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why would you NOT choose AWS ?
202 replies and sub-replies as of Jan 25 2020
😂 yep, heard this one so many times... but more and more I wonder if they have a point
Amazon is into everything technically, but it’s all tactics to keep u shopping... the fear really comes from e-commerce companies
Ditto on this. Our clients see amazon as a direct competitor. Not really sure why, but they do.
if i DIDNT want to line jeff bezos' pocket with more money
from a person dev perspective: sure, absolutely. but if you were making the buying decision for your business does betting on the risk of an AWS competitor outweigh the risk of making an impossibly rich dude fractionally richer (?)
sigh. capitalism.
feels to that
Can say the same thing about recycling.
does betting on the whole process of having to recycle outweigh the risk of making an impossibly plastic-filled world fractionally more dumped with plastic (?)
It’s the many “fractions” summed together that made him “impossibly rich”
eh you’re not just making Bezos richer. You’re also helping employ thousands of engineers that work at AWS. that’s thousands of people making money and spending it.
Don’t lambdas solve for that vs EC2?
yeah the data is where they get ya. even just logs can get expensive.
Migration costs from on-prem also - a bill to migrate 1k VMs to AWS using VMotion might get to ~$2M USD
Control.
this is surprising to me…any more detail on why?
None of my companies use any American tech services, or Australian.
privasectech.com/time-to-consid…
Removing Australia and Australians from the online world
We're in an era where governments are seeking the ability to overpower privacy laws and circumvent security measures, such as encryption. Any government who legislates that, can no longer be trusted. Only a few months after the US CLOUD Act, which forced my companies to stop hiring American developers, as well as forcing us to end using any American tech service such as Google, Gmail, or Amazon AWS, Australia has just passed a law that is also frightening. In this new Australian legislation, police can force companies to create a technical backdoor that would give them access to encrypted messages without the user's knowledge. As a result, you can not only not trust any Australian technology company, such as Atlassian (parent of awesome tools like Trello and Jira), or Fastmail, but you can't trust any company that has an Australian software developer any more. We're even discussing if we can trust any company that has an employed Australian any longer.I'm furious for my Australian friends over this, as your government has just abandoned your livelihood by making you not trusted any more. My companies have immediately stopped using any Australian tech company's services, as we're still rolling off American tech services, and we can no longer hire Americans or Australians without some reasonable type of Warrant Canary situation. As Asher Wolf noted, this bill also goes against the GDPR, so Europeans can't trust Australians or their technology companies. https://twitter.com/Asher_Wolf/status/1070263852477014016Even if you're naive enough to think only law enforcement would use this when appropriate, it's perhaps worth mentioning as someone with a background in information security, it is not possible to create a backdoor only for the 'good guys', but a backdoor is now a vulnerability for bad actors to exploit as well.We're seeing this creeping digital surveillance culture be trialled in the various 5 EYES countries, with the others eyeing the reactions to see the impact that would take place if they passed similar legislation on their respective soil. For any Canadian law or policy makers reading this, please consult me if a silly idea like backdooring encryption enters the room of any conversation you're in. It's a hard and obvious no, every time, with no exceptions. The economic impact of such a policy can not be ignored, or the impact of making your technical workforce no longer employable -- as two obvious impact examples that will impact their livelihoods as noted above. I hope the USA and Australia are measuring the chilling affects of these policies, which get larger every passing day. Any time you hear a politician who suggests putting backdoors into encryption they should never be trusted again (someone should start a Wikipedia page listing them all, by jurisdiction). They're either not knowledgeable in the subject matter, or they're aware and lying to you, and willing to give up your privacy and civil liberties of all of their citizens instantly, in the process.
krisconstable.com
seems like australia is the bigger problem here - the us's regulations aren't directly incompatible with the gdpr but with australia you literally have to choose to either not provide services to australia or not provide services to europe
few courts elsewhere is going to enforce australia's law if the service isn't offered there even if they have an australian developer living overseas
in the us i'd suspect mandatory decryption would run afoul of the 5th amendment in most circumstances
I talk about cloud generally, not just AWS. I use AWS daily. But the thing is by the time you choose to store your data/infrastructure to a cloud provider, it means you are trusting this company with all your digital assets. This does not happen when you host things locally.
