[HN Gopher] AWS services explained in one line each
___________________________________________________________________
AWS services explained in one line each
Author : jaytaph
Score : 1250 points
Date : 2020-05-26 10:23 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (adayinthelifeof.nl)
(TXT) w3m dump (adayinthelifeof.nl)
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Where's EBS?
| jaytaph wrote:
| EBS is actually part of the EC2 service. It's not listed
| explicitly in the console service menu. So I did not add it.
| (same goes with loadbalancing, security groups etc)
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Aha, I see.
| kevsim wrote:
| This is really well done! I might tweak the Lambda one a little
| to mention what they run in response to or to even drop in the
| serverless buzzword.
| mcv wrote:
| That's kinda useful I guess? But I still don't know whether I
| need EC2 or Elastic Beanstalk. And do I need still need Batch if
| I have one of the other two? Still, it's much clearer than
| Amazon's own pages about this.
| afterwalk wrote:
| Agreed, a concise description of "why" and "when" would be more
| useful.
| Jach wrote:
| It'd be nice to include "year introduced" data as well. My AWS
| knowledge peaked sometime in 2012 after DynamoDB came out. I know
| a bit about newer things (like Lambda) but there's a lot of
| catching up to do...
| elchief wrote:
| I made this list for my buddy a while back. It's meant to be more
| humorous than exactly correct
|
| Route 53 - Holy shit! It's NSD
|
| WAF - Holy shit! It's modsecurity
|
| SES - Holy shit! It's Postfix
|
| Inspector - Holy shit! It's OSSEC
|
| GuardDuty - Holy shit! It's Snort
|
| Data Pipeline - Holy shit! It's Cron and Bash
|
| Athena - Holy shit! It's Prestodb
|
| Glue - Holy shit! It's Hive Metastore and Spark
|
| OpsWorks - Holy shit! It's Chef
|
| VPC - Holy shit! It's a VLAN
|
| Snowball - Holy shit! It's a truck full of hard drives
|
| CloudWatch - Holy shit! It's syslogd
|
| Neptune - Holy shit! It's Neo4j
|
| ElastiCache - Holy shit! It's Redis
|
| DynamoDB - Holy shit! It's MongoDB
|
| S3 Glacier - Holy shit! It's DVD backup
|
| EFS - Holy shit! It's NFS
|
| Elastic Block Store - Holy shit! It's a SAN
|
| Elastic Beanstalk - Holy shit! It's Apache Tomcat
|
| EMR - Holy shit! It's Apache Hadoop
|
| Elastic Cloud Compute - Holy shit! It's a virtual machine
|
| Kinesis - Holy shit! It's Apache Kafka
|
| QuickSight - Holy shit! It's Tableau
| rlt wrote:
| I'm not sure if the sarcastic tone is meant to imply AWS is
| just a rehash of existing tools, but that's obviously not the
| case.
|
| A list of actual competing software/products/services would be
| pretty useful.
| joana035 wrote:
| Let that sink in
| alexchamberlain wrote:
| > Neptune - Holy shit! It's Neo4j
|
| Neptune - Holy shit! It's Blazegraph
|
| https://blazegraph.com/
| abc_lisper wrote:
| I am going to screenshot this for future reference
| julianeon wrote:
| I copy and pasted it for you, to save you a click.
|
| Route 53 - Holy shit! It's NSD
|
| WAF - Holy shit! It's modsecurity
|
| SES - Holy shit! It's Postfix
|
| Inspector - Holy shit! It's OSSEC
|
| GuardDuty - Holy shit! It's Snort
|
| Data Pipeline - Holy shit! It's Cron and Bash
|
| Athena - Holy shit! It's Prestodb
|
| Glue - Holy shit! It's Hive Metastore and Spark
|
| OpsWorks - Holy shit! It's Chef
|
| VPC - Holy shit! It's a VLAN
|
| Snowball - Holy shit! It's a truck full of hard drives
|
| CloudWatch - Holy shit! It's syslogd
|
| Neptune - Holy shit! It's Neo4j
|
| ElastiCache - Holy shit! It's Redis
|
| DynamoDB - Holy shit! It's MongoDB
|
| S3 Glacier - Holy shit! It's DVD backup
|
| EFS - Holy shit! It's NFS
|
| Elastic Block Store - Holy shit! It's a SAN
|
| Elastic Beanstalk - Holy shit! It's Apache Tomcat
|
| EMR - Holy shit! It's Apache Hadoop
|
| Elastic Cloud Compute - Holy shit! It's a virtual machine
|
| Kinesis - Holy shit! It's Apache Kafka
|
| QuickSight - Holy shit! It's Tableau
| fauria wrote:
| Similar to "Amazon Web Services In Plain English":
|
| https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english
|
| Seen on HN (2015): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286
| lode wrote:
| Some corrections: AWS Outposts: Run Amazon services in your own
| datacenter (not on your own hardware)
|
| Storage Gateway: Virtual appliance to couple on-premises
| applications to storage in the cloud.
|
| (So it's no iSCSI (block) to S3 (object) but Block(iSCSI to EBS),
| File (SMB/NFS/S3 to S3), or Tape (iSCSI VTL))
|
| Addition:
|
| VMware Cloud on AWS: Bare-metal, automatically deployed VMware
| clusters on AWS hardware.
| jaytaph wrote:
| thanks. Fixed the first one. About storage gateway: as far as I
| could see (haven't tested it) you get a iscsi path which you
| can connect to from your own device. It uses S3 as the backend
| store for files from and to this device. Will try and take some
| more time to look into it (never used this myself)
| unilynx wrote:
| Cool list!
|
| But I would just name "Lightsail" "Amazon's digital ocean"
| FigmentEngine wrote:
| I built this
| https://moca.computingarchitectures.com/en/vendors/aws/
|
| as well as visual representation
| https://moca.computingarchitectures.com/en/~hello-world/
| highprofittrade wrote:
| Route 53 is too generalized
| k__ wrote:
| _" Large & scalable non-relational database (but not really a
| NoSQL system)"_
|
| _triggered_
| zambal wrote:
| Ha, that caught my eye too. I'd say DynamoDb is kind of the
| poster child of the whole NoSQL thing.
| jaytaph wrote:
| Yes, you are right. I was thinking more about it not being a
| document-store like Mongo or couchdb. But I agree it's
| NoSQL.. will update
| davedx wrote:
| Consider that your typical enterprise software project will use
| quite a lot of these, and that you pay for them all separately,
| and sometimes pay twice for them (e.g. S3 you pay for storage and
| for outbound bandwidth).
|
| It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation of
| concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create
| complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print
| money. Bravo.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| You're totally right.
|
| I look at the whole stack and aside from IAM and EC2, and ECS I
| think you could get by without a lot of those products.
| SubuSS wrote:
| Problem is they are all built up of many smaller pieces as
| well - you may need the information about them at different
| points. For ex. EC2 drives are from EBS. if you need a load
| balancer ELB. You probably use S3 for some or other reason
| (log exports etc at least). You want a db - RDS makes it
| easier. Dynamo is literally a button click away. Kubernetes?
| Well there is EKS.
|
| Yes you can probably launch your own cache fleet using a
| bunch of ec2 boxes - but you don't get all the low level
| hooks Elasticache gets. You don't get the pricing discounts
| either (I remember cross zone replication or something being
| distinctly free for ec2 but you pay for network. Same with
| dynamo - access from all zones cost the same pretty much
| IIRC).
|
| If you are going to make the dive, it is worth spending the
| time. I would do a small overview bootcamp somewhere so that
| you know what's available and then start digging in for each
| new service you take up.
| smitty1e wrote:
| For those not in "the biz", the idea of a WordPress site isn't
| too far-fetched.
|
| One can mention that there is a LAMP stack behind WordPress
| without knocking too many unconscious.
|
| Amazon's genius has been to sell the various permutations of
| the acronym "LAMP" as services.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yup; if you go with AWS, expect to build a pretty complicated
| setup distributed over many services. Even the basic LAMP /
| Wordpress stack mentioned in a sibling comment and often used
| in tutorials starts at $50 / month once you add everything up,
| and that's without any traffic.
|
| Although I guess Lightsail would be a lot more affordable.
| exhaze wrote:
| Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they
| provide around pricing and budgeting.
|
| > It's quite a tour de force how Amazon have taken "separation
| of concerns", applied it to web services and used it to create
| complex and difficult to understand or predict pricing to print
| money.
|
| Is applying separation of concerns to web services really that
| bad? Look, if you're a small company with a simple product, you
| can just put your stuff on a few EC2 boxes and pay the monthly
| bill for that. At that size, your infra costs are going to be
| dwarfed by your other costs of doing business anyway. If you're
| a big business, you can literally pay people to keep track of
| this stuff. You've got the extra money, because now you don't
| employ data center architects, server engineers, etc. AWS is
| able to "print money" because it brings a lot of value to many
| businesses.
| sixothree wrote:
| They are awful. I have tried and tried to list the cost by
| resource (like you can in Azure) and I just can't figure it
| out. I think I might need to enable some special pricing
| tools (coincidentally not free) that Cost Explorer don't
| expose.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| AWS (or GCP or Azure or ...) value proposition depends on
| you.
|
| For a small/startup, the ability to execute quickly without
| sinking capital into a product that will likely pivot anyway
| is a superpower.
|
| When you get bigger, stuff gets dicey. Paying a premium for a
| "X as a Service" made sense when you had no people, but at
| some point the cost structure may not make sense or your
| needs are at odds with how the service delivery works.
|
| When you work for a big company or government agency, things
| change again -- you don't hire a database guy for a project,
| you have a project team that builds stuff, and an ops team
| that exerts the minimum viable effort to keep your stuff
| running or an outsourced ops team that does the same, but
| worse. At that point, you start looking at how much it costs
| to pay AWS to provide and SLA vs hiring more competent (ie.
| more $$$) ops people to keep it running.
|
| The long and short of it is that AWS is in a position to rake
| in cash up and down the spectrum -- all they need to do is be
| competent, which they are very good at.
| rudolph9 wrote:
| They're literally entire companies of 100+ employees selling
| a product that helps you figure out how much money you're
| spending on AWS https://www.cloudability.com/
| davedx wrote:
| > Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they
| provide around pricing and budgeting.
