The Google Disease Afflicting AWS (opens in new tab)

I hope this makes the front page. I've personally been complaining about this problem for a couple years now and it's only getting worse.

Amazon is incentivized to release 100's of half baked services because an org only needs to use a couple of them and suddenly they find themselves unable to leave AWS. It's like a drug dealer offering free hits to get you hooked. There's little incentive to build new feature rich and comprehensive services or continue to improve the existing ones.

It also feels like Amazon's organization has structural problems. Some services are managed well, some are not. Some have a comprehensive vision, others are a hodge-podge of amazon services YOU have to glue together and manage yourself (see setting up Guard Duty email notifications as an example). Good luck if it doesn't work and the documentation is frequently outdated or incorrect. And then as the article points out there's the variations upon variations of an existing service and no clear reason why the functionality justifies separate products.

Don't even get me started on the console. At least it's not as bad as Google or Azure in my experience.

It's a mess.

I just ran into this. What is the difference between EC2 autoscaling groups, Spot Fleets, and EC2 fleets? At one point they had pretty different features which was a problem, because you might very well need a combination of features no single service had. AWS has largely fixed that by adding featurea to each service, but now it isn't clear why you should choose one over the others. At the very least I wish they would have documentation on how to pick which one to use, and maybe focus on one and deprecate the others.