RTMP features
Can you tell me more about what you're looking for?
#awswishlist
I already talked to AWS on the phone a while back and just changed vendors from one using AWS behind the scenes and other tech to using Azure. There is 0% of switching anytime soon. I still use AWS for plenty though.
We're always thinking long term, and want to understand better any place we might not be meeting the needs of a particular customer/workload. We have tons of streaming, RTC, and VoIP workloads on AWS, and it's hard to imagine that there's something that can't be built on it now.
But we don't have perfect knowledge as individual human beings, so it's very possible that learning more about what you were trying to build fills in a hole in knowledge.
I have a slack room with AWS TPMs cause I’m at Adobe ;) Find the right channels to get to me at work and I can answer questions there.
which ones?! (I only vaguely remember this from the Flash days)
There is more granularity in control, details of stream, and events.
This is the most on brand tweet for you right now Dave!
All about that streaming currently.
I can't tell if "currently" was pun intended or not.
Azure
gcp looks nice, if you already use a lot of google products it can make a lot of data stuff smoother and afaik it’s historically had better k8s support
I also plan to use azure for windows vms and cortana commands
but those are all still big iaas companies. sqsp was for a long time pathologically on-prem though starting to warm up to gcp and that was interesting to watch
for them it felt like a lot of it was inertia - they ran their own stuff prior to The Cloud and stuck w it cause it was working for them
I think on-prem made certain data access issues easier and its cool having the power of Real Machines sometimes (like our data warehousing clusters) but practically speaking I do think the managed things make the work a lot easier
UI is 👎
Documentation is subpar (not consolidated / cohesive)
I feel like I am being pushed services I dont really want (ex: API Gateway) and have to string together a bunch of services to get something working
Cost
(ultimately these aren't deal breakers just my opinion)
I think for enterprise I wouldn't choose any other provider, but for small / startup projects its a bit more of a decision
I quote for UI 👎
honestly? no idea where to get started.
# if you have node installed...
npm init @architect ./myapp
cd myapp
npm start
Ok, I just tried this and it's super clean!
I've been meaning to try it for a while, but that npm init was too easy to pass up.
eric does this work for serverless only or can i just push a node server?
right on thats great to hear / hat tip to @ryan for cookin' the init scripts!
Google cloud is a lot more straightforward and has serverless databases that don't require spinning anything up
ah but only in on demand mode, and only if you don't have DAX set up and need we go back to the complexity compared to google where data store asks you if you want the new or the old version, and where should they store the data
Even in provisioned mode, #DynamoDB has no servers to allocate. Yes, you have to tell it what capacity floor and ceiling you want enforced, but for the right workload, the price difference can be worth it. Though I have seen where on-demand is cheaper for some workloads.
For just getting rolling , using google cloud platform is free and does a lot of the devops work for you. I'm using it until cost becomes a factor.
By that work I'm using in my project alone:
-auth
-hosting
-database
-ab testing
-analytics
-cloud functions
-events
-client engagement/acquisition measures (there are a ton)
cause google cloud is way easier to use
Google gives $20k in credits.... others give $50k 😝
Because AWS is not on my continent and Azure is 🤷🏼♂️
(You should choose ☁️, but,)
Computer hardware is perposterously cheap & we ought deliver them to ourselves, get better at making running them easy. Open source is only one piece of mankind voyaging far with these bicycles for the mind.
because i don't want to support a concentration camp enabler.
geeeez, do I want to google this… ?
oh. yes. and I guess github and microsoft are out on these grounds too. at least amazon posted this
Our Positions
We created this page to provide customers, investors, policymakers, employees, and others our views on certain issues. While our positions are carefully considered and deeply held, there is much room for healthy debate and differing opinions. We hope being clear about our positions is helpful.
aboutamazon.com
Every major company that does business with ICE is putting out some kind of statement saying they care about immigrants blah blah blah. At the end of the day, they're still getting the contracts and not turning them down.
