank the koolaid. In my quest to use lambdas for as much as I can as cheaply as I can, I made a library[0] to use sqlite on top of s3 (not just readonly). It uses the sqlite session extension plus s3 compare-and-swap to allow you to write updates safely to s3, even if you have concurrent writers. [0]: https://github.com/psanford/s3db https://github.com/psanford/s3db
  • Neikius 5mo ago
    As you yourself said. Your load is so light you keep it in free tier. Their entire business model is for them to capture you while your load is light and then when you scale the price goes up.
    • psanford 5mo ago
      I have also used lambda at scale in professional environments. I would not use a lambda for a webserver at scale, but having an s3 object trigger processing via a lambda function is a really nice flow.
    • sofixa 5mo ago
      But the price per unit of measurement goes down, so no, it's not "their entire business model".
• hhthrowaway1230 5mo ago
  https://world.hey.com/dhh/merchants-of-complexity-4851301b https://world.hey.com/dhh/merchants-of-complexity-4851301b
• high_byte 5mo ago
  similar thing happened to me. I'm not a heavy aws user but wanted to setup some s3 buckets few days ago but my account was suspended for the same reason but unlike OP I just accepted this fate and moved away from aws :)
• xrd 5mo ago
  There is one fortunate result that will come from the SaaSpocalypse combining with Mythos (color me skeptical but let's assume it is as powerful as Anthropic tells CIOs). If anyone can clone any SaaS, then there will be millions of SaaS that offer all the features you need. How will you choose? AWS and Microsoft (and all the big clouds) make it easy for their customers to get hacked, and Mythos makes it more likely the cadence will only intensify. But, if I vibe code a hosting service which is pure rust and doesn't use any external libraries and never open sources my code, my attack surface is much smaller and I only have three customers anyway. Hackers are lazy and will go for the pond where the most fish live. AWS will always have a lot of marks and a lot of holes. AWS will be expensive because you are paying the tax they have to add to fend off the hordes. It'll be an intelligent choice to avoid working with Rome and find a little village in Bergen.
• crises-luff-6b 5mo ago
  [dead]
• aeagentic 5mo ago
  But is there a better one with same IaaC and API completeness?
• hhh 5mo ago
  IAM is my favorite part of AWS.
• mt_ 5mo ago
  The well architected frameworks tells you to have separate accounts, your fault that you "tested" in a production environment. https://imgur.com/a/Smal9fL https://imgur.com/a/Smal9fL
• stevepotter 5mo ago
  I was such a fan of it that I ended up working there for 4 years. Now I avoid it and encourage others to do the same. AWS used to have a nifty tool called "policy analyzer" or something that monitored for permissions used by a role so you could scope it down. The other day I had the need for it and when I went to use it, found out they charge something like $9/resource. So I would pay $45/month for metadata monitoring on just 5 things? Nuts. If they knew how to build truly delightful products, they would make something like a role that starts with broad permissions and automatically scopes itself down after some point. And it would be free or at least really cheap. DDB is hardly a database. The only reason I can think of to use it is for massive amounts of data whose schema and query patterns are guaranteed to almost never change, which is very rare. Need to sort data on a field? Then you have to create a 'secondary index', which is a copy of the table that they charge you for and that is not strongly consistent. Schema change? Good luck with that. And don't you dare ask to use a nice ORM library. But hey it's serverless. Here's a good one: you stop an EC2 instance and its volume keeps running and you pay for that. If you detach the volume, you still pay. There is no way to 'archive' an instance. And the only way I found out about that was I got hit with a big bill for those volumes with the charge labeled 'EC2 - Other' lol. Not very 'customer obsessed' to me. My gripes are clearly not important to them because this is old stuff. So all I can do is go somewhere else, which is fine with me
  • goostavos 5mo ago
    DDB has two use cases: 1. You need an "infinitely scalable" key/value store and have deep pockets[0] 2. you work at AWS and your deployment pipeline has so many stages and regions and fabrics that you can no longer even conceptualize what it means for there to be a "current version" of your software (the hell in which I live). But for some awful reason it's sold as a general purpose "NoSQL Database." Pair that with the Pavlovian response developers have to the word "scale" and you've got an army of people using the worst possible tech for their usecase. Everyone eventually pairs DDB with Elastic whenever "Oh, wait, so we need to be able to query our data?" hits. [0] And you ONLY need PK reads. Querying turns "infinite scale" into "infinite throttles."
    • 5mo ago
• mlhpdx 5mo ago
  I’m not sure how someone can be an “AWS Fanboy”, drink in all the promise, and think IAM is evil. As far as I can tell it is the one glorious thing that separates AWS from others. IAM is the core that makes it sane.
