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0 pointszo14y ago0 comments

Dunno what everyone else thinks but these AWS Lego blocks are anything but convenient and reusable. Frankly they're oversold from my perspective as someone that came a little late into the "aws cloud" game.

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6 comments · 3 top-level

tyingq4y ago· 3 in thread

My experience is "it depends". I had, for example, a good experience with AWS Fargate. It's not inexpensive, but it did what it said it would. It let me focus on packaging apps into containers, and caring less about making them elastic.

I had the opposite experience with Lambdas/Serverless. It made easy things very slightly easier, and hard things impossible.

Nextgrid4y ago

My experience with AWS services is that the ones that merely provide low-level building blocks (such as EC2) or host existing open-source software such as Postgres, Redis, etc are good, but the proprietary AWS-specific ones are bad because they not only lock you into AWS but make it more complex to develop against as you can't always run it locally (there is LocalStack, but it's a simplistic reimplementation that doesn't always reflect the real thing especially when it comes to edge-cases), can't inspect it or debug it easily (it is a black box) and costs money even during development.

AWS-hosted Redis? Sure! AWS-hosted RabbitMQ? Of course! AWS SQS? No thanks - it wouldn't give me anything useful that RabbitMQ can't do, however it will lock me into forever having to pay AWS, deal with their terrible console (or stacks of YAML files) to control the thing and expose me to potential edge-cases I will have no way to debug or replicate locally.

orf4y ago

> AWS SQS? No thanks - it wouldn't give me anything useful that RabbitMQ can't do

Allow other AWS services to send it events (SNS, lambda, etc etc)? Reliably handle millions of messages per second without managing anything yourself? Transparent KMS encryption? Fine-grained role based permissions via IAM without any hard-coded credentials?

Come on.

glogla4y ago

Yup.

The other axis is "do they dogfood?" meaning "if I go to amazon.com is the service used?"

The services Amazon built for themselves - s3, rds, ec2, dynamo, ... are generally pretty good. Redshift and glue? Not so much.

kennu4y ago

Do you have examples of which AWS "Lego blocks" are not convenient and reusable?

For me, the convenient "Lego blocks" that I use a lot include CloudFront (web server/CDN), S3 (file/web server), ACM (certificate manager), DynamoDB (NoSQL database), Firehose (message batching and storage), SQS/SNS (queuing and publish/subscribe), Step Functions (low-code business logic), Lambda (event-driven custom code execution) and API Gateway (REST API / WebSocket service). It is very rare to need to run any self-managed servers any more with all these services available.

scient4y ago

Unfortunately I think the issue not AWS here. You say you lost interest when it became a frustrating exercise, I read it as you lost interest once you realized setting up a cloud environment is not trivial.

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