As for Github and MSFT: Yep. Every time we use these services, we're choosing the convenience of using them over the fact that they're enabling concentration camps.
It's hard to operate ethically in today's world, but it's a decision we make.
PaaS is better choice than IaaS for most products of most sizes.
which ones? are you confident they're going to be around longer than AWS ?
Been happily using Heroku since 2007. Every time I’ve landed at a place using AWS they’re either moving to PaaS or on prem
Probably not, but they're most likely going to be around longer than the average seed stage startup.
Or around longer than your website/project/business ! :)
If they aren't providing free credits. Startups literally migrate between cloud providers based on who's giving out free credits.
Large enterprise agreements and SLA's.
K8s support
they are the leading supplier with three products !
K8s on GCloud "just works". AWS is overly complex and brittle. Over time aws will improve EKS and other linked services. :)
It seems like EKS is still a work in progress. No complaints from me, it’s a public beta where we can try to contribute feedback to our TAMs and hope it makes it to the service team :)
For a smaller org, much simpler (and by extension more secure) shared identity management between IT, Dev, and Ops. I see that for GCP if your virtual IT infrastructure is primarily G Suite; or Azure if your virtual IT infrastructure is Office365/Sharepoint.
Personally, I find their tech generally mediocre at best when compared to the competition. They do sell and support it well but I generally don't need that, I'm usually pretty self-sufficient.
who do you choose instead ?
It depends on the project but for now use cases I tend to find Google cloud is much more to my liking. I suppose a big chunk is personal preference but I find gcp engineering is a way ahead of AWS for the most part. Though gcp doesn't have do many services & support isn't as good
Obviously no platform is perfect but gcp gets closer IMO
GCP has done a great job in bringing all the services together in a single dashboard. Not perfect, but I found AWS to be a bit all over the place (was one of the first customers and stayed on it for many years). Unsure if things have improved.
AWS definitely did improve the console ui recently, it's not bad now but the services feel disconnected to me. I guess I just have a different philosophy to AWS.
I mean, many of their products are based on aging tech such as s3 and ec2 which often means they're a serious compromise. Just my opinion.
Lack of a competitive price for hobby projects compared to most VPS offerings.
Hobby projects can easily pass terabytes across continents every month, which racks up egress costs, no?
idk I've got like 20 ish domains of side project clocking under $30
If it still requires and instances, you could take a look at Lightsail. The pricing is simpler and it comes with bandwidth bundled;
Amazon Lightsail
Virtual servers, storage, databases, and networking for a low, predictable price.
aws.amazon.com
Is the Kubernetes offer allow to use these lightsail instances?
Unfortunately not, but you could use a spot instance instead for maximum savings.
google vpc is global, google preemptible instances are easier to use than spot instances, google cloud run feels better than lambda because you can throw a docker image at it, GKE is ahead of EKS (they are catching up). but AWS is better in many other fronts like EFS, RDS...
If anybody gives free credits of gcp or digitalocean etc..
The UX is awful.
I don’t feel like I have a real choice, no other platform has everything I need or a competitive enough price to consider switching
I hate this, I want AWS to have real competition
I like how Linode continues to build out more datacenters and slowly expand out its services, hopefully they can compete head on with AWS over the next few years.
Less about competing head on (heck, even Google is a blip at this point) and more about giving customers a viable alternative (and giving Google/Azure someone to point to for their own enterprise clients looking at multicloud). Linode's independence/open roots don't hurt, either.
Cognito and AppSync are killer features for rapidly prototyping mobile apps, I’d need parity in that department and I just don’t see another company giving a shit in the same way. Again: I wish there are competition! Sincerely.
Thanks for the feedback/insight!
German/European companies being afraid of the CIA having free access to their data.
Especially for smaller projects, the UI is incredibly complicated. You shouldn’t need multi-page tutorials to set up static file hosting.
^ this
You’re likely still using AWS indirectly via other providers ;) But yes, AWS has to offer its entire configuration set upfront, that’s its sell. It’s up to others (or another AWS service ala beanstalk, lightsail) to build the opinionated (simpler) abstraction layer on top.