  • Cyph0n 5mo ago
    I may be biased, but I find that GCP’s IAM story is simply way better.
    • mlhpdx 5mo ago
      I find it really difficult to discuss the two with people because of the overloaded terminology.
• fnord77 5mo ago
  Are the other two big providers any different?
• raffraffraff 5mo ago
  I always smile at posts like this. They're right and wrong at the same time. Systems should be "as simple as possible, but no simpler". And thinking that you can gloss over the detail is just going to create more hassle later on. IAM is just complex. I can't think of any implementation of "users, groups, roles, policies, identity providers, oidc" that is truly simple. I'm reminded of a guy I worked with, who fought against Kubernetes adoption because it was "too complex", only to slowly reinvent Kubernetes badly, adhoc, out of vault, consul, systemd, nomad, iscsi, ansible, jenkins, puppet, bash, spit, glue... making lots of mistakes along the way. You think you don't need to implement some feature until you do. Another thing I'll say about AWS (having been the sole infra guy at a few startups) is that it's well within most people's abilities to learn it. And you can usually avoid the shitty stuff. You think lambdas stuck? Don't use them! You could use EKS, ECS or bare EC2.
  • cyberpunk 5mo ago
    Another point is that while it can be more expensive than self hosting, the savings are dwarfed by the engineering costs. A decent infrastructure engineer working for 2 man months on your “money saving” ovh setup costs you more than you can possibly save by not just using fargate or rds whatever.
    • noprocrasted 5mo ago
      But unless you're on a PaaS, you have "infrastructure engineers" already. So why not at least let them make back their salary by making them built a cost-efficient infrastructure?
    • izacus 5mo ago
      This is rarely actually true but it's a common falsehood told by people who have financial interest of keeping everyone on AWS. And that includes engkneers that only know how to use AWS and are terrified at having to learn something else.
    • amluto 5mo ago
      How much would you pay for 2 months of infrastructure engineer time? And how many millions / tens of millions / hundreds of millions are you imagining being spent on overpriced AWS services? (Also, those AWS services are not engineering-free. I tried to migrate a system to RDS once and gave up after quite a few hours when I got to the part of the documentation that suggested that I edit my sql dump using sed to get it into a form that RDS would accept. No, thanks.)
• atemerev 5mo ago
  As if there's any alternative. Azure? That mess of everything smashed on top of each other that looks like it was vibecoded in a few month by hundreds of people at once, except that they looked like this from the very beginning where there was no AI? The one that makes you fill docx forms to enable quotas for some services? Or Google Cloud, which _looks_ like it might be simpler, but it has permissions for permissions to enable permissions, and endless micromanagement? I am trying things, but I always return to AWS :(
• torginus 5mo ago
  Imo lambdas are super cool, and the best way to have a no-headache fast-iteration time deployment service. What most people realize, that you don't have to go microservice or fragment your code to a billion little repos, you could take a standard webserver, and move it to lambda, as long as you don't expect requests to be able to share on-server state.
  • kikimora 5mo ago
    I second that. I use lambda as on demand server with one lambda handling entire web app.
  • petesergeant 5mo ago
    What is lambda adding in this situation that throwing a docker image up somewhere isn't?
    • torginus 5mo ago
      Well, complexity and iteration time for example. For docker, you need something that runs it (like your own cluster of EC2 or ECS), a private registry you push to, a separate user that provisions the actual server, while iteration (code changes, or something as simple as changing an env var) - involves the cycle of upload new image, shut down the old containers, try to start up the new ones, with all sort of weird failure cases, like if your container depends on a dockerhub image like alpine, you can run into a ratelimit scenario with dockerhub,as AWS is too cheap to pay for dockerhub access, and doesnt have their own mirror, so your containers may fail to start unless you explicitly mirror your base image. Then you have to take care to update your images etc. All this stuff, like ECS also lives in a subnet, so you have to manage routing, and public accessibility and stuff - its legit crazy amout of work compared to either lambda or just running stuff on a virtual machine. Imo it's the worst of all worlds.
      • bpicolo 5mo ago
        You’re describing incidental complexity of running a container on AWS, though. Which you can also do with lambda because there are 15 different ways to do it. Dead simple on GCP Cloud Run.
