by heldsteel7 on 12/17/21, 9:07 AM with 72 comments
by angarg12 on 12/17/21, 10:52 AM
This is only partly true. Fun fact: Amazon is so big and the churn so high, that hiring talent has become the bottleneck.
So yes, parts of Amazon have prioritised new/more features over improving existing ones, and some are drowning in a sea of legacy. But also parts simply don't have the number of experienced engineers they need to deliver all their goals.
Disclaimer: I work for Amazon.
by cle on 12/17/21, 10:49 AM
> The only conclusion is: bad tooling isn't affecting their sales.
I actually think bad tooling does affect their sales and long-term growth, but that they're blind to it because they can't easily measure it, and they have an obsession with data-driven decision making.
I suspect this is also exacerbated by hiring problems due to their reputation as an employer, forcing them to make tradeoffs that sacrifice dev UX more often than they'd like.
by decidertm on 12/17/21, 11:06 AM
However aws-sdk doesn't need to be 70mb, the console doesn't need to be slow and they don't need over 10 unique services to deploy containers.
We're working on a much improved dev ex for cloud providers and Kubernetes at https://northflank.com - with a fast real-time console, a well documented and useable API with auto generated CLI and API clients. 30 seconds of fun - can I get a production ready CI/CD setup for a repo(s) in 30 seconds? Can I get a HA Redis, Postgres, RabbitMQ provisioned and connected to my code in 30 seconds? These are the questions and solutions that developers will be asking for more and more.
by jillesvangurp on 12/17/21, 11:43 AM
It prevents customers from leaving and it prevents customers from lowering their amazon bills by making more effective use of what's on offer. Amazon makes it really easy to spend money on their platform but very hard to save money by simplifying or more effective use of resources. That is their business model. They always offer an easy and expensive and slow/convoluted, slightly less expensive path for doing anything.
If it was easier, countless companies would be saving a lot of money and Amazon's profits would be decimated. Or worse, they might be tempted to jump ship to a competitor. The primary goal of complexity is to keep customers after they buy into that.
Of course, over time it has exposed them to companies trying to compete with them with a better developer experience. To mitigate that, they invest continuously to ensure those companies never quite catch up. And of course that keeps on adding complexity. Which is good for them.
Most big software companies work with the same business model. IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, etc. it's all about vendor lock-in through complexity with those companies. It's how they make money. Lure customers in with whatever they need, sell expensive stuff, consultancy, training, etc. and before you know it you are in a decades long relation ship with your customer where you basically cream off their revenue on a monthly basis. AWS is here to stay. However, that doesn't mean it is the smart thing to be using right now for small new companies.
by moltar on 12/17/21, 12:15 PM
AWS CDK is a breakthrough in infra as code. It will be the standard in a few years to come.
AWS SDK v3 is quite ok and will get better soon.
AWS CLI is maintained and has everything well documented.
Most popular services work well together.
IAM is very powerful and a well thought out solution.
by 2ion on 12/17/21, 12:12 PM
AWS's core is developer experience.
AWS is an API. Anybody who does not realize or can not exploit this fact this pays massive premiums for using it (probably a lot of businesses which should have no business using AWS directly).
The application tooling is extra. And as far as I can tell, AWS is the only major public cloud that has decent coverage by tools of any flavour against their API, and they have the most decent set of language SDKs available. I am not familiar with GCP but anything Azure puts on the table is a catastrophe when compared to the ease of using boto3 to get a certain flow working.
Admittedly, their console has some defects it ought not to have, but with some systems and software development knowledge, you can grok all of the tooling AWS releases pretty easily.
