[hedora]

I guess I should also point out that I’ve used AWS at extremely large scale in the past, which is why I’m running this subproject on another cloud.

As for simple permissions, go read the UNIX paper. It spends a page or two on their approach and is all you need.

Then, read the paper on mapping between NTFS SMB ACLs and NFS. It’s either impossible or undecidable, depending on the deployment. IAM is from the windows acl lineage which is known pessimal from a usability and security perspective.

[cyberax]

IAM is NOT from any lineage. It has grown organically and is complicated, just as any other policy language. AWS even uses an automatic proof assistant to verify IAM policies.

However, the secret to IAM in AWS is to NOT use IAM. Just create separate AWS accounts for separate services and only share whatever resources are needed. Then you can have dead simple IAM policies because you won't need to do granular permissions ("AWS role X can access database Y").

[dotwaffle]

> Just create separate AWS accounts for separate services

My understanding is that different AWS accounts have different mappings of availability zones, so it's very easy to suddenly find yourself with an unexpected bandwidth bill due to all the cross-az traffic.

I've been irritated at AWS (and the other large cloud providers) that they charge $0.01/GB for cross-az traffic. That's $3.24/Mbps -- about the same I was paying for internet transit (as in: from London to anywhere in the world) 20 years ago, and this is just between two datacenters in the same city controlled by the same organisation, markup must be 10,000x or more considering these places are cross-connected with massive bundles of fiber!

[cyberax]

> My understanding is that different AWS accounts have different mappings of availability zones, so it's very easy to suddenly find yourself with an unexpected bandwidth bill due to all the cross-az traffic.

As far as I remember, accounts within the same organization will have the same mapping. You also can use stable zone names these days, instead of the regular mappings.

And yeah, egress traffic pricing is freaking insane at this point. It's the biggest reason to NOT use AWS.

[dotwaffle]

Insanely high S3 storage charges too. $23/TB/month? Even with the insane HDD pricing that we see today, that's paying off a drive in 1 month (at retail) that will last for 50-100 months. Sure, there's probably some encoding overhead, but it's still mad.

[cyberax]

S3 is pretty competitive if you want similarly-performing storage with consistent millisecond-level latency, high scalability, and at least 3x redundancy. Try looking at how much it's going to cost you in enterprise SSDs :)

[dotwaffle]

Is it 3x redundancy forever? I always just kinda assumed it was RS encoded after a while, so only 30-50% larger than a single copy. Plus, almost all object storage is written to / read from hard disks, not to SSDs. Unless they're in a caching layer that is.

I know Azure has done a bunch of work around Pyramid Codes (essentially a locally repairable EC/RS variant), and Google obviously have the Colossus infrastructure that allows variable encodings, I'd be surprised if AWS is still triple-replicated everywhere.