• raverbashing 5mo ago
  > IAM - the hideously complex auth and access rules system - this was invented by Lucifer sitting on his burning throne in the ninth level of Hell as the worst possible torment for those who have been sent below for using AWS. Perfect explanation - no notes I don't think I remember anything so over-engineered and confusing in recent times (probably SELinux now that I think of it). And I understand - we kinda need the complexity for what they intend to do but they do need a Come To Jesus moment here to make the Insane Asylum Machine make a bit more sense for mortals 2nd most annoying thing? Boto3 lib, where conventions don't matter and Pythonic is just a suggestion and the thing works more like a REST wrapper than anything else over a not-great API (please why tell me there's an S3 API and an S3Obj API)
• dakiol 5mo ago
  When are we gonna start hearing the same stories about Anthropic/Openai/etc? The whole AI thing kinda smells like the early days of AWS: everyone was getting onboarded, but later realized they'd built up a pretty big dependency that's not easy to shake
• wg0 5mo ago
  I think one big decision AWS could have taken earlier is that of declarative medium for cloud resources. Cloud formation is not human friendly as JSON or YAML. Problem with terraform has been that it had to keep track of the state separately which AWS already had (like what resources have been provisioned against a particular account number) in their databases and further more, I NEVER liked HCL, it never made sense to me. Otherwise, some things that are good about AWS are as under: 1. IAM is I think good, logical and granular enough. 2. Separation of compute and storage in EC2 is very good. 3. S3 is amazing. 4. SQS is heavily underrated. 5. RDS is expensive but too good. I do not know how to go about 1 TB+ database size with daily backups without RDS. Similar ZFS setup with file system snapshots is complicated. Not good things about AWS: 1. Super expensive. About 10 times. With zero support. 2. Current geopolitical environment would suggest getting off AWS if you are not a US company. The fascist idiots at the helm of affairs have lower IQ than the big void's average temperature in outer space. EDIT: Typo + Formatting
• tailscaler2026 5mo ago
  Anyone considering leaving AWS and thinking they'll transfer all their data for free [1], I've got news for you: It's a lie. AWS takes as long as possible (for me it was a month) to respond to the initial DTO request, then require you to submit a multi-page form answering a barrage of questions about why you're leaving, where you're going to, what services you used, and estimated data egress. A week or so later, if they approve the request, you're not allowed to begin DTO until 60 days after the approval. By the time you can egress your data for "free", you've been stuck on AWS for 3-4 months since you first made the decision to leave. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-internet-when-moving-out-of-aws/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-i...
  • cryo32 5mo ago
    If you have a lot of data it's cheaper to lease a Direct Connect line into an AWS zone and suck it out through that.
    • layoric 5mo ago
      I might be reading the pricing wrong but you have to pay per hour for the port plus per GB transfer? And looks like the cheapest is $0.02 per GB? Is that really the 'cheap' option? That looks fine for a TB or two, but still crazy when getting closer to PBs.
      • stingraycharles 5mo ago
        Yes that’s the cheap option. But to be fair, I deal with several customers that are in the double digit petabyte scale. When you’re operating at that scale, and have 7-figure AWS bills on a monthly basis, AWS is suddenly a lot more available to you and much more willing to accommodate pretty much anything.
        • layoric 5mo ago
          I've heard stories of bills like that and is wild to me.. I built a SaaS that had just over a PB in data and our monthly was low 5 digit and largest part was S3, and co-location was already on the table. I can't imagine getting to 6-7 digit a month.. I understand how it happens with rapid growth, but even 6 months of that I would be scrambling for other hosting options.
• Galanwe 5mo ago
  These arguments against AWS are boring. 99% of the negative comments are along the line of "so i have a dead simple product, I dont know anything about AWS, I logged in and it was super complicated and it seemed pricey". Well guess what, if you have a CRUD website and 100 users you're just not the target. Move on. Some days ago I wanted to sketch a 3D model of my TV remote. I opened blender and what a mess of complicated windows and panes. I closed it immediatly. Do I think Blender is an over complicated mess? No, I just think I'm not the target. And I'm not offended to be too noob to use it.
  • smallnix 5mo ago
    The main issue with account suspension is not boring to me.
  • pier25 5mo ago
    Maybe but that doesn't mean that the AWS console isn't a royal mess.
  • anymouse123456 5mo ago
    I agree, this is a common story and your point stands for some significant percentage of the complaints. It should be made clear though, that some of us helped spend many millions in obviously wasteful on-prem infra in the nineties, bought into AWS wholeheartedly when it came out, fought through the ignorance, developed the ability to deliver highly scaled applications on the platform over many years and at least some of us still carry those same beliefs: - It's more complicated than it needs to be - It's more expensive than it should be - Pricing is more opaque than it should be Meanwhile, the cost of other options (including self-managed, on-prem infra) has fallen massively since those early days of AWS.