|
| Yes, I use it extensively.
|
| > Is applying separation of concerns to web services really
| that bad? Look, if you're a small company with a simple
| product, you can just put your stuff on a few EC2 boxes and
| pay the monthly bill for that. At that size, your infra costs
| are going to be dwarfed by your other costs of doing business
| anyway. If you're a big business, you can literally pay
| people to keep track of this stuff. You've got the extra
| money, because now you don't employ data center architects,
| server engineers, etc. AWS is able to "print money" because
| it brings a lot of value to many businesses.
|
| It's not bad per se. The real problem I often see is that
| many people within the typical org aren't aware of how these
| costs can accumulate, especially when you have multiple DTAP
| environments, microservices, and so on.
|
| Another problem is the days of "put your stuff on a few EC2
| boxes" seem to have been overtaken by the cloud native,
| microservices, k8s trends of the last few years. Personally I
| 100% agree this is the way to go for many (if not most)
| people -- and for this purpose Digital Ocean is just as good
| -- but what I see more often is people diving straight into
| the deep end, because "Is applying separation of concerns to
| web services really that bad?"
|
| I also think even big businesses underestimate the total
| costs of these all-in cloud infrastructures. You indeed need
| to pay people to keep track of this stuff -- multiple people.
| Your cloud costs + your devops/platform personnel costs can
| get to be a significant % of your total IT costs. Is it
| really necessary?
|
| Just because your business has a big market cap or
| significant revenue from digital doesn't necessarily mean it
| needs any of that stuff. Chances are you can run it all on
| the same couple of EC2 boxes you ran it on when you were
| still a small company.
| exhaze wrote:
| I think we are probably 90% in agreement on things, just
| talking about it in different terms. I think AWS/GCP have
| both gotten overwhelming in terms of how many different
| services they provide. Many people fall for it and end up
| playing AWS service golf
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23274668).
|
| Maybe a good analogy is to think of AWS as C. It's flexible
| and powerful, but it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
| That would explain why a lot of these "> magical-tool
| deploy" services have emerged, promising to abstract away
| AWS.
| davedx wrote:
| Yeah indeed. And I think often the _perception_ of AWS is
| that it 's more like Ruby. "It's what everyone uses, so
| it's a no brainer right?"
| StreamBright wrote:
| >> Another problem is the days of "put your stuff on a few
| EC2 boxes" seem to have been overtaken by the cloud-native,
| microservices, k8s trends of the last few years.
|
| I am not sure where you get the notion that any serious
| user goes with the "put your stuff on a few EC2 boxes"
| approach. Every single AWS project I worked on had a cost
| calculation phase when we investigated what combination of
| services could be the most cost-efficient for a certain
| problem.
|
| >> cloud-native, microservices, k8s trends
|
| It is kind of funny that you try to put on one end AWS the
| company that made cloud computing popular (and
| microservices with it) and the biggest player in the
| segment and "cloud-native, microservices, k8s" on the
| other. Trends come and go, AWS is here for the long run.
| rumanator wrote:
| > Have you ever used AWS? There's a whole suite of tools they
| provide around pricing and budgeting.
|
| They don't work. To elaborate, they fail to provide the user
| with information with enough clarity to allow him to form
| accurate mental models of what is being used,what it costs,
| and what is the implication in cost of applying some change.
|
| Heck, at any given moment it's unexplainably hard to tell
| exactly which AWS services are you actually using, and being
| billed for.
|
| The only reliable info on cost it the invoice you receive at
| the end of the month. Even then, the AWS guys felt the need
| to develop a full blown machine learning service to help
| customers predict what their next invoice will be.
| exhaze wrote:
| > Heck, at any given moment it's unexplainably hard to tell
| exactly which AWS services are you actually using, and
| being billed for.
|
| Did you actually look at the billing page? Here's a
| screenshot of my billing page:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/DQAxgRY
|
| It meticulously breaks out per-service costs across
| whatever dimension you want. "EC2-Other" is rolled up in
| the chart, but it's broken out by each individual item
| further down in the list.
| nolok wrote:
| You're absolutely right, and also absolutely missing his
| point. As a massive user of AWS for a long time, yes you
| can know exactly to the sub-detail line what you pay for,
| no you can absolutely not have an overview or good
| estimation of mapping what a change in your software
| stack / setup will cost or save you. Unless we're talking
| "remove an entire service" and then duh, yeah.
| gowld wrote:
| How is that different from if you ran all this stuff on
| prem?
| nolok wrote:
| First, the obvious that if a massive surge happens
| (attack, bug, ...) on prem stop serving, aws surprise-
| drain your bank account. Yes it's possible to have fail
| safe to avoid it, it's also very common to not have them
| or that they're not tested or working.
|
| Second, the "in-between" costslike bandwidth from service
| to service, iops on your disk, ... They mostly don't
| exist on prem, you either have enough of it and it works
| or you don't and it doesn't work and you need to go buy a
| bigger pipe. They're one of the biggest source of
| surprise cost on AWS.
|
| Eg take a basic data storing application, the cpu and
| storage space are easy to estimate and are the same as on
| prem, but suddenly you also need to estimate your iops,
| and you realize you have no idea about it. Do you have an
| on-prem database running somewhere ? How many iops does
| it need ? Unless you've had to figure it out, you have no
| idea and will never know on prem.
| coder543 wrote:
| Isn't that exactly what the person you replied to said?
| You're showing what you've been charged for previously.
| That part works, at a certain level of detail.
|
| That doesn't show what you _are_ being charged for _right
| now_ , nor does it help you predict what your total costs
| will be at the end of the month.
| enitihas wrote:
| You can opt in for detailed billing report, and get
| detailed daily reports on what you are being charged on.
| You can load it in any db of your choice and ask all the
| questions that you want.
| scarface74 wrote:
| If you set up your infrastructure with CloudFormation (as
| you should), you can get a cost estimation of how much
| your solution would cost.
|
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/User
| Gui...
| djsumdog wrote:
| > CloudFormation (as you should)
|
| A lot of people use Terraform (my shop does) and I've
| found a good terraform setup way better than CF
| templates. You can do tags in Terraform too. You should
| be forced to use their already bad tooling just to get
| correct cost estimates.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Yet another reason to use native tooling. If you want to
| take advantage of AWS features - you have to use AWS
| features.
|
| Blame Hashicorp if they don't have a similar feature.
| mixedCase wrote:
| Moving from Terraform to CloudForm is as pleasant as
| chewing glass, and the last thing we need is more AWS
| lock-in unless you're running an AWS consultancy.
| scarface74 wrote:
| If you are using Terraform you are still "locked into"
| AWS since all of their provisioners are cloud specific.
|
| Also if you are at any type of scale, your IAAC choice is
| the least of your problems.
|
| Have you actually done a realistic project plan and
| estimated how much it would cost to migrate
| infrastructure from one provider to another once you
| reach any scale - including regression testing, auditing,
| training, etc? Do you really just use your cloud provider
| to host a bunch of VMs? Even then it's not that easy at
| scale.
| mixedCase wrote:
| Sigh, I should've gone ahead with the longer version of
| my previous comment that I deleted because I felt that
| pre-emptively responding to this would be unnecessary by
| now.
|
| Yes I've dealt with this issue (to be more precise multi-
| cloud rather than migration, also used other TF providers
| in tandem like the Kubernetes one), and yes your TF
| resources are provider-specific, but being able to handle
| it all with the same tool instead of having to deal with
| an awful vendor-specific tool (to be charitable, because
| the reality is having to deal with mutiple ones and
| having them inter-operate through bash glue) vastly helps
| in reducing and controlling lock-in, and I would argue
| it's the baseline step you have to take if you don't want
| to risk your whole business on a single cloud provider
| not going to the gutter either because they've grown too
| big for their own good or because they're being squashed.
|
| CloudFormation means jumping into the pit of lock-in and
| you can only climb back out by digging your fingers into
| the dirt wall, Terraform means you have climbing gear to
| rappel down and if you have to, get back up without as
| much hardship. Sure you have to put the gear on but your
| descent is controlled and then you can climb back up at
| your own leisure.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Is the only thing you are doing with your cloud vendor is
| using VMs? Not S3? Not IAM? Not SQS? SNS? You don't have
| to go through security audits? Hybrid networks via
| VPNs/Direct Connect? You don't have a massive amount of
| data that has to be transferred? Your DNS entries? Your
| build pipelines?
| mixedCase wrote:
| No longer at that gig, but in order: Kubernetes
| applications using Kubernetes abstractions, S3 API
| abstracted away at the library level, RBAC done through
| Kubernetes (which includes IAM integration), we did use
| SQS and SNS but those were easy to replace given our
| abstractions. No security audits (third party ones at
| least, we did have scripts and checklists for deps and
| GDPR compliance). No hybrid networks, we either had an
| internal API/frontend for our services or we used bastion
| servers for SSH proxying. Wherever data transfer was a
| major issue we stayed within AWS, but that's our fault
| for going with AWS in the first place, which doesn't
| belong to the bandwidth alliance; a hard migration had
| been discussed and informally planned for but punted for
| later. DNS can be handled cross-vendor easily with
| Terraform since it's easy to set a module's outputs to
| another's parameters. Pipelines we ran with CodeBuild and
| hosted in ECR, but running a single command and docker
| pushing to a repo is not something I would even consider
| as a migration pain.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Everything seems easy until you actually get your project
| management organization involved, and your IT staff, your
| QA, your business analysts, your compliance department,
| start allocating cost for your staff etc....
| mixedCase wrote:
| Well that's because you're _locked-in_ :). If you 're
| already locked in, you're screwed and have to work your
| way out or live with it and the consequences that come
| either now or later.
|
| If I get to make the call and I care one bit about the
| business beyond next quarter, I would always have a clear
| way out to heavily reduce risks to a situation that we
| have seen play out many times before with the Oracles and
| IBMs of the world.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The same happened when moving from a colo to AWS...
|
| You can't imagine the red tape moving from Workday and
| their homespun EMR (Healthcare) written 20 years ago
| using Powerbuilder.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I'm training on AWS and part of an AWS infra team - but
| we use Terraform partially because we intend to have
| production support at our company for all three big US
| clouds, and want the IaC layer to be uniform.