The biggest of my problems with AWS that besides their API, some of their managed services are just not on the quality level as their core services (ec2, s3, ...).
by jsmith99 on 12/17/21, 10:56 AM
Eg https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45602558/devpay-and-mfa-...
by sparsely on 12/17/21, 10:50 AM
by xmodem on 12/17/21, 11:21 AM
by rpsw on 12/17/21, 11:18 AM
by mschuster91 on 12/17/21, 12:02 PM
Hard disagree here. The reason why AWS can get away with shoddy tooling is that the competition is orders of magnitude worse. Azure's web UI is an unmitigated desaster, and while I never used GCE I can say I won't ever use it for the simple fear of some "AI" running amok and killing off my Google account - too many horror stories here on HN for my taste.
by mehukatti on 12/17/21, 12:43 PM
Disclaimer: I work at Amazon.
by hzlatar on 12/17/21, 6:39 PM
AWS isn't a developer tools company. It is ops tools company. In particular enterprise ops tools company. Their customers are IT managers and system administrators from large companies. That explains 1 and 2.
Famously, AWS is organized as huge bunch of two pizza teams. Essentially, it's a huge incubator for internal startups. That's how they manage to churn out new features so frequently and try out and discard unsuccessful products. Also, that is why their tools looks so damn inconsistent and why you never know what's working with what.
Regardless of money, they can't make the tools better without sacrificing something. And that is a space for competitors. Work on developer centric tools for small and medium sized companies.
by Ozzie_osman on 12/17/21, 11:40 AM
Second, there's an arms race in cloud infra. So it's more about adding functionality, ticking the box, being ahead, than being simple and usable.
Finally, frankly, poor design. The AWS console is a usability nightmare.
That said, AWS is awesome. It's just infuriating to use if it's not your day job and you don't know it in and out and aren't willing to spend days reading their docs.
by robmoorman on 12/17/21, 10:54 AM
by marstall on 12/17/21, 1:28 PM
Now I'm using Firebase and Google Cloud Storage on a new project, and I've generally found the UIs to be clearer and better-organized than AWS, and the documentation more accessible and easier to understand.
These GCloud tools really do feel tailored with the average hacker in mind, something I often don't find at AWS.
UI/docwise, AWS kind of expects you to to come to the mountain, not the other way around.
As an example, getting Firebase Auth up and running was worlds easier than Amplify Auth, which I flailed helplessly at and gave up on.
Curious to learn more about GCloud, see if the rest of it is this good.
by tobltobs on 12/17/21, 1:09 PM
If you have to go to the cloud what else is better. Google, MS? If you press hard enough the same amount of shit drops on your feets.
by whoknew1122 on 12/17/21, 3:28 PM
CloudFormation works in both YAML and JSON. Don't like that? Use the CDK to write in your favorite language and that will be transformed into CloudFormation template. I'm not seeing what sucks here.
The reason most people use Terraform or Pulumi is because they want something that's cloud agnostic. That doesn't mean CloudFormation itself sucks -- it means that people have a different usecase.
by manojlds on 12/17/21, 10:46 AM
by buzzwords on 12/17/21, 11:00 AM
Say the eks team responsible to deliver a cli/console tooling?
It's an interesting problem to solve. Any insight on how to go about managing this is greatly appreciated.
by TruthWillHurt on 12/17/21, 11:24 AM
Have you tried the serverless tooling from GCP? doesn't hold a candle to AWS SAM.
by AzzieElbab on 12/17/21, 12:55 PM
by jmacd on 12/17/21, 1:39 PM
In the end they didn't buy us and the aped everything they learned and launched a carbon copy product 18 months later. rages
... but...
one thing that caught me off guard during the process was that their teams had no idea about developer experience, didn't understand workflows outside their own domain, and didn't pretend to understand any of it.
Honestly the only card they really had to play was being aloof and condescending. Of course we were very deferential to them the entire time, because AWS.
This was one group within what is a massive organization, so YMMV, but if they come knocking my suggestion is to be aloof, kind of a jerk, and don't share anything that isn't on your www. My guess is that would really be what gets their juices flowing.
by adabaed on 12/17/21, 11:02 AM
by minus7 on 12/17/21, 4:40 PM
by Aeolun on 12/17/21, 10:44 AM
They also have everything.
As long as there are other companies building on top of AWS, I’m pretty happy with them.
by hericium on 12/17/21, 11:01 AM
by k8sToGo on 12/17/21, 11:17 AM
by qingwei91 on 12/17/21, 4:02 PM
by mobutu on 12/17/21, 1:25 PM