    • tempest_ 5mo ago
      Prior to the RAM crunch you could buy 4 or 5 servers ~50k that would be more than capable to handle many enterprises needs. The thing is the industry has sorta lost the skill set to host and maintain them. The people who can do this still exist of course but they are outnumbered by the YAML jockeys 10 to 1. There are also other things that the cloud hides in its price as well. Redundant networking, provisioning, rack space, internet connections, firewalls, UPS backup, power usage. Still I think a lot of startups would benefit from hosting their own stuff if they intend to be a long term business instead of just shooting their shot and hoping to be acquired.
• tonymet 5mo ago
  Every single complaint has a simple fix: “just use EC2”
  • BirAdam 5mo ago
    That’s what all of AWS’s inf is anyway. Each instance of a thing is just a premade EC2 instance (I am exaggerating but not by too much).
    • tonymet 5mo ago
      Ec2 + open source app = 5x vcpu and iops billing
• anymouse123456 5mo ago
  Like OP, I was an AWS booster for many years (also a Heroku lover), but fell out of love about 10 years ago for the same reasons. - It felt like far too much complexity just to do simple things. - The obvious attempts to trap customers with slightly incompatible, higher level services felt gross - The inability to run AWS trash on a dev machine had a MASSIVE hit on productivity - Pricing didn't fall as fast as I felt it should (an obviously debatable position that reasonable, smart folks disagree with) In my current company, we've been running basic SMB/tech startup functions on-prem (ACK! THE HORROR!) from ~6 basic computers (4 game machines and 2 nucs) for a few years now. We just reconstituted the entire infra working part-time over about 2 weeks using Claude code and ansible. It really doesn't make sense in this world to pay tens of thousands of dollars to rent a level of computation that can be purchased and managed for a tiny fraction of that money. We're also seeing massive dividends paying out with this architecture because we have self-hosted gitea, along with a local workstation for our agents to run in, and now our agents have all of the context without us relying on Github or ingress/egress fees at all. [edited for formatting only]
  • oneneptune 5mo ago
    The value in paying someone is if you have enterprise requirements for physical data security. Then after that if you go the Hetzner route, you have to micromanage your underlying OS, Redis, DB, etc... and it's just more work.. and if you're in enterprise business it reduces friction a lot to just pay someone a trivial amount like $10,000 a month.
    • kaydub 5mo ago
      I honestly can't believe most of the people posting aren't engineers or they work at small companies or something. They show their lack of experience when talking about how cheap Hetzner and DO are.
• mavsman 5mo ago
  This title sounds like an employment experience post: "returned to" and "left" both pretty strongly insinuate joining AWS and leaving employment, not simply using it as a customer.
• fafa09 5mo ago
  Interesting take on the migration.
• fafa09 5mo ago
  same pain here
• lowbloodsugar 5mo ago
  When it comes to email: “Don’t shit where you eat” is the closest analogy I can think of. Have your email somewhere else, it on any service that might decide to lock your account for any reason. Have your domain ownership somewhere else. And have already, or have a plan already, to move that somewhere if for some reason your email provider gets pissed at you.
• hand2note 5mo ago
  Almost everything is true about Azure as well, especially obscure pricing and complexity in absolutely everything.
• Canada 5mo ago
  And because we have fallen for the convenience we have lost a lot of alternatives. The old rack/cage way was less convenient, but it came with a respect for our anatomy to run our stuff that I really miss.
  • jerhewet 5mo ago
    > anatomy Autonomy? [autocorrect strikes again! :-)]
    • Canada 5mo ago
      Yes, thank you!!
• bironran 5mo ago
  GCP has it's own share of issues. ... I was writing a long vent about GCP but the mix of issues we had, just in the last few weeks, was too identifying and I don't want to sour an already tremulous relationship, as much as I'd like to spill it all here. Let's just sum it up with resource crunch and degraded services because, apparently, when one customer signs a $200B deal [1] all the "just a few $10M" get thrown to the wayside. AWS is also affected. Time to go to Azure? I never thought I'd say those words. [1] https://www.engadget.com/2165585/anthropic-reportedly-agrees-to-pay-google-200-billion-for-chips-and-cloud-access/ https://www.engadget.com/2165585/anthropic-reportedly-agrees...
  • vp4nkov 5mo ago
    Azure was affected by this already - small compute quota increases tickets I had opened last year took months to resolve, and they also took away ability to provision postgres in eastus entirely (we are under quota limit).
• exabrial 5mo ago
  We invested in colocation 2022-2024 for non-prod (log aggregation, Gitlab, warehouse databases, analytics loads, etc). Didn't know what kind of savings we accidentally set ourselves up for. Investing 3 months DO and AWS Bills permanently cut our spending, and since then has never seen an increase. If these systems go offline, it's an inconvenience but not a show stopper. We intentionally engineer prod so it doesn't rely on any system in the colo (so nothing like 'store our config in git and the apps pull it on startup' type party tricks). With memory prices right now it's harder to recommend expanding colocation but it's something every company needs to do (eventually). Not every system you have has equal production value.