|
| I get that there are times to dive all the way in, but
| there is still a part of me that says "Is this what the
| Internet is now?"
| scarface74 wrote:
| You have looked at the provisioners for the different
| providers haven't you?
|
| Terraform in no way provides you an abstraction layer
| over the different cloud providers.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Learning terraform for the various providers = learning
| the different syntaxes and design philosophies of
| different python libraries.
|
| Learning the different IaC tools for each provider =
| Learning Python, Javascript, and PHP.
|
| Also, Terraform does state management and can be used to
| package deployments of apps to different platforms. Our
| IaC pipeline uses Terraform to deploy resources to AWS
| and several other cloud toolsets, all in one language.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The provisioners are the easy part - understanding the
| ecosystem and how the different parts of the cloud
| providers relate is the harder part. I routinely go back
| and forth between C#, Python and JavaScript using the
| official AWS SDKs and I understand how to accomplish what
| I need in either language. Using those same languages, I
| wouldn't know where to start with Azure or GCP.
|
| Using Terraform vs CF is easy compared to using AWS vs
| Azure.
| cure wrote:
| That is correct; I've always found it a missed
| opportunity in Terraform. I still like it a lot as a
| tool.
|
| A unified abstraction layer would certainly work for a
| subset of cloud offerings. Think the more basic stuff
| like EC2, VPCs, etc. Platform specific extensions could
| be handled as optional arguments to the unified objects.
|
| That said, even though you need custom Terraform
| definitions for each cloud vendor, using _one_ IaC tool
| still beats having to use a cloud-specific one for each
| of your deployments. The parent 's point stands.
| bb611 wrote:
| This is really terrible blanket advice, CF is one of AWS'
| worst products in my extensive experience with it (My
| team manages a ~$4 million monthly bill and locked into
| CF well before I joined). It has a number of significant
| limitations that aren't applied to terraform, it's pretty
| important to understand those tradeoffs if you're buying
| in.
|
| Given that AWS supports terraform, it's really on them to
| provide a calculator for it as well. We're large enough
| that we just spent an obscene amount of money on employee
| time and effort to track our billing (lots of automated
| tagging), but until we did that it wasn't uncommon for a
| couple hundred thousand dollars of unnecessary charges to
| hit our bill every month.
| scarface74 wrote:
| How is Terraform better than CF for AWS? What are these
| significant limitations? I also know of plenty of large
| enterprises that use CF.
| exhaze wrote:
| You bring up a good point - it would be a good idea for
| AWS to set some sensible max budget defaults for new
| accounts to prevent surprises.
|
| Since they don't, if you are literally so concerned with
| your current costs for this month, you can set a budget
| and alerts for whatever you want, so that you don't
| exceed some cost. Also, they show you your current cost
| for this month, up until the moment, as well as a daily
| breakdown of your costs.
| coder543 wrote:
| > You bring up a good point - it would be a good idea for
| AWS to set some sensible max budget defaults for new
| accounts to prevent surprises.
|
| I didn't say anything about this at all. It would
| certainly be a nice feature, and one people have asked
| for since the very beginning of AWS.
|
| > Since they don't, if you are literally so concerned
| with your current costs for this month, you can set a
| budget and alerts for whatever you want, so that you
| don't exceed some cost.
|
| Again, this is a strawman. This isn't a response to
| anything I said.
|
| If you're trying to understand how much a new deployment
| on AWS is costing you, and find ways to optimize that,
| you don't care about the total budget of the account, or
| having some auto shutoff. You need detailed, real-time
| information from Amazon, which I've never seen in the
| console.
|
| It's been several years since I've had to be digging
| around in the billing console, so I have no stake in this
| discussion and things might have changed. Based on other
| comments being made around here, I really doubt anything
| significant has changed.
|
| I was just trying to clarify a comment you completely
| misunderstood.
| exhaze wrote:
| > If you're trying to understand how much a new
| deployment on AWS is costing you, and find ways to
| optimize that, you don't care about the total budget of
| the account, or having some auto shutoff. You need
| detailed, real-time information from Amazon, which I've
| never seen in the console.
|
| No one who is working on this cares about real-time by
| the second data - the daily cost is enough.
|
| > Again, this is a strawman. This isn't a response to
| anything I said.
|
| OK, what are you trying to say? If my response above did
| not answer the question, can you give me a one sentence
| summary of the point?
| sam0x17 wrote:
| If you're working with, say ML workloads, daily billing
| is laughably broad. Some workloads run for an hour or
| two, and cost a ton.
| coder543 wrote:
| > can you give me a one sentence summary of the point?
|
| >> I was just trying to clarify a comment you completely
| misunderstood.
|
| Alternatively,
|
| "The billing UI and billing infrastructure is a major
| weakness of AWS when it comes to helping people
| understand what their usage will cost." You can clearly
| see this is true by the large number of people who
| complain about it.
| anonymousab wrote:
| The couple of AWS acquaintances I asked about this said
| that this kind of feature doesn't exist because:
|
| - There's almost no demand for it from the majority of
| their customers.
|
| - Billing code is a big, scary, tangled mess and also
| happens to be the one area where you really can't afford
| to introduce bugs and make mistakes, so meaningful change
| is already exceptionally difficult.
| balls187 wrote:
| > sensible max budget defaults for new accounts to
| prevent surprises.
|
| Amazon, in my experience, has issued organizations a one-
| time credit in cases of surprise bills.
|
| The bigger crux of the issue, is Amazon has democratized
| CapEx into OpEx, and it's too easy to be ignorant of the
| details of infrastructure planning, which is rolled into
| AWS pricing.
|
| Before AWS, IT teams had to plan for and estimate costs
| prior to procuring hardware. This is no longer needed
| with ondemand, programmatic infrastructure.
|
| Engineers, who (reductively) focus on solving business
| problems with code, aren't necessarily thinking about the
| costs of deploying their solutions, the way Ops and IT
| would be.
| Shorel wrote:
| I started using my new account yesterday.
|
| I already got a surprise, because in one place it says
| t2.micro and t3.micro instances are free for twelve
| months.
|
| But, if the instance runs Windows, or the zone is this or
| that, or something else I don't know, the only free tier
| instance is actually the t2.micro.
|
| And then there's the Unlimited option, and CPU credits,
| where if your CPU use goes over 25% for some time, it
| will either: Be throttled so slow as to be useless, or,
| not being free and you still have to pay for each hour of
| use.
|
| And that's just the beginning!
| fragsworth wrote:
| I'm not sure why that would be terribly important though?
| A month of delay in optimizing your services isn't going
| to make or break an average company.
| [deleted]
| StreamBright wrote:
| If the AWS tools fail to provide you this information than
| you can just tag everything (we use scope, stage, service,
| region, owner tags, example: global, dev, hadoop, eu-
| west-1, data-engineering) and it is trivial to generate a
| cost report where you can drill down by environments,
| teams, services, etc.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Exactly,
|
| I'm often fielding questions over on r/aws about how to
| do X on AWS where X is something simple. I then ask are
| they trying to solve problem X or are they trying to
| learn AWS. If it is the former, just use LightSail.
| Outside of serverless applications, _I_ wouldn't want the
| complications of full fledge AWS for a small project and
| I get paid to know the ins and outs of it.
| wolco wrote:
| From where I stand as someone who isn't using Amazon figuring
| out what my costs will be is difficult, impossible and would
| require wasting money on various tests.
|
| With something like digitalocean my costs are fixed. I might
| have misjudged how much I need but can scale up easily or
| down (with effort).
|
| Will Amazon offer fixed pricing? Does Amazom offer fixed
| pricing?
| anaganisk wrote:
| Aws is definitely not for hobbyists, or small applications,
| its a replacement to a datacenter with a lot of variables,
| not a VM. Your better comparison would be DigitalOcean vs
| Lightsail (AWS). So yes.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Yes.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/
| mherrmann wrote:
| > There's a whole suite of tools they provide around pricing
| and budgeting.
|
| It could be there are such tools. But they are impossible to
| find, setup or understand for someone who is not already an
| AWS expert. I recently got a $500 bill from AWS. It was
| impossible for me to find out which S3 buckets (or even
| specific files) caused these costs. I looked at this for half
| an hour and have used AWS before. They just don't tell you
| how to obtain this information. Or maybe they do, and it is
| so well hidden that it might as well not exist. This was a
| horrible user experience. As a customer, I want to know what
| I'm being charged for. The fact that AWS make it so difficult
| make me never want to use them again.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You can get cost breakdown on a more granular level by
| taking advantage of tagging. You can tag your resources
| logically and get a break down by tag.
|
| The biggest mistake I see is that people jump into AWS
| whole hog without doing the research or if they are large
| enough, hiring someone who knows what they are doing.
|
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv
| 2...
| mherrmann wrote:
| I don't understand why I even need to do manual things
| such as "tagging" (besides learning what that even means
| in AWS) to find out something as simple as why I'm being
| charged as much as I'm being charged. I'm sorry. It's
| inexcusable.
| scarface74 wrote:
| And large organizations would complain about why they
| couldn't group their resources like they want to. Having
| individual bucket costs would be of very little use for
| cost allocation and to tie back to something like a
| department. For instance, we tag every resource created
| with the same CloudFormation template with the same tag.
| We can get billing based on an "application" and all of
| its related resources.
|
| Just like AWS is not understandable to someone new, I
| feel the modern front end ecosystem is royal cluster but
| yet and still thousands of people understand it after a
| 12 week boot camp.
| mherrmann wrote:
| You could have both. Let advanced users tag. But give
| less sophisticated users insight into what they're being
| charged for - without having to go through a 12 week boot
| camp.
| exhaze wrote:
| It's literally called "Billing" and the "Cost Explorer" is
| the first item in the navigation when you go to the page.
| I've attached a screenshot and highlighted it for you. FYI,
| this month is the first time I've opened the AWS GUI in 4-5
| months, and it took me about a minute to find the billing
| page and drill into our AWS costs. I've provided an image
| that shows how to get to the cost explorer from "Billing"
| (you can use the search box available on the AWS account
| landing page to type in "Billing" in order to access the
| billing page of AWS).
