| I've had to use AWS in the past professionally. The general categories of problems I've seen with AWS are threefold: 1. Each individual service in AWS may be perfectly well designed, but there are now about 5000 services in AWS, which means there's 5000^2 possible interactions between services. Services interact in strange ways, and there's no visibility (and no documentation) into exactly how. You can write 5000 bug-free functions, but that doesn't mean you'll end up with a bug-free program. 2. The craftsmanship that goes into each element of the AWS console is poor. Controls don't work like I expect, and don't work like similar controls elsewhere. Error messages are terrible, or missing, and don't give any clue what is actually going on, or what secret AWS-specific trick I need to use to fix it. I've wasted hours of my life on those spinners because it's not even clear if an action will occur right away, in 30 seconds, or 30 minutes. What is one supposed to do when they click a button, wait a few minutes, go to lunch, and come back to see "at least one of the environment termination workflows failed"? 3. The documentation and support is lousy. I've asked a few questions on AWS's own forums, and never gotten any response at all. The above error message appears in exactly one forum post, and AWS finally got back to them after 2 weeks, and it was all done via PM so I learned nothing from it. I've used the 'Feedback' button, and when I get a reply, it feels like some combination of "it's your fault" and "you should have googled harder". > designing, leading, and building the frontend for an AWS service Designing the frontend for an AWS service doesn't help with the biggest problems. It's like designing a city by designing apartments and offices, with no thought given to roads or signs. > The universal thinking within AWS is that people will ultimately use the API/CLI/SDK. I can't understand this. If someone can't get the web console to work, they're not going to say "I know, I'll just write everything by hand with the API instead". The web console is essentially your landing page and your trial combined. Do all your "personas" consist of people who build for the web but never use the web? Or who try a service, and when they can't get it to work, they double down on it? |
As a personal anecdote, my first interaction with AWS was to try and adjust the size of some elasticsearch disks. Not knowing better I tried to do it through the UI, only to find some crazy inconsistencies were the tooltip would say to type any size between 5 and 50 GB while the current value was 100GB. Even if you clicked "apply" with the current value of 100 you'd get an error message. I tried different browsers and it seemed to be a browser-specific issue.
After that I delved into the terraform that was used to provision all our AWS resources and I haven't looked back since. Apart from the obvious benefits of keeping your infrastructure as code and automation etc, terraform actually helped me understand how all the different services we had worked together and allowed me to get a grasp of our infrastructure layout quicker.
I would seriously discourage anyone from using the console for anything other than searching logs or managing DNS records (terraform is a bit flaky on that regard)