• AIorNot 5mo ago
  Yup -like the honesty Why don't cloud services have reviews like amazon products.- I’m so tired of enterprise sales speak in corporate docs- just cut the BS and do straight talk If you haven’t used a service you shouldn’t have to search reddit for dev experience on it
• calmbonsai 5mo ago
  The AWS UI should be, effectively, read-only for any infrastructure aside from setting up some initial roles and perms to manage all of it through an IAC system. Put more bluntly, if you're using the AWS Console to spin-up/spin-down service instances you're doing it wrong.
  • alasano 5mo ago
    I've never enjoyed AWS more than with LLMs managing infra as code through sst.dev
    • calmbonsai 5mo ago
      Try Terraform or CDK. I like Terraform scales better, but there are some real foot-gun gotchas with it. You do need "depends_on" https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/meta-arguments/depends_on https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/meta-argu... for efficient large-scale deployments and certain networking situations, it's also really awkward with high-level AWS abstractions such as Organizations, but otherwise solid tech. CDK (atm) as limitations and it's also got a more imperative model. It's touted as being more familiar as it has multiple language support, but I don't think shoehorning declarative context into imperative languages works well.
• VerifiedReports 5mo ago
  I left because of their shitty or nonexistent documentation AND absurd complexity. After wrestling with their garbage for weeks, we started over and built a VPS from scratch. Development and deployment proceeded without a hitch after that. The only vestige remaining was S3. I'm in the midst of a new project now, and I'm not even considering Amazon, even for S3 this time. I'm going to use an S3-compatible layer just in case, but I don't want to give Amazon a dime anymore.
• dickywad 5mo ago
  [dead]
• gchamonlive 5mo ago
  > AWS Lambda - yeah I really bought the sell on this - "its scalable!!!!", and I ignored the slow startup times, the MASSIVE development complexity. I don't know... Maybe I spent too much time studying how to tame AWS using IaC and gitops reproducible deployments, but AWS lambda seemed to me the most impressively simple and inexpensive product. Once I did an complete project, from end to end, designing the architecture and flow of multiple lambdas communicating with each other through SQS queues to search, extract and load info from geotiff files from S3 into a PostgreSQL database, and it was really straightforward. If you leverage docker images for deployment and separate the interface for treating lambda requests from the core logic, it doesn't have much space for surprises. If the author went with the cliché that lambda scalability can harm your budget, it wouldn't be original, but at least it would have been plausible, but complex? I don't know, maybe someone could present the case with more deails for why it's so complex.
  • kaydub 5mo ago
    Lambda IS super simple. These people are professional amateurs. They don't know what they don't know so they post stupid posts like this and all the other know-nothings upvote it and comment likewise. Seriously, there's nowhere online for good software engineering discussion.
• recursive-call 5mo ago
  I was in a team that used aws once for their quantum computers. we had $100 of api credits. while still trying to get the code to work, we somehow used all of them, and then it didn’t even alert us that we were out of credits and just spent an additional $100 that we didn’t have. I would not touch this system again with a 10 foot pole…
• themafia 5mo ago
  > Somewhere in the depths of AWS some sort of security alarm had been triggered probably by the fact that my mostly dormant account suddenly started doing stuff with an expensive computer. You mean the alarm that shows up with a notification bell in your console? Why not just post that? > I am dreading having to "request quota" to be allowed to do that. Why? It works fine. I've done it several times. > IAM - the hideously complex auth and access rules system - this was invented by Lucifer sitting on his burning throne in the ninth level of Hell as the worst possible torment for those who have been sent below for using AWS. It's literally a JSON policy document. > - once I noticed the complexity of IAM I could not unsee the complexity everywhere in AWS. All our policy actions are scripted at this point. You specify what functions the lambda calls and it builds the policy for you, sends it to IAM, and attaches it to the lambda. Everytime I see someone complain about AWS I'm left wondering "did you read _any_ of the documentation? If you just want a linux server then run that but if you want out of the hassle of managing one then you need to learn just a _handful_ of new tricks." If half the effort of complaining about AWS was spent reading documentation then most of these articles would never be published.
• mchl-mumo 5mo ago
  I looked up DigitalOcean and it looks like a good alternative. What downsides should I be aware of, from those who have made the switch from AWS?
