alt Hacker NewsYears ago, I joined a company, took over a dev team and was asked to launch the product in 3 months.
They were using AWS, so I logged in the account to add a few more machines. Right there, in front of my eyes, were the signs of an adversarial, abusive relationship.
The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs.
I had to have the two tables open, cross check the specs and price.
If I had learned one thing from my past life was that if you see the signs of an abusive relationship, you have the option to walk out, and you don't, all that follows is your own fault.
Created a DigitalOcean account, moved everything over. Set up our CI/CDs to deploy there, and spent the next two months on the product, launching one month earlier than promised.
Some years before that I saw a video online where a person digs a hole near a river and puts a pipe connecting the river and the hole. The fishes push themselves hard in the pipe to get to their trap. Choosing the path of least resistance, and never backing off from a mistake: recipes to end up like those fishes. The video left a big impression on me.
Replies
That's one of the things I like about Azure, they don't overwhelm you with listing prices beside every individual item as you're creating it, but they seem to always present a price on things that could be expensive. It's a good balance, I have yet to be surprised by a charge.
if you see the signs of an abusive relationship, you have the option to walk out, and you don't, all that follows is your own fault.
This is the only correct way to do it: choose infrastructure provider that can help you deliver. AWS is good, just not for everyone. It stands somewhere between services like Heroku and bare metal, abstracting a lot of maintenance, but offering some control over scaling architecture. Which means that as a cloud provider it helps to scale, not to build the cheapest and simplest setup possible. If you have VC money and pitch growth, AWS might be a safe choice - 2 years of startup credits they offer via accelerator programs help you not to bother too much about your infra budget and build first 18 months before you start optimizing spending (and then you know it, have good forecasting etc). If you are bootstrapped or indie developer, choose what you can afford and choose something simple. Hetzner, DO etc will work fine.
AWS actually has a pretty good price calculator with some decent presets (but FFS, can I have an "uncheck all" button?) but of course it's an entirely separate app. Amazon naturally wants some friction to having this pricing information handy, though I suspect the main reason has to do with Conway's Law: AWS still ships their org chart.
I agree with you at some degree, but I would like to point out that AWS pricing is much more complicated that you can calculate how much will you pay from a static number showing up on the UI.
If it bothers you that you need to open two tabs for cross-checking the costs, you may want to avoid every cloud provider, not just AWS.
Once you have NAT gateways, CloudFront, S3, auto scaling, loadbalancers, etc, calculating the cost becomes an art rather than an exact science. And if you don't use these, there is no point of using AWS, there are plenty of "cheap" VPS providers.
[dead]
So this project had a three month timeline and provisioning the cloud resources maybe took an extra hour or two because of crosschecking? I actually prefer the dedicated calculator pages and product pages because it gives you more insight into how things are billed. I think this is a strange thing to get hung up on, IMHO, especially as a lead / manager of developers.
>> The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs.
This is false. The price shows up right away when you select a machine. I dont work for AWS...
> They were using AWS, so I logged in the account to add a few more machines. Right there, in front of my eyes, were the signs of an adversarial, abusive relationship.
> The UI to fire up a new machine did not show me the price. I had to look up the price in another table that did not have the specs.
I don’t want to be the one defending AWS, but I don’t think that this is a valid reason not to like them. I mean, pricing depends on so many factors like reserved/dedicated/spot/on-demand instances have all different prices.
I don’t even think that using the UI to spin up the machine is the right way to do that in an enterprise setting, you should always do that through Infrastructure as Code, to know exactly what you have up and running, just by looking at that as you would with any program. I’d suggest to use the UI for simple testing, for which the costs are often (but not always) negligible.
Jeff Bezos if you see this please send me some cash.
Doesn't Amazon engineering culture have a very engineer-led product culture? Meaning, devs are often responsible for the UX and flow.
I remember many years ago we hired a junior developer who just finished his internship at AWS and he showed me the dashboard he shipped all by himself in the summer with no product or designer help. I was surprised that he had no UX designer to help him and it looked horrible.
Some devs are really good at that but the vast majority are horrendously bad at UX.
My point is that maybe it was intentional, but just bad UX culture.
Edit: It wasn't intentional