|
| EDIT: sorry, I forgot to include the screenshot link -
| https://imgur.com/a/tVFoocr
| mherrmann wrote:
| This does not show the costs _per bucket_. Specifically,
| I was interested in the costs for data transfer for each
| of my buckets. As I said, after half an hour of looking
| into the "Billing" in AWS, the Cost Explorer and
| googling around I simply could not find a way to obtain
| this information.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| If this is an ongoing issue and you can't get the
| information from something that is in front of S3
| (cloudfront/your application etc) then you can enable
| bucket logging in the settings (which costs!)
| exhaze wrote:
| You're right, it's shitty of them to not provide that out
| of the box. However, if it's such a big problem for you,
| as others have pointed out, it's easy to solve. If you
| are paying $500/month for S3, you must be processing
| quite a large amount of data - as another poster pointed
| out, there's an easy to fix it. If you weren't going to
| use S3 for this, what would you use instead for this use-
| case?
| scarface74 wrote:
| I literally just search on Google "How do I find the
| price per s3 bucket" and the first link is this.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-
| center/s3-fi...
|
| Why do people think that they can give Amazon a credit
| card number and expect everything to be easy enough for
| them and suitable for a large enterprise? AWS offers
| something for beginners - Lightsail. When that outgrows
| their needs, they can peer their behind the scenes
| LightSail VPC to a full fledge VPC.
| mherrmann wrote:
| I look forward to migrating to Linode's S3-compatible
| object storage. I appreciate that you are agreeing that
| it's shitty of AWS. But I disagree that it's "easy to
| solve". Like I said, I already spent quite some time
| looking into how to solve it. And having to set up
| logging for a bucket (and learning how to do this in
| AWS's complex interface), and if I understand correctly
| creating another bucket to receive those logs, and
| learning how to then obtain and interpret the results?
| Maybe you're above my paygrade but I do not consider this
| easy.
| notyourwork wrote:
| When every company workload and footprint is entirely different
| what alternative do you propose? Different companies have
| different needs and different cloud services suffice those
| needs in really different ways. You can run your database on
| relational, non-relational or flat text file backends. They all
| have different performances characteristics and different costs
| associated with running them.
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| Not to mention that if AWS doesn't price everything correctly
| someone will find out how to abuse it. For example, if AWS
| only charged for outbound bandwidth on S3 I could store
| petabytes of archives for almost free. If they only charged
| for storage, I would host all my high access, small size
| files on there for free. S3 is an oversimplification but it
| applies to other services. If they don't charge for every way
| they can lose money on a service, someone will find it out
| and abuse it.
| wilburlikesmith wrote:
| Brilliantly well put. May I screenshot this to 9gag?
| davedx wrote:
| Sure
| StreamBright wrote:
| I am not sure what you are talking about. We have many millions
| of yearly AWS cost and it is both predictable and
| understandable down to the last cent. One additional thing, I
| am not sure it occurred to you but some infrastructures operate
| on AWS are not sending any significant traffic outwards. S3 is
| used as a cheap and reliable data warehouse storage layer for
| exabytes of data just fine.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| Came here to say exactly this.
|
| There's a level of complexity and nuance in AWS that casual
| users or those on the outside do not quite comprehend. And
| honestly it takes quite of bit of experience and interaction
| to fully understand some of these things. It's not that
| you're getting charged "twice" for S3, it's that there are
| separately line items in the CUR for S3 data transfer, S3
| storage (and S3 API, S3 inventory, etc.). It's confusing to a
| layperson but this level of detail is actually quite
| powerful. You can tune your application to use just what's
| needed.
| kavehkhorram wrote:
| Hey guys,
|
| I faced a similar issue at the company I work for (where a PM
| had activated an instance for months and racked up a $9k bill).
| I've been spending my coronavirus time hacking together a
| service that hopefully makes billing on AWS more clear. It does
| cost optimization and anomaly detection right now, and I plan
| on adding more features as I start to see more use cases.
|
| Check it out if you'd like, and let me know what you think!
|
| www.usage.ai
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I'm always amazed at the complexity of AWS billing. "Why does
| this cost so much" turns out to be an incredibly hard problem
| to answer the moment you don't have 100% perfect discipline
| when it comes to resource tagging.
|
| The fact that there are consultants who specialize in figuring
| out AWS billing was, in retrospect, a warning sign.
| moduspol wrote:
| I usually try to cut them some slack. I mean, they're
| operating this stuff at Internet scale and have never (AFAIK)
| raised prices. They've basically got two options:
|
| * Price things in an intricate way sufficiently specific to
| actual costs of providing the service for many use cases
|
| * Price things more generally in a way that more or less
| probably results in about the same revenue
|
| The problem with option #2 is that it's dependent upon some
| customers implicitly subsidizing others (e.g. any "unlimited
| storage" backup solution). It can work a lot of times, but
| sometimes it doesn't, and at AWS's scale, that could change
| quickly. It'll upset a lot of customers if they then have to
| restructure pricing to account for a small subset of
| customers' use cases being too costly to provide.
| zackbrown wrote:
| To apply established terms to these concepts, the divide
| you're describing is roughly "cost-based pricing" vs.
| "value-based pricing."
| pathseeker wrote:
| >I mean, they're operating this stuff at Internet scale and
| have never (AFAIK) raised prices
|
| Prices should have gone down _because_ they 've continued
| to scale up and go into custom
| cooling/hardware/backbones/etc.
|
| You're basically saying that you're cutting them slack
| because their margins have gotten much larger and they
| haven't decided to raise prices to make them even bigger.
| ses1984 wrote:
| Early customers were taking a bet on a new thing. Later
| customers are buying into the stability of the brand.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Prices should have gone down because they 've
| continued to scale up and go into custom
| cooling/hardware/backbones/etc._
|
| Why should that make prices go down? Prices aren't based
| on cost. They're based on what the market will bear,
| i.e., what customers will pay. If you think AWS is too
| costly, you can go find some other solution. If enough
| customers start doing that that AWS's financial state
| suffers, AWS will have to rethink its price and cost
| structure.
| moduspol wrote:
| Perhaps. All I meant was to show there's never been a
| time where they've had to acknowledge pricing something
| sufficiently badly that they had to go back and adjust
| prices up, perhaps after seeing how customers were using
| it.
|
| The slack I'm giving is for the complexity in their
| billing, not in the price itself.
| joosters wrote:
| Doesn't that kind of problem get _easier_ at large scale?
| It 's like any time you have a limited resource to share
| out. e.g. if an ISP has 150mbits of connectivity, it would
| be difficult to provide a '100mbit' service to two homes -
| one busy user will clearly hit the other. But if you have
| 1500mbits to share out to 20 homes, the service will seem
| much better. As you scale up, it becomes easier to
| provision less per customer.
| inlined wrote:
| Economy of scale is different when you're providing a
| cloud business because your costs (and hopefully revenue)
| are dominated by the head customers. Imagine a company
| whose business model isn't profitable for AWS becomes the
| next Dropbox. Suddenly the tail can't subsidize the head.
| And even if it could, the business is shot.
|
| You always need the head to subsidize the tail (e.g. free
| trials). You can't let the head become unprofitable.
| joosters wrote:
| All these are problems, yes, but my point is they become
| more manageable when you have more customers. Having
| Dropbox as a client would be exceedingly difficult if you
| only have two other customers, but it gets easier as you
| add more customers and scale up.
| moduspol wrote:
| I think that works for ISPs because their service area
| and customer base are arbitrarily defined and within
| their control. They don't have to worry as much about a
| datacenter suddenly opening up in the middle of a
| neighborhood that throws off the profitability of
| everyone else.
|
| And they can also impose things like bandwidth caps to
| curb some less-profitable customers' usage. But cloud
| providers, by design, are charging "per use" and expected
| to scale "indefinitely"... at least for expected use
| cases.
| scarface74 wrote:
| One case that comes to mind is when they started charging
| for S3 API requests because people were using it as a
| free KV store.
| outworlder wrote:
| > The fact that there are consultants who specialize in
| figuring out AWS billing was, in retrospect, a warning sign.
|
| Well, there are whole organizations in my company dedicated
| to installation, procurement, provisioning, ordering(and
| tracking of said orders), of datacenter resources and
| hardware.
|
| We are spoiled.
| doorstar wrote:
| I've been horrified at how bad this is on Azure, I'm sorry to
| hear that AWS has the same issue. I've signed in some
| mornings only to discover that I've been charged $20 for a
| MongoDB instance that's been sitting idle all night. Support
| can only come back with some hand-waving about RUs, a term
| that defies any clear definition.
| zaidf wrote:
| This is a problem across enterprise SaaS companies. At my
| last company (small enterprise SaaS biz <$50M ARR), I got
| so tired of this consuming so much of my time. I literally
| hacked together some code so I could point at any line item
| from any bill generated by our "system" and it would try to
| answer _" why did I get billed $x for this?"_ so a five
| year old could understand.
|
| I wish there were SaaS products that would effortlessly
| audit enterprise SaaS bills with support for more than just
| the top 1% SaaS products.
| doorstar wrote:
| I was poking around with their CLI to see if I could put
| together a cron job - this artifact now costs more than
| $X so delete it. Unfortunately if there's a 'get current
| charges' command I haven't found it.
|
| I have a ticket open with MS support. I suppose it's to
| their credit that they're listening to me but it's been a
| few weeks with only the aforementioned hand-waving. I
| started just sending them screenshots showing that their
| own dashboard showed no usage during the times I'd gotten
| charged.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Dealing with Azure causes me physical pain.
|
| AWS you can poke around and figure it out, Azure is a
| Kafkaesque nightmare of infinitely confusing UI/UX, a
| permission system that is like trying to hit a moving
| target in a dark room, being moved by someone that hates
| you, doing anything seems needlessly complex, and trying to
| replicate/test anything locally is horrible (looking at you
| Azure functions).
| doorstar wrote:
| My sibling...
|
| I'm trapped in this mess because the nature of our Client
| is that they'd consider anything besides Azure as a slap
| in the face, but it's been absolutely the most miserable
| task I've taken on in years.
|
| As a bonus I'm getting side-eyed by teammates who have a
| naive faith in The Cloud and can't comprehend why this is
| taking so long and why I can't just give them a cost
| estimate.