• nimchimpsky 5mo ago
  [dead]
• mattbillenstein 5mo ago
  I tend to use a few services on each cloud as possible so it's easy to switch between them; spinning up an Ubuntu VM that's identical on nearly every cloud is a superpower. And, so if you keep it simple like this, it's not too complex and the costs are knowable - mostly VM hours and S3 for most of what I run. But, the thing I've become increasingly disappointed with is simply the performance. The cpus are _slow_ - being forced to use EBS for a lot of things is _slow_ as hell; and starting/hydrating new VM volumes is super duper slow (have fun paying for fast launch). So, for what you pay vs what you get, it's a huge difference, albeit very convenient. Increasingly, I think about like racking stuff - like run most of your workload on dedicated hardware somewhere close to an AWS region and then burst into the cloud as needed and just use s3 in that region. Reduced cost, better performance for what matters, and you just pay for hands-on in the datacenter. Send them servers and just manage it all remotely.
• regularfry 5mo ago
  Can report that exiting from Lambda to something more sane (like, say, a django task or api endpoint or something) is now pronounced "hey copilot, look in that directory and implement precisely the same functionality over here". Or thereabouts. A whole lot of things suddenly look a lot less locked in.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• waterTanuki 5mo ago
  anyone building with AWS or any cloud provider should be setting up a forked pipeline for their data production: one goes to the cloud provider DB used for production, the other is a local-on prem DB you regularly backup and always have on hand should you need to leave the cloud.
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• zmmmmm 5mo ago
  I am curious the effect AI will have on these cloud offerings. On the one hand, they bust through a bunch of the pain points of setting it up and configuring it. Especially if you are trying to do it using something like Terraform etc. So they make it more accessible. But on the other hand, they equally reduce the pain of building all the premium part of the offering yourself. Why do I need AWS ECS / ALB / autoscaling etc etc services if I can get all that configured on bare metal just as easy now? So in a different scenario all the lock in and premium services wither away and it all reduces to commodity compute - in some sense, where it should never have left. Initially experienced joy as the bitter battles I fought with Terraform became smooth prompts I issued to have Claude deal with all my problems. Life has gotten much better. But I'm now definitely moving into frustration because it's clear that AWS is mostly a middleman causing friction now across a whole set of infra that I could be managing directly. So I'm paying for the privilege of all this frustration. Why? I don't know at the moment which way this will go, but I'm quite curious about it.
• bill-cupid 5mo ago
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• aetherspawn 5mo ago
  The one thing that’s good about Microsoft is the support. You can get someone on the phone in less than an hour and they can actually fix the thing. That’s why it’s so far been hard to go past Outlook Plan 1 for (big scale) email hosting. Completely agree about AWS, and we use Cloudflare now, but the jury is kind of out on whether CF is largely going the same way.
  • trollbridge 5mo ago
    Yes. I feel confident recommending Microsoft 365 to clients because I know if something goes wrong it can actually get fixed. I lack that confidence with Amazon or Google support.
• pbgcp2026 5mo ago
  ... skills issue. LOL. Good luck to making these tests easier on GCP / Azure. Or try to set up equivalent HW server without pulling your hair. Complexity is large part of why we, IT people, are paid those money. (Should've created *new AWS account* for those tests. AWS's automated security algorithms almost certainly flagged this abnormal behavior as a "suspected security breach" to protect the (long time dormant) user from potentially devastating unauthorized charges)
• anthonycoslett 5mo ago
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• stiray 5mo ago
  Amazon is bad at their blocking of accounts. They blocked mine for no reason (want me to call some USA phone number which I wont) a few years back and I was writing down everything that I would buy at their store, but I bought it elsewhere. They have lost 3785.90 euros in sales due to their idiotic anti-user war. Not to mention of all bad reputation that I gave them.
• nicman23 5mo ago
  i mostly used the ec2 instances and the workflow to make a simple gpu instance from the terminal (terraform) is terrible in contrast to ie gcp. from the UI it is even worse also how it is so slowwwwwww
• bbbflgllglhlld 5mo ago
  These fake open source rugpull companies deserve what Bezos did to them. They made hosting their software hard, intentionally. For example, prohibiting more than one node/replica, and being hostile to PRs/features that they consider their ”commercial offering”. But the worst thing I’ve seen, for many software, is probably the hostility towards people who want to automate the software, for example putting the software in a container (10 years ago), then they refused to give support even if you had a valid paid contract.
• thomas_witt 5mo ago
  It's hard to take the author seriously technically competent when reading "DynamoDB what a hot pile of garbage. I tried it and ended up with a $75USD bill by the end of the day." Clearly there are many people - including me - who built highly scalable, available and near maintenance-free systems using DynamoDB for a ridiculously low cost. I have no idea how you can actually burn more than $5 in development for DDB. If you don't make the effort to explore what a technology is built for and/or clearly didn't understand it, maybe you should holding back ranting about it. Unless you want to look like a fool. Same goes for IAM. It's complex but still easily understandable to get the basics. Creating e.g. a rule where you can only read from a DynamoDB table but not delete entries or the whole table takes you under 10 clicks.
