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As a developer (but not a sysadmin) I feel the opposite. Not saying your criticism is wrong, just giving another view from a AWS newbie perspective. When I re
by jonahx 12y ago
As a developer (but not a sysadmin) I feel the opposite. Not saying your criticism is wrong, just giving another view from a AWS newbie perspective.
When I read most AWS product descriptions, I cannot understand what real world situations they are for. I either could not say, or could only vaguely say, what the product is in my own words. There seems to be a great scaffolding of assumed knowledge about the AWS system and distributed computing. Maybe that's intended, but it's intimidating and keeps me in simpler places like Heroku land.
- seanwilson 12y agoI feel similarly about AWS and I've been using it for a while. AWS is very powerful and flexible but the number of options and different services can be bewildering. I've suggested AWS to several developers I know that have never used it before and they were turned off from not being able to understand what was being offered and how much it would cost them. For example, compare the Heroku pricing page and the AWS pricing page for EC2: https://www.heroku.com/pricing https://www.heroku.com/pricing http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ The Heroku one is significantly easier to understand in my opinion. I understand AWS has more options and is therefore harder to summarise though.
- sciurus 12y agoI think this just illustrates your point, but EC2 and Heroku Dynos are two different types of services (IAAS vs PAAS). The appropriate comparisons are AWS Elastic Beanstalk to Heroku Dynos and AWS RDS to Heroku Postgres. https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/ https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/ https://aws.amazon.com/rds/ https://aws.amazon.com/rds/
- seanwilson 12y agoYes, a link to Elastic Beanstalk would be a fairer comparison of what is being offered by Heroku but my point was most AWS pages are like that and aren't easy to follow, especially if you're new to AWS.
- derefr 12y agoThe "you" in the comparison changes as well, though. Indeed, the copy for (say) EC2 isn't comprehensible to the same people that the copy for Elastic Beanstock is. But different people will be reading the copy for those two things. The person AWS is selling EC2 to isn't a newbie developer wanting to run their app; it's someone wanting to build out something like Heroku: someone with lots of system-architecture experience. Or, to put it more simply: the intended audience for AWS ad copy is exactly the set of people who are currently trying to compare some specific AWS service to similar services of competitors. AWS is never trying to "create a need" for something nobody was already asking for; they're just trying to serve the needs people already do have better/cheaper/more flexibly.
- goldenkey 12y agoheroku uses ec2 under the hood. heroku is heresy for any competent programmer. despite aws being packaged services at least both managed db and ec2 show you your actual servers and let you choose specs.
- chuckcode 12y agoI completely agree that the AWS descriptions and documentations are written with the style that actual best practices are left as an exercise for the reader. Without much nurturing the community is left to develop solutions like boto-rsync for moving files into S3 and glusterfs to overcome a 1Tb limit on drives. I'm not sure if that is intentional or a side effect of something else but it certainly turns off a lot of newbies for whom it seems overwhelming and a lot of technical folks as it is difficult to get a grasp on exactly what to use and how in AWS.
- amelius 12y agoWhy not have both? E.g. a simple description at the top of the page, and a more advanced discussion below.