[Bucephalus355]

I'm a cloud engineer today with about a decade of experience. I mainly build and maintain K8s clusters for those who've made the unusual choice of going with EKS.

That being said, I did not understand until I was 17 that you could...just open a browser...and the internet was on.

As AOL rolled out broadband to its previously dial-up customer base, they did not want to confuse their very technically unskilled customers. So just like dialup, where a PPP connection has to be made initially, they preserved the concept in broadband. You still had to click all of the buttons as if you were signing into AOL. This also had the advantage of keeping people on the AOL browser.

[bitwize]

That reminds me of seeing a video featuring a bloke from the millennial generation (perhaps a little younger) who today does lots of mathy stuff in Lisp, but when he was a kid/teenager computers came in two varieties: "old computers" (e.g. the Apple II) which could be programmed, and "real computers" (modern (late 90s) PCs) which could not.

Kind of a sad reflection on how we went from booting to BASIC and encouraging programming by the end user, to booting into Windows (or worse, a smartphone OS) and almost suppressing programming.

[jhayward]

> they did not want to confuse their very technically unskilled customers

That's not really a good explanation for the design.

AOL kept the "AOL client" paradigm because your browsing was actually done via an L2TP tunnel back to an AOL datacenter. AOL provided some proprietary content, caching, and had things like parental controls (a very big deal for many users) as value adds over your broadband service. The idea was that you could get the same AOL experience no matter the provider or service type.

There were other benefits, such as masking your home IP address from advertisers - all they saw was an AOL tunnel endpoint address. AOL invented the "ad id" pseudonymous identifier to satisfy some of the tracking desires of advertisers w/o letting them re-identify you (given then current techniques). Apple uses the same concept today.

[amaccuish]

>That being said, I did not understand until I was 17 that you could...just open a browser...and the internet was on.

Same boat. When I was at friends houses I'd see them just open IE without logging in and wonder how that worked.

[tuckerconnelly]

Why is EKS unusual? I've found GKE to be wayy easier, but wasn't aware it (or--something else?) was more popular.

[shoes_for_thee]

IME most AWS users stick with AWS primitives rather than hosting those services themselves on a k8s cluster.