Cannot stand either AWS or GCP UX. Seems like designed by big corp engs for big corp engs.
E. g. render.com is so much nicer experience.
Render · The Easiest Cloud For All Your Apps and Websites
Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networking, and auto deploys from GitHub and GitLab.
render.com
hey Vladimir, thanks for the link, render looks cool 🤩
many clients actively choose to avoid Amazon products if they are a competitor.
It's so COMPLICATED! And HUGE! I think they have at least 3 different message queue services. I like say, the simplicity of Firebase or Zeit Now.
Doesn't Zeit Now just use AWS in the background?
Maybe? If so they've done a nice job hiding all the complexity.
It (@zeithq) is multi-cloud. It currently uses AWS and GCP under the hood.
Regions and Providers - ZEIT Documentation
A listing and explanation of the regions and providers ZEIT Now implements.
zeit.co
In total, we use 4 major clouds under the hood 😋 Zero complexity gets bubbled down to our customers 😌
What’s the fourth? (Also, doc update? 🙃)
The other 2 aren't relevant as they're used for operational reasons, not publicly faced 👍
FYI them being multicloud does nothing for you consuming at a higher level abstraction except increase the likelihood you can't run at a lower level. It's a weird talking point because this is usually considered negative.
FYI I didn’t mention it as a talking point or any such thing. Someone wasn’t sure about a piece of information, I linked to it. Simple.
Sure. Here's a another simple link I recommend in this line of thinking
The cloud lock-in myth: opting out of servers, and opting into de facto standards
The forecast is cloudy; with zero chance of servers
blog.begin.com
The line of thinking in this thread is about the OP finding AWS complex and companies solving for that. Not about cloud lock-in or the multi-cloud silver bullet (which, we know isn’t a silver bullet, just a different set of trade-offs).
Unplanned migrations are pretty complex (but I think this is something you'll need to learn through experience in the future).
I know they are. And, to your surprise probably, I have already experienced them :)
To re-iterate, the thread is about dealing with complexity (UX, DX, billing, etc) that current providers have. Not about migrations and multi-cloud that you seem to be stuck on.
I stated the thread. :) It's about why you wouldn't choose AWS. Was looking for solidly argued critical thinking not easily dismissed marketing talking points from niche resellers.
And the response was around complexity. The marketing talking points you allude to were not stated as an argument against AWS anywhere here. They were stated as a response to a question where the OP was unsure if an infra provider indeed used AWS under the hood. :)
And in that point, the outages in Canberra and Sydney would indicate that one wouldn’t use AWs for mission critical services like emergency services...
You can, if it's abstracted away via a CDN network like @zeithq – if you depend on direct access it gets tricky
I've found a few companies that won't use AWS because they (or their customers) see Amazon as a competitor in retail.
The other reason is that Azure and GCP are better at some stuff - it depends on your focus.
Kubernetes master is $77 USD a month (down from 144 though)
Other clouds offer the master for free ☹️
Honestly the interfaces and complication makes it really unappealing. Having used loads of gcp products, and aws extensively I would go gcp purely on dev/ops experience within cli's etc etc. Just seems so much more polished on other services.
At a certain size, AWS/cloud is more expensive compared to running your own data centre.
When your ops team is more proficient with Azure or GCP.
Would kill Savee on costs. Linode is so much cheaper. Went from a 110$/mo S3 to 8$
I find the interface really horrible to work with in comparison to Azure. I also like how the pricing is front and centre in Azure but less so in AWS.
Already established elsewhere. The same reason people on AWS less likely to move either
It’s too expensive :)
Heroku 😉
Depends on the use case, there are definitely some apps/sites that are better off being on Azure. Most of the services from both are interchangeable but cost difference usually prevails and tech stack plays a crucial role too.
I like @digitalocean, they have clear tutorials on everything
I dislike centralization - same reason I'm growing tired of CloudFlare.
Also, I set up a VPS once and realistically for most projects it's totally fine. Few projects need AWS-level resources; if you prefer the stack for dev usability reasons, then sure, I guess, go for it lol
Because Bezos is a vulture capitalist
I use gc, azure and aws regularly... can get most things done dramatically faster in azure ... cg a close second for certain types of projects (e.g. firebase) ... aws is powerful and flexible but usually too low level for working quickly
Is it like better than Linode/DigitalOcean + CloudFlare ?