| qchris wrote:
| As an aside, unless I'm reading this very wrong, this is
| the first time I've seen the use of "my sibling" as a
| gender-neutral replacement of "my brother/sister" to
| express empathy. I'm delighted by it.
| ken wrote:
| I'm as anti-AMZN/AWS as anyone these days, but to their
| credit, Amazon has their own teams of consultants who will
| come to your business for free to analyze your usage of AWS
| and tell you how to save money. They openly joked about how
| it was their job to get customers to spend less money with
| their company.
| pathseeker wrote:
| If this team shows up, it means you're spending so much
| money stupidly that they are afraid a competitor will
| easily steal you away with an offering for 10% of the cost.
| Their job is to come in and get you scaled back so another
| sales team can't get a foot in the door.
| skrebbel wrote:
| That's not openly joking, it's sales.
|
| If you feel like you're way overpaying for AWS, you're much
| likelier to look out for alternatives. So if they help
| their biggest accounts save some money, it'll net them way
| more in the long run.
| ken wrote:
| We were in no way one of "their biggest accounts". We
| were a couple guys in a cramped office over a mattress
| store, with a production service so small we could have
| run it from my old laptop. I guarantee it cost them at
| least 10x more to send those consultants over to us than
| we spent on AWS in a year, even before the optimizations
| they pointed out.
| rainyMammoth wrote:
| But here you are, letting us know that they have been
| wonderful sending consultants.
|
| It's part PR, part long term customer acquisition
| biohax2015 wrote:
| Maybe, just maybe it's a good product with good customer
| service? And the reason it costs so much is because you
| get what you pay for?
| [deleted]
| 1MoreThing wrote:
| Exactly. It's about developer lifetime value, not single
| customers.
| bt1a wrote:
| Right - it gives the illusion that you're 'getting an
| amazing deal and wow these people are great' when it
| reality you're probably getting gouged without the
| consulting and have to opt in for fair prices.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Yep. To be frank I think that spinning it as a joke and
| not an honest retention tactic almost feels like lying.
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean it's a retention tactic at the company scale but
| for the individual consultant they're genuinely trying to
| help you out.
|
| I frequent a local family-owned Italian restaurant/pizza
| place and my usual order jalapenos, banana peppers, and
| roasted garlic so I do a build you own. Totally fine,
| happy to pay the price. But one day I come in and the
| woman working the take-out counter sees my order before
| it goes in and tells me that if I order a "meat lovers",
| remove two toppings and sub the rest it comes out way
| cheaper.
|
| So now I'm the vegetarian that always gets a meat lovers
| and she makes the joke every time I come in.
|
| I don't think it's weird or nefarious that a business
| doesn't have completely consistent pricing and holding it
| differently can save you money. When we spec out services
| on AWS we're using the official calculator when deciding
| whether it's "worth it" so to us at least it genuinely
| feels like we're saving money.
| reificator wrote:
| > _So now I 'm the vegetarian that always gets a meat
| lovers and she makes the joke every time I come in._
|
| I've seen that before, and I've also seen the opposite
| where people buy the veggie pizza and then add a meat or
| two on top to get a cheaper supreme pizza.
| jeffasinger wrote:
| I did an online food ordering startup a ways back, and it
| was very surprising how few of the restaurant owners we
| talked to had clearly thought through pricing strategy
| for things like this.
|
| We had originally gone in with clever ways for owners to
| describe how different changes would affect the price of
| an item, but ended up landing on just a giant matrix
| where they could input the end result price for any
| combination. The owners couldn't articulate their own
| pricing well enough to model it well.
| robert_g wrote:
| There's an open guide[1] that's pretty useful. Amazon also
| publishes (at least some) documentation on Github[2].
|
| [1] https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws
|
| [2] https://github.com/awsdocs
| erwincaco wrote:
| > Amazon Connect AWS version of ZenDesk
|
| Wrong. That should be "Amazon's Cloud-based Contact Center"
|
| > Pinpoint Create transactional emails based on templates.
|
| Pinpoint can do SMS and voice too.
| jaytaph wrote:
| Isn't that what ZenDesk is too?
|
| Yes, pinpoint can do more.. Will update
| nostrebored wrote:
| ZenDesk is a CRM/ticketing system. Amazon Connect integrates
| with ZenDesk CRM.
| derision wrote:
| and if I don't know what ZenDesk is, then you're just
| exchanging one confusing name for another
| mekster wrote:
| Is there a list of all the AWS services and what the counterpart
| it may be for a self hosted open source solution?
|
| Seems many of the actual services may have one.
| [deleted]
| vivekf wrote:
| The title should have been a computer science introduction to
| marketing terms
| vladoh wrote:
| You are missing one of the really amazing services: Snowmobile
| (https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/). It is a real truck, that
| connects to your data center, copies up to 100 PB of data and
| drives back to one of the AWS data centers and dumps the data
| there...
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| And the companion Snowball (https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/)
| capableweb wrote:
| "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of hard-
| drives driving down the highway" or however the saying goes.
| Latency is extremely long, but the bandwidth is crazy once it's
| arrive!
|
| Edit: Original quote (seems I accidentally modernized it a
| bit):
|
| > Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of
| tapes hurtling down the highway - Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
| calmchaos wrote:
| AWS sounds like a good idea until you start calculating the cost
| of the setup with any kind of clustering and moderate data
| traffic.
| pg-gadfly wrote:
| The compute is really a negligible part and one that you can
| severely effect.
|
| Outbound bandwidth is the real killer, going at ~$90/TB
| PetahNZ wrote:
| Or RDS, which jumps from db.t3.medium, to db.r5.large.
| anonymou2 wrote:
| So you give them your data for free then you need to pay the
| ransom money to get it back?
| drcongo wrote:
| It's sad that this is so necessary, but I'm still confused by the
| very first two lines of this list.
|
| > EC2 Virtual Private Servers > Lightsail Amazon's hosting
| provider (vps, dns, storage)
|
| Both of these are VPS? EC2 has no storage?
|
| Absolutely not a criticism of your list, more a comment on how
| baffling AWS is these days. I stopped using AWS once they hit the
| point where I couldn't reasonably be expected to remember what
| all the three letter acronyms were. I still occasionally have to
| use it for S3, Route53 and IAM - but every time I log into the
| console I find that they've removed them from my "pinned"
| services in the menu bar and I have to pin them again. Even this
| tiny detail is enough to make me not want to have to deal with
| that * 1000 by taking up more of the services.
| choward wrote:
| > I couldn't reasonably be expected to remember what all the
| three letter acronyms were.
|
| Just remember if you see an "S" it means simple. That means if
| you can't understand it you must be an idiot. S3 is one of the
| least simple things I've ever used.
| callamdelaney wrote:
| I think pinned items are on a browser basis - because I logged
| into another account on the same browser and it had the same
| pins as my other account, without me setting them.
| drcongo wrote:
| I only use Safari for any actual browsing, I've not noticed
| this happening, just that whatever I pin is gone next time I
| log in. Maybe it's short lived cookie.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Think of LightSail as being more akin to Linode or Digital
| Ocean a simple straight forward VPS without having to setup a
| VPC and being bombarded with trying to navigate 150 services.
| It's also straight forward pricing.
| jitix wrote:
| EC2 requires you to specify the attached storage to it, giving
| you more options; lightsail doesnt. Lightsail is more like the
| ye'old VPS services.
| OJFord wrote:
| Well, to EC2 you attach storage from another AWS service. I've
| not used Lightsail, but from the description I imagine it's a
| more 'single package, quickstart' service mirroring the
| experience you might get from a PaaS like
| DigitalOcean/Scaleway/Vultr/etc. vs. the IaaS style
| provisioning of compute & storage independently.
| s_dev wrote:
| Similar to https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/
|
| Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Is it because they're
| dominant and it adds friction to moving to another provider?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I think "codenames" are easier to reference and discuss once
| you get immersed in the ecosystem. "lambda" vs. "serverless
| compute" - which one do you want to say 30 times a day?
| victords wrote:
| My personal theory is that they made such a bad naming decision
| on their first service that they just committed to it and
| doubled down from there on.
| hinkley wrote:
| Probably because parallelization is not the end-all-be-all of
| management strategies.
|
| Consumers expect most companies to act like a coherent unit,
| (purportedly due to Dunbar's Number), and when you don't have
| enough oversight or leadership everything begins to look
| schizophrenic.
|
| "Self-organizing" is organized chaos. If nobody picks winners
| at the end it never stops being organized chaos.
| adwww wrote:
| This is one of the things I love about GCP.
|
| Kubernetes Engine, Compute, Storage, Memory Store, Cloud SQL,
| PubSub.... almost all of the main services do what they say on
| the tin.
|
| The only downside is - ironically - it sometimes makes googling
| for help a bit tricker. Eg. Are you search for generic cloud
| storage or the Google product with the same name?
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| It is kinda funny and heartwarming when you use Google to
| search for one of Google's cloud products and the first
| result is some competitor.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I know the ins and outs of AWS pretty well, but when I see
| discussions about Azure or GCP, I'm completely lost. It's not
| like I'm a stranger to the development side of the Microsoft
| ecosystem. I've been developing in C# for over decade and have
| used Visual Studio since 1997.
