Amazon Web Services (AWS)

“I haven't seen a single "cloud native" company yet that is not leaking hundreds of thousands of dollars per month to the US digital monopolists.”

“Or just use Azure, AWS, etc. for Claude/ChatGPT inference, where the AI labs never even get your data in their data centers at all.”

“I get unlimited scalability in AWS. I can standup and run an app for $0-$5/month depending on how I want to build it.”

“most of the high-value services are increasingly flaky and questionably supported, and nearly all of them have (often not very obvious) lock-in barbs”

“once you're in AWS, they make using their managed things so tempting that convincing everyone else to not use them is an even bigger battle”

“it cost a fraction of what we were paying our supplier and that things took minutes to set up rather than weeks”

“Their prices have mostly gone down ime. I have so far seen zero bait and switches and mostly things working as usual.”

“the massive advantage of AWS is that it allows staff to buy infrastructure without having to raise purchase orders”

“I learned a lot of stuff about networking, how AWS works (VPCs, IAM, CloudWatch, etc) from trial and error”

“AWS having opaque billing and the ability to provide a huge amount of compute (even at high cost) at the click of a button”

“Early on they nailed it with Retail and AWS. Since then, all that terrible cutthroat culture grinded the efficacy down”

“The list of compliance standards that AWS meets is so big they have a separate product just to deliver the compliance documents.”

“Using vendors where you not only have infosec permission, but they are also listed as data processors in our contracts with our customers is the way not to get fired and sued.”

“AWS isn't going to risk their reputation, and thus huge chunks of their business, just so a few AI labs can get some extra training data.”

“The whole model of slicing the app into so many pieces (proprietary wrappers it seems like) to make more opportunities for billing is terrible.”

“how many millions / tens of millions / hundreds of millions are you imagining being spent on overpriced AWS services?”

“I think the interface is difficult to use but am able to get what I want from the CLI and some scripts I have aliased.”

“When I log into AWS there is a big graph saying "Cost savings" and offers all the different ways to save money.”

“Is true, probably, that AWS doesn’t know how much anyone’s use case will cost (even when it’s yet another version of something we’ve seen before).”

“I actually prefer the dedicated calculator pages and product pages because it gives you more insight into how things are billed.”

“I can go right into an account and see an estimated cost per hour, and even pre-pay at a fixed discount for longer terms if I want to.”

“pricing depends on so many factors like reserved/dedicated/spot/on-demand instances have all different prices”

“I agree that it's overcomplicated. Although having the self-service portal also for assigning IPs is useful.”

“It is a little annoying being tied to AWS just for that, but very little of our traffic goes through them, so in practice it works.”

“Azure is impressive in its own right, but it's not comparable to AWS. (Which has its own problems, to be clear.)”

“There's infamously no way to set a max bill amount for an account in AWS, so it indeed has unlimited spending, but I'm okay with a couple hundred bucks a month.”

“in 10min or less an agent can deploy almost any stack to an optimal AWS setup for a fraction of the cost of any platform”

“Most of the people agreeing to foot the AWS bill do it because they see how much the compliance is worth to them.”

“AWS has a more powerful abstraction already, where you can condition permissions such that they are only granted when the request comes from a certain VPC or IP address”

“I've seen far fewer partition-causing networking hiccups than when my coworkers and I were responsible for wiring”

“The big 3 are costing you as if it's still 2009, and they don't change this because people have an irrational attachment to overpaying.”

“AWS, at least for a lot of the services last time I used it, was comfortable greying most things out with a tooltip”

“you are already sitting behind world-class infrastructure protection that rivals anything Cloudflare offers”

“It's why I've used AWS for a couple of side hustle projects because I had familiarity from using it at work.”

“It's very hard and costly to replicate what AWS gives you if you have requirements close to enterprise levels.”

“I'm paying for the entire ecosystem around it: security and access management, S3, Lambda, networking, monitoring, reliability guarantees”

“Tried their app engine and container runner and went back to running Docker on a Linux VM as a saner solution.”

“I've only really used AWS at a startup, but this sounds kinda scary based on that experience just because it's so easy to configure services in AWS to cost you lots more.”

“If you run software on AWS, you can hire someone familiar with AWS and as long as you're not doing anything too weird, they'll figure it out”

“Some of the offerings these cloud providers offer are extremely affordable if you know how to play your cards right”