  • kaydub 5mo ago
    Yup! I've been holding Hacker News in too high of esteem for too long I think. Most people on here are amateurs at best. The complaints about AWS/Cloud and LLMs are getting too loud. Did the industry pull in too many inexperienced during covid and now we're witnessing the backlash or something? I've been doing this a long time. Running hardware, running VPS in the cloud, and running on AWS. I'll never go back to hardware/on-prem.
• nuker 5mo ago
  > Complexity! Complexity!! This guy needs supabase or heroku or similar.
• imrozim 5mo ago
  Setting up AWS for my startup felt like a full time job gave up and just used a supabse. AWS complexity is real even for similar stuff.
• fxtentacle 5mo ago
  "Maybe one day they will get around to unsuspending my account." is increasingly how support feels with all big cloud companies.
• stuaxo 5mo ago
  The whole model of slicing the app into so many pieces (proprietary wrappers it seems like) to make more opportunities for billing is terrible.
• rfmoz 5mo ago
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• cantalopes 5mo ago
  sorry to hijack this but since we're talking the AWS egress exorbitant prices, could someone recommend a reliable production-tested s3 service that will not ruin me financially? i have been with hetzner and while their vps server are great, they are absolutely terrible at s3. random downtimes, incomplete uploads/downloads, capacity issues, terrible api key management, etc - but the failure rate is really high
  • ovaistariq 5mo ago
    Check out Tigris: https://www.tigrisdata.com/ https://www.tigrisdata.com/
    • cantalopes 5mo ago
      It looks quite nice on the paper, but honestly, i have browsed the website and see fal.ai in the case studies which is a very red flag for me. We use fal heavily in our manual production pipeline and their cdn/storage speed is really bad. Like, my colleagues that generate videos in the platform sit on the platform sometimes wait for minutes before a generated 5-10 video downloads from the servers, the speeds are very slow. Sometimes it works but half of time i hear them b!tching about fal being slow, when i checked the network requests, the content that's getting fetched from the v3b.fal.media for example goes reeeeally bad
• continueops_com 5mo ago
  Had a similar one. They switched off Lambda and SNS because of a potential credential leak — none had actually leaked — and I was without service for 48 hours. Same flavour as the post: the provider's heuristic was probably right to fire, but you only find out which of your things were load-bearing once they're gone.
• simonebrunozzi 5mo ago
  Hmm... I was very early AWS, and it might even be "the guy from the US" that spoke at the first AWS Melbourne event was me, back in 2010. I agree with few of the things that have annoyed Andrew Stuart, and brought him to leave. I disagree with a few. Let's pick one: DynamoDB was brilliant. I even knew one of the key engineers behind it, Stefano Stefani, as brilliant as he was hilariously funny as a person. It solved large scale problems beautifully, much better than SimpleDB or a combination of that and S3 would be able to do. But I really disagree with one thing: > And recently I went back to AWS. WHAT?!?!? WHY? You might ask. To get some research done. Do a few tests, get in and out. I would never trust a person doing this, and would never hire him/her ever.
  • andrewstuart 5mo ago
    No it wasn’t you Simone. I don’t think you had joined AWS at this time. It was a nice guy I think named Mike. He has since passed away. I think you misunderstood the blog post. I was never employed by AWS, I was a customer. Since there’s people here from AWS I’ll give some feedback that might prevent posts like this……. if you suspend/restrict someone’s account - put yourself in their shoes - they probably want it back on line real fast. AWS needs to analyse the customer experience of restricted accounts/suspended accounts. Go back and read the support contact records of each customer account restriction/suspension - how long did it take AWS to respond, did the customer know clearly what steps to fix it. Etc etc Also if the support form says they’ll respond within 24 hours then really there should be a response within 24 hours. Also there shouldn’t be special insider knowledge needed to “use the chat, they actually respond to it, versus the web messages”. You might even get customer obsessed about it. :-)
    • simonebrunozzi 5mo ago
      There's many reasons to dislike a company or service. I know. It is not a good reason to look for employment to "get in and out". If I were your hiring manager, I would be upset to know. Mike Culver, great guy and a bit of a mentor to me. Yes, very sadly he passed away several years ago now. RIP.