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| >Why does AWS use such convoluted language? Is it because
| they're dominant and it adds friction to moving to another
| provider?
|
| Having gone from AWS in my last role to GCP in my current, I
| can tell you with 100% certainty that for me, AWS' mnemonic
| device naming convention is far, FAR more effective in helping
| me remember which service does what.
|
| S3? Storage. EC2? VM/compute. GCP's equivalent? GCS/GCE. I
| don't do a whole lot with VMs in my role but it takes me a few
| good seconds to remember "GCE" whereas EC2 is instantly
| memorable. Don't get me started on Google's many "Data X"
| services (Datastore, Dataproc, Data Transfer, Data Catalog,
| Data Fusion, Dataprep, Data Labeling).
|
| tl,dr; the lizard part of my brain very much prefers AWS'
| naming style, and I have a hard time remembering GCP's services
| despite the descriptive naming.
| toomanybeersies wrote:
| I think that AWS offers more distinctive names, which helps
| experienced users a lot. EC2 is instantly recognisable as
| meaning Amazon's compute service, S3 is storage. GCE and GCS
| could stand for all sorts, Google brings up "General
| Certificate of Education" and "Glasgow Coma Scale" as the
| first results.
|
| I suppose because of this, Google tend to use the full name
| in most of their documentation. It does make learning how to
| use Google Cloud as a beginner a lot easier though.
| wyck wrote:
| > Why does AWS use such convoluted language?
|
| Because it's run by engineers (not a bad thing).
| chapium wrote:
| Why is lemon sugar flavored carbonated beverage called Mountain
| Dew? Shouldn't the soda companies use less convoluted language?
| Why is Confluent not just called Kafka+? Why isn't Kafka called
| LinkedIn distributed subscriber service?
| rantwasp wrote:
| and more importantly should diet mountain dew be called
| "lemon flavored carbonated beverage" or "lemon flavored
| sugar-free carbonated beverage"?
| zxienin wrote:
| Because your enlightened state is in conflict with their
| commercial interest.
|
| Providing complex answers to simple questions, almost always is
| due to a need to hide sth.
| pg-gadfly wrote:
| It reminds me of cult-speak, where everything has to be
| redefined according to some abstract higher level
| representation, even when it's simple.
| ImaCake wrote:
| This is typical in finance. Many of the financial
| "instruments" are given funny nouns that hide the true
| character of what they are (usually shitty loans, or stocks
| being sold at a mark-up).
| stevievee wrote:
| To add: It might actually help with commercial sales - the
| obfuscation makes it seem like there is more to each product
| than it being a cloud-managed version of what is done locally.
| nerdkid93 wrote:
| > CodeCommit should have been called Amazon GitHub
|
| because Amazon can ignore trademarks? That would have been an
| entertaining lawsuit between Amazon and Microsoft though.
| zamalek wrote:
| > Why does AWS use such convoluted language?
|
| This is the exact reason I prefer Azure. I can use the search
| textbox to find something and the name is usually pretty
| explanatory (but they do have some daft stuff, like 3 different
| queue offerings with pretty vague documentation on the
| differences).
| ben509 wrote:
| I think it's because naming things is hard, that link proves it
| by coming up with worse names for almost everything they tried
| to rename, and often far, far worse.
|
| Imagine the confusion if S3 were called "Amazon Unlimited FTP
| Server." That gets every word wrong, except that "Amazon" is
| merely redundant. It's not unlimited (having to pay for a thing
| is a limit), it's not using FTP, and it's a service, not a
| server.
|
| Or if VPC was "Amazon Virtual Colocated Rack". A "colocated
| rack" means your computer in their datacenter. They actually
| have this service, it's called Direct Connect, because you can
| actually
|
| Lambda does require you've got some vague notion of what lambda
| notation is. But "AWS App Scripts" suggests it's for mobile
| "apps", but it is not specific to those. And it suggests it's
| only for scripts, but you can run an entire application on
| Lambda just fine.
|
| Or even DynamoDB. They recommend "Amazon NoSQL." They're not
| offering many NoSQL databases, just their proprietary one:
| DynamoDB. They have a service that offers many relational
| databases and that _is_ called Relational Database Service.
| pdyck wrote:
| Services like S3 are referred to as ,,object storage". AWS
| Lambda is a service for ,,serverless compute" or ,,function
| as a service" (although it's debatable if these are good
| names for the concept).
|
| My point is that definitely are named for these concepts but
| AWS uses brand names which is quite confusing for people who
| are new to AWS.
| scarface74 wrote:
| It makes it a lot easier to search for on Google though...
| pas wrote:
| Why? They could have simply named them with AWS
| Serverless, or AWS Compute, or whatever.
|
| Using these brand names might make it easier to evolve
| them later, or they really wanted nice sounding names
| because eventually you'd have to write out long phrases
| with the AWS prefix, and that's probably harder to
| market.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| > AWS Serverless
|
| Which serverless? ECS Fargate? Lambda? Step Functions?
|
| There are tons of AWS services which are technically
| "serverless". Even S3 obfuscates away the server.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Los Balancer = HaProxy Serverless
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Those names are extremely generic and each covers many
| completely different service offerings.
| Twirrim wrote:
| Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has been trying really hard to
| make sure things are named in as straightforward a way as
| possible. It was a very early decision pre-launch, and
| unsurprisingly not that hard to stick to. Marketing people
| didn't argue, either, but maybe that's a difference between
| the marketing team backgrounds? Enterprise company CIOs etc.
| don't want to have a translation guide when it comes to
| making purchasing decisions.
|
| Some of the "WTF, how did they come up with that name" with
| AWS comes entirely down to the public name being the internal
| project name, e.g. Snowball. Various engineers and managers
| have facepalmed hard when marketing decided to go with the
| easiest option and use that name rather than come up with
| something meaningful.
| vmception wrote:
| Huh, I can actually appreciate that more now.
|
| Like when you think about if a startup had to sell people on
| a single one of these services, they would have to actually
| say "like an unlimited FTP server BUT" and thats the only way
| they could get into board rooms and they would spend years on
| just that wrong and skeuomorphic branding just to get off the
| ground
|
| Whereas Amazon doesn't have to do that, and doesn't have to
| explain the skeumorphic stuff to anyone, they'll just mention
| it in some conferences about what you can do now, the end.
|
| Yeah, thats really cool. It doesn't mean there isn't a better
| way, but I can see how it isn't as arbitrary as I thought.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Same with Azure. Even when I understand what it does, I am
| baffled of how they came up with the name.
| sudhirj wrote:
| Most sound about right except for Global Accelerator, which isn't
| a way to run your apps on edges, it's a way to route all your
| network traffic through the AWS edges. Make it a bit more
| reliable and faster, and has really cool load balancing and
| routing options.
| nojito wrote:
| How to waste money in just one line each...
|
| Simplifying AWS like this only serves to normalize wasteful
| spending on the "cloud".
|
| This works when the economy is great....not so much when
| businesses are looking to trim costs.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Yes I'm sure you know every single vertical and business model
| well enough to know whether it's a "waste of money".
| [deleted]
| mabbo wrote:
| > Kinesis Collect massive amount of data so you can do analytics
| (like ELK?)
|
| I would say a better description is something like "pay per use
| Kafka".
| jchw wrote:
| Useful and interesting but some of them are either blank or,
| well:
|
| > After reading it over and over again, i still have no idea what
| it does.
|
| > Some quantum thing. It's in preview so I have no idea what it
| is.
|
| > in preview so no idea.
| jaytaph wrote:
| Yes.. some of them I have absolutely no clue on what it does.
| They might serve some edgecase specific for that domain. There
| are a few services in preview which I cannot see for myself
| what it does.
|
| I will try to update and correct services as soon as I have
| more info (or somebody can provide it to me)
| mariodiana wrote:
| No one dast blame this man.
| marz157 wrote:
| Hey, dev here for Robomaker. Most relevant line from our
| overview page is probably "AWS RoboMaker is the most complete
| cloud solution for robotic developers to simulate, test and
| securely deploy robotic applications at scale."
|
| The main feature is the on-demand cloud hosted version of the
| robotics simulator gazebo ( http://gazebosim.org/ ) that
| allows you to run your robot's code in a 3d physics
| environment. You can then take that tested/verified code and
| deploy it over the air via our fleet management features to
| your actual robot.
| jaytaph wrote:
| THanks.. will update this
| skriticos2 wrote:
| Indeed. One of the entries like this is a dedicated robot
| infrastructure service (like, managing real robot hardware
| that does something out there - think delivery robots).
| Certainly out of the usual software domain. They also
| collaborate with a few different quantum computer companies
| that do different approaches to quantum computing (gate based
| and annealing) which is an entirely separate field of science
| and most likely out of the usual comfort zone of most IT
| people.
| superasn wrote:
| This can be a good cheat-sheet and no wonder there have been so
| many attempts at this(1).
|
| Maybe we're better off making this as github page where users can
| send pull requests and add/rewrite to these.
|
| (1) https://netrixllc.com/blog/aws-services-in-simple-terms/ (2)
| https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/
| wegs wrote:
| I'd prefer to see this integrated into the AWS UX.
|
| For an external crowd-sourced version, I'd like to see
| something like this with a column for maturity, and whether it
| actually works.
|
| The classic AWS services are rock-solid, and perfectly
| sufficient to build a business on. Many of the newer ones
| are.... much less so. A green checkmark, yellow question mark,
| and red land mine icon would go a long way towards letting me
| know what I should and shouldn't use.
| karatestomp wrote:
| > The classic AWS services are rock-solid, and perfectly
| sufficient to build a business on. Many of the newer ones
| are.... much less so. A green checkmark, yellow question
| mark, and red land mine icon would go a long way towards
| letting me know what I should and shouldn't use.
|
| I'd like that and also the same thing for languages supported
| by various services and SDKs, which are sometimes supported
| and sometimes "supported".
| imglorp wrote:
| > integrated into the AWS UX
|
| Sure, it should be right in the headline of the service's
| "about" page. The fact that people need this at all is UX
| problem.
|
| If people are reading your "about" page and nobody
| understands what the hell your thing does, maybe your
| marketing, faux-tech, word salad is pointless.
| Frost1x wrote:
| >The fact that people need this at all is UX problem.
|
| Is it a UX problem or is it intentional deep branding to
| further promote vendor lock-in? This is one reason I've
| been opposed to AWS since the early phases--I don't want to
| learn all of their stupid branded vendor-specific
| nomenclature.
| scarface74 wrote:
| If you are any sort of real business, you already "locked
| in" to more than likely a dozen or more third party
| services. I worked at a company whose entire workflow was
| tightly integrated into Workday via APIs, not to mention
| SalesForce.
|
| If you have ever worked in healthcare, the level of
| "lock-in" that they have to their EHR/EMR and various
| other third party services. would make you cry.
| panpanna wrote:
| Well this was really useful.
|
| I didn't knew cloudfront was an Amazon product. I wonder what
| cloudflare people think of that.
| detaro wrote:
| > _I wonder what cloudflare people think of that._
|
| Because of the name? Cloudfront is older then Cloudflare afaik.
| panpanna wrote:
| Didn't knew that.
|
| Given the discussion few months back, I thought maybe this
| was one of those lets-copy-our-costumers-business we-already-
| know-everthing-he-does things.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| CacheFly is another CDN with a somewhat similar name ('CF'). I
| think they're all different enough that things are clear,
| though.
