Ask HN: Things you like or dislike about using AWS

I do understand that the complexity, including the authorization subsystem, are necessary in the long-term. But when you are just trying to whip something up to test an idea, I find it frustrating. … I asked the group that owns our tools related to AWS if they had a template that follows best practices that I could look at - nope. Ok, then maybe theres a project I can look at as an example that follows our standards - nope. So as someone with mostly a developer background it was a lot of frustrating trial and error to fix an issue that I didn't even create. … In AWS it seems you are stuck managing ARNs for every damn object if you want to have anything less than a free-for-all in the account. This is an incredibly intense level of bureaucracy. I can see how the project abstraction could break down for a proper enterprise, which might really need that arbitrarily complex spaghetti of individual objects connected to individual objects. But it would still be better if the default or happy-path approach favored the better engineering practice of self-contained systems connected over few and well-defined interfaces. ... Dislike: There is no truly safe way to experiment and play around, even in the free tier. I set up billing alerts, but even with that it can be tricky to identify exactly what is costing me money (EBS snapshots, NAT gateways, Route 53 hosted zones, etc) … I would agree on that WebConsole is a little confusing when it comes to using it new_guy on Sept 17, 2021 ALSO they routinely send me a billing reminder telling me the invoice is 'overdue' BEFORE they even send the invoice, which frankly would make me move somewhere else if I had the time. It's maddening. vfulco2 on Sept 17, 2021 fiftyacorn on Sept 17, 2021 padthai on Sept 17, 2021 Dislike: A billion products, most of them half-baked, terrible DX, terrible documentation, pricing all over the place. Examples: regular Sagemaker is much worse than a normal VM, Sagemaker Studio is so so. CloudFormation is not great and only works with AWS. Smaller products are even worse. I try to avoid as much as I can dealing directly with AWS APIs (specially their web) and focus on third party tools like Terraform, Ansible, etc. It makes it tolerable. Jugurtha on Sept 18, 2021 Several parts of the website display a "Create an AWS Account". I am fucking logged in. I have to click on "My Account", just next to a user creation button, for it to display spinning arrows to log me in (again?). Once done, cluster creation took forever in a "Creating" status. There's all that confusion about users and organizations. Root vs. IAM. Adding people or accounts to the "organization" is convoluted as well. Coming from GCP, this fucking blows. I had non-technical people create service accounts and clusters and VMs on GCP and hook them to our product. I'm trying AWS/EKS and Azure/AKS for testing purposes for our product (which hooks to users' clusters, and I have to try this out). I can't find the web console and the docs talk about installing one. … But other than the alpha products, generally it works very well and is highly reliable. jerglingu on Sept 17, 2021 Bad: dumb service names, API’s are not at all easy to learn and much of the documentation is subpar (WorkDocs is the latest pain), feeling some unease with all the downed services this year … Otherwise experimenting on Aws is very risky, particularly if you'd like to use the pay-per-use services. jjice on Sept 17, 2021 Dislike: Due to expansive options, it can be tricky to combine pieces together. codingclaws on Sept 17, 2021 QuinnyPig on Sept 17, 2021 … Cons: It's glaringly obvious that all AWS products are developed by independent teams with little coordination or style guide enforcement. Documentation ranges from excellent to completely unusable, which does not help the fact that AWS services in general has a far steeper learning curve than it should. (Security, for example is a nightmare unless you spend a LOT of time leaning crap almost no one should ever have to know.) Billing is non-transparent and far better billing tools are available for free through AWS partners, but effectively only to big companies.