• AJRF 5mo ago
  AWS / GCP / Azure aren't for individuals or small businesses. They won't tell you this anywhere, and they won't stop you from signing up - but they simply do not care one iota about users with anything less than $100k billing per month. They treat big account owners like kings, they fly them out to Formula 1 events, they get 3 day workshops in swanky retreats, because a few k spent on this equals maybe millions of dollars. If they respond to a small business quicker they don't get anything from it. They collect a bill that if it went missing they wouldn't notice. I am not saying this is right - but people running small businesses on these platforms are operating under false pretenses.
  • throwaway2037 5mo ago
    All good points. What do you recommend for the "small potatoes"?
    • AJRF 5mo ago
      Hetzner. You won't get much better support, and you will have to deal with EU legislative nonsense, but it won't be hard to do that if you are actually small. Why do I say Hetzner? It's very budget friendly and has a very small list of services so its much harder to screw yourself into a situation where its hard to leave.
      • stingraycharles 5mo ago
        For individuals, probably. For SMBs spending $10k - $100k a month, I would absolutely advise against that.
        • VHRanger 5mo ago
          A lot of those are spending 10-100k a month when they could be spending 1k-10k a month with a more lean infra
        • earnesti 5mo ago
          Why is that? I've seen couple of small firms using hetzner very successfully and saving a lot of money compared to whatever cloud offering.
• infoinlet 5mo ago
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• eddy-sekorti 5mo ago
  Hahaha good one, what was the reason, the complexity, the cost, or simply the clunkiness in the whole setup. I was using Heroku and moved to AWS for saving cost and now endup paying more and thinking about what to do. AWS gets expensive very qucikly.
  • cindyllm 5mo ago
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• etothet 5mo ago
  There are many reasons to dislike AWS and many reasons to stay away from it (and the criticisms in the article about support resonate with me), but a few things in the article stood out to me as a bit misleading: First, the comparison of running an Anthropic model in Bedrock vs. Claude Code is not apples-to-apples. With Bedrock pay API pricing (or whatever negotiated pricing AWS and the vendor agreed to), just like the other providers in Bedrock. You know what else is more expensive/token than a Claude Code subscription? API access for pretty much all of the other big providers. Whether we like it or not, Anthropic sees subscrition usage as different than API usage. This is not at all an AWS thing. Second, regarding Lambda: the cold start criticism is fair but for heavy workloads usually isn't an issue and for light workloads there are some workarounds. But, if you have a discreet function that can exist outside of your app, Lambda still may be a better option here. As far as the "MASSIVE development complexity" I wish the author cited specifics. I feel like this can be true of any technology and depends on how you go about setting it up and implementing it. I've used Lambda for all sorts of use cases, including a full web application (I'd advise staying away from this one!) and there definitely is a sweet spot where it can work well. Lastly, the whole bit about using AWS WorkMail would also suggest they never really "left" AWS. But maybe I misunderstood that part as I'm not very familiar with that service.
• kaydub 5mo ago
  Alright, so where are the good engineers these days? Reddit died quite a while ago and I was holding on to Hacker News, but with all the anti-LLM posts and the anti-cloud fud I see on here it's obviously not here either any more. What is going on that all the "engineering" users are anti-engineering, against change and advancement? You guys posting this shit have to realize you're working on podunk garbage coding projects right? If you're finding AWS overly complex this is sounding more like a YOU problem. Those of you saying on-prem is better, you're saying a lot more about yourself, your experience (lack of) and the project you're working on than you're saying about cloud. Like holy fuck, how can you hate lambda? It's STUPID simple wtf???
• icedchai 5mo ago
  I generally agree with this, especially the Lambda and DynamoDB advice. DynamoDB: I think DynamoDB is great, actually, if you think about your use cases up front and thoroughly. For most apps, that just isn't realistic and it is too easy to paint yourself into a corner. If you're not sure what you're doing, you are better off with a traditional database. Lambda: Don't use it for your backend / API. There are too many weird limitations: request and response sizes, timeouts, etc. For handling "events" emitted by other AWS services, it is often fine (example: do something when there is an S3 upload.) I prefer ECS/Fargate for API.
• rewilder12 5mo ago
  Me reading this from a 100% Azure shop I wish Azure just worked at all.
• bytestrix 5mo ago
  I started using AWS for my project, at starting it looks deficult but it's really easy to use , ui is little complex but you'll get used to it
• armaan23 5mo ago
  Hey Andrew I reached out internally at AWS to get traction on your ticket.
• dirkg 5mo ago
  I have no idea why people dont use GCP more. Its made by and for devs unlike the hideous complexity and stupid UI in every layer of AWS. AWS has much bigger mindshare, thats it. Google has a well deserved reputation killing products, but their actual products/APIs are so much nicer. Haven't used Azure but I bet its much better integrated as well.