| minitoar wrote:
| Ah I was hoping this was going to pithy/comedic.
| joshfraser wrote:
| Sometimes it pays to be boring. One of the hardest parts of using
| AWS is learning all their silly names for everything. I know it's
| tempting to be cute when naming things, but everyone else wishes
| you would just be clear and descriptive. I've seen this play out
| at startups that love to name servers after galaxies or cartoon
| characters. It's all fine until your new employee onboarding
| guide comes with a massive memorization test before you can be
| productive. Yes, db-master and db-slave are way more boring names
| than Saturn and Uranus, but do everyone a favor and express your
| creativity somewhere else.
| ggregoire wrote:
| Star Wars still seem to be the greatest source of inspiration
| for backend engineers when comes the time to find a name for a
| new microservice.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I think they went through a middle phase of cutesy naming, but
| this seems to have subsided some (to the good).
|
| Simple Queuing Service, Simple Storage Service, Elastic Compute
| Cloud, SimpleDB are names that very much make sense.
| Greengrass, Lightsail, not so much. EKS, Outpost, Ground
| Station, and Lake Formation are more toward the usefully
| descriptive side again, I think.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| Would be really awesome if each row also included the open source
| equivalents.
| harshaw wrote:
| I'll bite. At the very least I would describe S3 as an object
| store (object semantics) and EFS as POSIX file semantics with an
| NFS interface.
| tilolebo wrote:
| Very nice!
|
| I was surprised by 2 descriptions:
|
| Opsworks: I thought it was using Chef under the hood. Is it
| really Ansible?
|
| CloudWatch: it's actually so much more than logging, as it also
| provides timeseries, alerting and even scheduling. Not sure how
| to summarize this, though.
| wraithm112 wrote:
| Everything I've seen about OpsWorks is chef/puppet based.
| Ansible is not mentioned in the opsworks documentation at all.
| I think that's just wrong.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| This is a 100 x better than their website. I've actively walked
| away from Amazon products because I could barely make out what it
| really was and if I could use it for the application at hand.
| Many thanks!
| sixo wrote:
| "Redshift: Warehousing. Store lots of data that can be
| processed through streams."
|
| Not sure what that second sentence means...
| tommica wrote:
| Maybe allows stream reading a database?
| RedShift1 wrote:
| The counterpart to stream processing is batch processing.
| With batch processing you run a job every hour or so and
| calculate a result, with stream processing you immediately
| calculate the result you want as the data is coming in.
| rantwasp wrote:
| nowhere close to 100x. actually it's worse than the aws names
| across the board.
|
| the names have a logic to them but I agree it's intimidating to
| learn hundreds of things at the same time - so you don't. you
| learn the bits and pieces you need.
|
| for example:
|
| EC2 actually comes from Elastic Cloud Compute. You have Compute
| in the Cloud which also happens to be elastic.
|
| S3 is Simple Storage Service. It's a Service for Storing
| things. It's simple because it's just a key-blob storage.
|
| Route53 is obvious if you know what runs on port 53.
| teej wrote:
| Cognito? Lightsail? Redshift? CodeStar? Athena? Polly?
|
| There are loads of AWS services that don't follow any logic,
| they're just distinct, easy to spell nouns.
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| Cognito is an identity service, "incognito" means unknown,
| "cognito" means known. Polly is a joke about how parrots
| talk, the service does text-to-speech. Athena is a goddess
| of wisdom, the service is for querying databases. The name
| is frequently some sort of silly inside joke. Except
| Fargate, that name means nothing...
| core-e wrote:
| I noticed you conveniently left out Redshift. :) What
| about Snowball, Chime, Sumarian, and Route 53?
| rantwasp wrote:
| Here is the redshift:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift#Doppler_effect
|
| It's a tongue in cheek about
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift#Expansion_of_space
| and how
| rantwasp wrote:
| go to:
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/products/
|
| look up your service. each service has a 1 line description
| that captures what it does.
|
| eg Athena = query data in s3 using sql
|
| i don't really get why people cannot be bothered to learn
| what a service does and want to pretend they get it from
| the name. you need to learn the ins and out of the service.
| the name is the least of your worries.
| jonahx wrote:
| > i don't really get why people cannot be bothered to
| learn what a service does and want to pretend they get it
| from the name. you need to learn the ins and out of the
| service.
|
| Names matter.
|
| When your first experience with a product is an opaque
| name or description, it usually tells you one of two
| things:
|
| 1. The people behind it are not good communicators. If
| so, this will likely show up in many of the other product
| details: APIs, documentation, complexity.
|
| 2. The people behind it deliberately chose to be opaque.
| Perhaps they want to make the product seem more important
| than it is. Perhaps they thought marketing jargon would
| help sales. Etc.
|
| You seem to want to frame this in terms of developer
| laziness, but I don't think that's right. Both of these
| are often reliable signals. The criticism here is well-
| justified.
| somestag wrote:
| Yes, this is a huge problem throughout the industry.
|
| The tech world is gibberish. The real world is gibberish
| too, but the comparatively large number of tech products
| (because of the ease of releasing software) really
| exacerbates the problem in tech. Everything is a code
| name, in-joke, or initialism.
|
| If this were limited to public products then you could
| write it off as overly ambitious branding, but you can
| tell it's an issue because _internal_ products suffer the
| same problem. You know it 's bad when you can't even
| navigate your own company's hierarchy because you don't
| know what half the team names mean.
|
| Unfortunately, this will probably never change; there's
| too much precedent. Naming things incomprehensibly is
| fun, it creates a barrier to entry that makes developers
| feel smart, and the tech world doesn't value
| communication enough to change it. In a world where
| stackoverflow serves as _de facto_ documentation for many
| major tech products because their own documentation is
| terrible, I hardly expect those same companies to value
| coherent naming.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| btw, How does AWS amplify fit into this?
| notatoad wrote:
| which i really appreciate when it comes to googling them
| for help with stuff. i can google "aws lightsail" and get
| results directly relating to what i'm looking for. have you
| ever tried to sift through the mess of seo marketing crap
| that comes back when your search term includes "VPS"?
| Uehreka wrote:
| TIL what runs on port 53. I have never understood this name
| and I've been a professional software engineer for 8 years.
| rantwasp wrote:
| now you know. and hopefully route53 will ring a bell every
| time you hear it.
| mraza007 wrote:
| This is useful.
| unixhero wrote:
| Useful, but it contains factual errors: >S3 File storage. Not
| directly used for mounting, but you can directly download files
| from HTTP.
|
| You most certainly can mount S3 buckets, and its done frequently
| in data pipelines throughout the industry[0].
|
| >S3 Glacier Low cost storage system for backups and archives and
| such
|
| Sure but it would be good to include why there is a tradeoff in
| price, why is it low cost? For Glacier its intention is to
| provide storage, but rarely fetch data, as it is very slow.
|
| [0] https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse
| matharmin wrote:
| It's a one-line summary, not an in-depth explanation or
| comparison. "Not directly used for mounting" is a good summary
| of the intended use.
| dirktheman wrote:
| Yes, you can use a S3 bucket and Route53 to host a high
| availability, static website for mere pennies.
| pg-gadfly wrote:
| You should be wary of any hostilities between your site and
| it's users. Even though it can't be brought down, your wallet
| sure can be if you don't set it up really carefully.
|
| You can simply retrieve the page constantly over a
| residential connection to drive up the costs to over hundreds
| of dollars
| eterps wrote:
| How is that a factual error? It didn't say that mounting was
| impossible, just that it isn't directly used for mounting. How
| did you conclude that it's done frequently throughout the
| industry? What percentage of S3 customers do you think does
| this? If I would have to guess I'd say less than 1%. But I am
| happy to learn I am wrong.
| pfortuny wrote:
| You are totally right, and your explanation is perfect. No
| need to bother.
|
| You could also mount gmail accounts as a filesystem.
| unixhero wrote:
| I beg to differ.
|
| I have already argumented against it, and provided evidence
| for my statement [0].
|
| My argument is logically airtight.
| slau wrote:
| Not OP, but my current gig is literally building streaming
| data pipelines on top of S3 using lambdas that only have a
| few hundred MBs of RAM to process gigabytes or more of data.
| S3FS is as close as it comes to mounting in my book.
| tlobes wrote:
| Tested Sumerian and it's a barebones 3D web tool (modeled after
| Unity but more akin to ThreeJS editor) that can be controlled via
| script by other services. One example is being able to do some
| tasks like in-browser AR.
| celsocrivelaro wrote:
| Thank you so much :-). I have no ideia about some services, even
| reading the doc.
| pwdisswordfish2 wrote:
| All AWS services explained in one line:
|
| Overpriced, unnecessary or both.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| Out of curiosity, as a solo developer, what would it take me to
| do on premisis server at home?
|
| I mean in terms of hardware and software stack.
| hagsh wrote:
| Although AWS Braket is just in preview it's pretty safe to say it
| is a Quantum Computer as a Service bundled with a framework to
| write you algorithm in (a la IBM Q and qiskit). The nice thing
| about it is that you have a choice between three hardware vendor,
| all featuring different architectures giving the ability to test
| superconducting, ion trap and annealing systems from the same
| place.
|
| I have no affiliation with this other than being a Physics/CS
| graduate with only one Quantum Computing course under my belt.
| [deleted]
| traeregan wrote:
| Here's the Google Cloud equivalent:
| https://github.com/gregsramblings/google-cloud-4-words
| itsmeamario wrote:
| I came here with the hopes of finding something similar to GCP.
| Thank you!
| topkeks wrote:
| That is an excellent list. There's also a guide that compares
| Google Cloud with AWS and highlights the similarities and
| differences between the two.
| https://cloud.google.com/docs/compare/aws
| StevePerkins wrote:
| > _Lightsail - Amazon's hosting provider (vps, dns, storage)_
|
| > _Kinesis - Collect massive amount of data so you can do
| analytics (like ELK?)_
|
| Based on some of these that I'm already familiar with, I don't
| think I would rely on these descriptions for the ones I'm not
| already familiar with.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I see that AWS IoT Greengrass is missing.