Weak S3 consistency. But I like AWS too much for that to be the only reason.
Not enough hype 😎🤪
Well, I do use AWS. But I also know competition is healthy and having a single player isn’t, so once we’re all at AWS then what?
It's not about not AWS: at big scale anyway it's about vendor lock-in. Dread of another IBM Mainframe scenario. Hence the Corporate love of Kubernetes. If AWS ups prices I'll haul ass over to Google or Azure.
Figure "standardised serverless" out and you'll be overrun!
The Azure default is to not get in your way. AWS I find is for ops masochists who insist on being able to SSH into everything and having to manually manage the same configuration as 90% of the users on the platform.
Account setup is super complicated compared to Netlify, Next and/or Heroku
UX. Azure cares about it.
(I still prefer AWS but gotta be honest there)
Regulations and stuff, or you just really love owning a data center
All complicated
AWS is our standard solution for medium size situations. The complexity is too high, though, for simple things, and the cost is too high for large things. Dedicated servers cost about 1/10 at scale.
Oh yeah, and don’t run emergency services in AWS mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-2…
Not a good look “...giant Amazon has apologised after a technical upset caused a website providing crucial emergency bushfire information to crash.
Insightful responses. I’ve worked on all three major Clouds for large enterprises. I wonder how many opinions are from hobbiests vs. established enterprises that have millions or billions of dollars at risk.
Right! 🎯
Why would you? Their UI sucks and a lot of it is a manual process to get the same result as hosing with someone like @zeithq. It leaves a lot of room for error that is not necessary for 90% of projects.
Ugh there's always a typo in my tweets no matter how many times I read them before lol...
Why would I choose the pioneering leader of the cloud which is arguably a defacto standard? To minimize risk of lockin to one of their likely to fail competition mostly.
I've also been burned by stuff built on AWS to "make the ux better" shut down. VC looks for exits eh.
Because I'll probably be long dead before my AWS hosted site gets taken down and I'm pretty sure zeit, netlify, etc. will be looking for an exit within 10 years if not sooner.
This
Except the timing is more like every 18 months...
I can see your point there. It really depends on what you’re building. Most of the apps I have built so far are easy to drop anywhere so having to switch hosting someday doesn’t bother me. I will say that I do use Route53 for all my domains.
Our goal is to indeed become a public company. That's the only "exit" we'll be looking for.
Stoked for the journey!
Could happen. At the last round of public info appears Netlify is a steal at about half a billion. Move quick Guillermo they're not getting cheaper!
I’ll pitch in $20
Have you seen Azure portal? 😵
If you count AWS as dev and deployment stack, than tied yourself to proprietary environment without option to balance to in-house or 3rd party. Surprisingly only Azure gives you that flexibility, not for free though.
My last name is Page-Brin
Firebase with Firestore plus BigQuery plus Data Studio plus GSuite plus anything else from Google Cloud Platform is pretty awesome, and entirely serverless
Complicated pricing
It‘s overwhelming, their billing model is confusing af, the tooling tolerable at best, they make it very easy to shoot yourself in the foot both in terms of design as well as costs and finally, from a sociological standpoint, I don’t want to power their monopoly.
This is even before I get into setting up IAM roles. Oh the horrors!
Because I work at Microsoft and don't want dirty looks from coworkers 🙃
(Regardless, Azure UI/docs are relatively better, and services like Netlify/Zeit make things incredibly easy for other use-cases)
cuz @AWSAmplify doesnt support @FlutterDev
In my experience starting a product with AWS makes you less productive (unless you are an AWS expert).. Other providers like @digitalocean @Netlify @zeithq makes it way easier to deploy and update your app
It has the hardest to understand UI.
GCP is easier to use and works nicely with firebase. AWS UI is a nightmare and their low cost is not worth the time spent reading their docs or figuring out their UI.
But it seems AWS newer services like Amplify may be moving in the right direction.