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by senderista 2442 days ago
The console sucks because it's done by the individual back-end service teams who have no idea about UX or front-end coding, and don't coordinate with each other or any cross-service owners of the console.
1 comments

AWS makes... how much?

And won't invest in basic stuff like that?

Their CLI is irritating too.

You might hate the console or CLI tools, but people at Amazon have real data telling them the CX is good enough and their capital would be better spent investing in other features. Source: I work there. :P
Yeah, we know you've got us locked in. The steaming piles served up in the console still taste like shit.
What’s your problem domain? You shouldn’t be locked into AWS. No offense, but sounds like bad design or more generally, you or your engineers don’t know what they’re doing.
As a percentage of offerings, how much of the AWS portfolio is portable between clouds? 5%? 1%?

Of course we could re-write on a different cloud, just like Amazon can move off Oracle, but it would take time and we would put up with a lot of abuse before it happened, just like Amazon no doubt did with Oracle.

Which is what you were just bragging about: your numbers show that your customers are locked in enough that you can abuse them plenty before they can effectively retaliate.

Congrats.

You didn’t answer my question and deflected, only responding with personal attacks. Nice.

I still think that your notion of intentional vendor lock in is misinformed at best and poor design and architecting from your side (at worst). I do happen to work at Amazon but my post history will show you how critical I am of the company.

But nothing you’re saying is valid, and I don’t see any parallel here with the migration from Oracle. If you’ve used Oracle DB or have familiarity with its one off special “features”, there’s no parallel between that and using something like RDS or Dynamo. RDS is replaceable. Dynamo is a key value store first and foremost.

There are also enough third party abstractions that let provide you their own configuration and syntax for spinning up resources on AWS, Azure, GCP, etc or mix and match.

if you are using the console to manage your infrastructure you're doing it wrong
You answered the questions on exactly what is wrong with the console...
How so? Op is correct - you shouldn’t be using the console to actively manage your infrastructure. The consoles primary purpose is to let you quickly spin up resources while you explore. If you have a real business use case, all your infrastructure should be defined in configuration and deployed out to AWS. That way, you always know what you need to spin up and it’s exact, specific configuration, all stored in source control.
It's fine for experimenting, but I agree in general.