| https://aws.amazon.com/greengrass/
|
| I may be wrong but from what I understood, it's more or less a
| way to manage AWS Lambda functions (cgi-bin scripts), Docker, and
| a MQTT client connected to AWS on your GNU/Linux devices
| (raspbian on a raspberry pi for example, or a x86 pc).
|
| However you still need Ansible or similar to manage the device so
| the actual value is kinda low because if you have a setup to
| manage the device, it's not much more work to manage docker and a
| mqtt client yourself. About running AWS Lambda functions on a the
| device, I think it makes sense for AWS to check the box "IoT edge
| computing with AWS Lambda" but unless you have a huge codebase in
| AWS lambda, it seems to be a bad idea.
|
| In one sentence : "vendor locked half baked IoT platform".
| imglorp wrote:
| Close, greengrass is about pushing real aws lambas down to
| intermediate site gateways (with certs and crypto and
| management), and then you can have very lightweight clients
| with almost no brain talk to that thing. My blurb would read,
| "vendor locked lambdas at the edge to proxy IoT widgets".
| simlevesque wrote:
| Do you use Greengrass ? I think not many people do but I
| really like it.
| imglorp wrote:
| Yes, in anger at last $work. It fit our usecase but it's
| definitely not for everyone. Happy to chat.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Aurora doesn't get a mention either. It's covered under _RDS_ ,
| but still, it seems worth an entry as a service they offer.
| jaytaph wrote:
| The whole lot of IOT services are pretty confusing. Mostly
| because I have no experience with IOT/MQTT in general and it
| took a few days to actually figure out how to create and
| connect things (emulated). I actually bought some IOT devices
| (lamps, sensors) to try it out, but this turned out to be
| vendor-locked without any possibilities for MQTT. I reckon
| somebody with more experience in the IOT field could provide
| more insight in these things.
| dirktheman wrote:
| Do your sensors/lamps use Zigbee? I use the excellent
| Zigbee2MQTT library and a DIY Zigbee sniffer. Now I can use
| most vendor-locked IOT-devices (Hue, Ikea Tradfri, cheapo
| Chinese stuff) in my Home Assistant without the need of a
| separate bridge.
|
| Check if your devices are supported here: https://www.zigbee2
| mqtt.io/information/supported_devices.htm...
| jaytaph wrote:
| The devices have a ESP8266, and they should be easily
| flashed with custom firmware to connect to MQTT. But I
| found that OTA flashing did not work, and the only viable
| option is to solder apparently. I'm dangerous enough
| without a soldering iron in my vicinity.
| speedgoose wrote:
| The IoT world is full of vendor locked solutions and
| platforms that you must avoid. And the joke "the S in IoT
| stands for Security" is very very true, though AWS Greengrass
| is actually pretty good for security, if you don't mind
| sending all your data to a USA company of course.
|
| I would recommend to go opensource and skip the platforms
| that try to lock you in. There is a lot of solutions
| depending on how low-level you want to be. Like HomeAssistant
| if you want high level, or a Mosquitto MQTT broker and
| NodeRed and some dongles on a Raspberry pi if you want to be
| lower level.
| wiremine wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm VP of Engineering for software consultancy
| focused on IoT. We work with startups, midcap and several
| fortune 500s.
|
| I agree vendor lock in must be avoided. I also disagree
| that Open Source is the best approach in all situations.
| Mosquito and Raspberry Pi are fine for smaller projects,
| but if you're going to push 100M or a billion messages,
| you're better off leveraging a IaaS solution like AWS IoT
| Core. At least, until you have a dedicated 24/7 opps team
| that can triage and support the solution.
|
| The trick is to create the right abstractions and
| architectures to migrate your solutions off of AWS and onto
| another solution: Azure, your own, etc.
| jon-wood wrote:
| I'll give it a go:
|
| IoT Core: Managed MQTT broker, and state management for
| devices with intermittent connectivity
|
| FreeRTOS: RTOS operating system for microcontrollers to
| automatically connect to IOT-Core or greengrass.
|
| IoT 1-Click: Manage 1-click buttons that can be connected to
| other systems like Lambda
|
| IoT Analytics: Clean up and save messages from topics into a
| data-store for analytics
|
| IoT Device Defender: Automated detection of misbehaving
| devices
|
| IoT Device Management: Firmware release management
|
| IoT Events: Visually build automation rules based on device
| data
|
| IoT Greengrass: Run Lambda functions on remote devices, and
| manage release of new versions.
|
| IoT SiteWise: Turnkey industrial automation platform
|
| IoT Things Graph: Represent IoT devices in terms of
| connectivity - for example a door sensors connects to a hub,
| which has an internet connection.
|
| And one bonus definition:
|
| AWS Sumerian - A 3D game engine integrated with AWS services.
| wiremine wrote:
| This is a great list. I'd add a few things:
|
| IoT Greengrass - Edge computing that can run Lambda
| functions and ML models on prem.
|
| IoT Core - Managed MQTT broker, state management and rules
| engine for devices with intermittent connectivity
|
| I'm not sure I'd call SiteWise a "automation platform" I
| think it's more of a data collection and visualization
| platform?
| jason0597 wrote:
| Sometimes I sit back and wonder if Amazon makes these names so
| complicated on purpose. Hmm, now that I think about it more,
| maybe they had to come up with these weird names so they could
| trademark them?
| rudolph9 wrote:
| It seems there is a a lot of back and forth on this thread about
| AWS good/bad. On the one side, people seem offended people use
| AWS at all Which common it serves a need and generally does what
| it's supposed to. On the other side it's like Stockholm syndrome,
| do people seriously believe AWS is there for you and hasn't
| trapped you in dependency of their services?
| ct520 wrote:
| Love it! Does anyone know if something similar for competitors?
| More specifically azure?
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| I had this one bookmarked, I think it's originally from 2017.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190508145128/https://www.exped...
| ct520 wrote:
| Awesome!!!!!!! Thank you
| ibatindev wrote:
| Really loved Amazon Braket's explanation
| tr33house wrote:
| a bit tangential: I think a lot of AWS customers would actually
| benefit by hosting on their own machines in a data-center. The
| tools (and hardware) out there have become so good that there's
| minimal benefit to hosting on AWS for more than 4x the price. A
| lot of DCs also accept shipments so that even makes things
| easier. The trouble is that we've been conditioned, as an
| industry, not to think for ourselves or dare question certain
| accepted norms/practices. AWS/Azure/GCloud is great for some but
| I suspect it's for a much smaller subset that we want to accept.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I used to feel like "the cloud is just someone else's computer"
| but I have changed a bit.
|
| If you do cloud native, there can definitely be pricing and
| peace of mind benefits. The idea that you can deploy a globally
| redundant database with automatic backups, with zero
| installation or server/software maintenance, is pretty amazing.
| Lambda is awesome and powerful, AWS IAM security model is
| revolutionary vs. so many different network/LDAP security
| policies.
| koheripbal wrote:
| That's what we (mid/small-sized company) with couple dozen
| machines. It is probably 10% the cost of AWS - but you do need
| to have at least one person that can handle the servers when/if
| there are issues.
|
| That one person only needs to devote maybe 2-5% of their time
| to it (once the systems are setup), so it's still a net gain.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Yeah, we use a mix of AWS and self hosted machines. We've had
| up to 40 servers with this method and devoted similarly
| trivial amounts of time to it. If you want it to be long term
| sustainable, you probably want at least 2 people that can
| handle it, so they can go on vacation.
|
| If your goal is to be the next billion dollar company, it
| probably doesn't matter that much. But if you're self-funding
| and need a sustainable business model from the beginning,
| there's a huge growth phase (mid-sized) where the cost
| savings from doing this sort of thing can be large enough to
| be worthwhile.
|
| I'm not sure why so many developers seem afraid of hardware.
| Back in the early 2000s it definitely felt more commonplace
| for developers to be able to deal with it. Maybe it's because
| we grew up having to deal with our own in the form of
| desktops. Nowadays it seems like lots of people just use a
| macbook. And that's their only exposure to hardware
| aptrishu wrote:
| mediaconnect - to transport live video mediapackage - package
| live/on demand video content mediastore - store video assets for
| live/on demand video content
| syats wrote:
| Is there something similar for Apache projects?
| adwww wrote:
| Ha good luck explaining in one sentance the difference between
| Flume, Spark, Storm, NiFi, Camel, Apex, Flink, Beam.....
| faizshah wrote:
| I'll try. Heres what u should know from these:
|
| Fast, Reliable, Stream Processing - Flink
|
| Data Science on Big Data - Spark
|
| Reliable Distributed Log Aggregation - Flume
|
| Low Code Data Flows w/ GUI - NiFi
|
| Zapier for Enterprise Software - Camel
|
| A Single API for Batch and Stream Jobs. Execute on Spark,
| Flink, managed services etc. - Beam
|
| Never heard of anyone use Apex over Flink. Storm community
| has branched off into Flink, Spark Streaming, Heron and Cloud
| Dataflow.
|
| Explaining Spark vs Flink is quite hard tho.
| adwww wrote:
| Wow that's actually a pretty good effort.
|
| We use Camel, Spark and Beam to do much the same thing at
| my work, so despite using them all semi regularly, I've
| never known why you'd pick one over the other.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| From the little I know,
|
| Spark was built as a Batch job solution. Flink was built as
| a Streaming solution. Since Spark needed to adapt, they
| leveraged micro-batching to operate as a streaming
| solution.
|
| They are very similar today. _Maybe_ some remnants of the
| original design make Spark "slightly less appropriate" for
| pure streaming usecases, or possibly less able to iterate
| on future features/optimizations, but so-far that line of
| reasoning has been only speculation.
| faizshah wrote:
| So Flink differentiates in stream processing in two major
| ways:
|
| - Flink guarantees exactly once stream processing through
| a barrier checkpointing system.
|
| - Flink has very detailed APIs for handling state and
| doing stateful stream processing.
|
| Additionally, Flink has one of the most active
| communities in the Apache Software Foundation:
| https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-
| softwar...
|
| In situations where you want to create a streaming
| application with persistent state you might choose Flink
| over spark streaming.
| gunnarmorling wrote:
| My awesome open-source data engineering list [1] covers a few
| Apach projects. Contributions welcome!
|
| [1] https://github.com/gunnarmorling/awesome-opensource-data-
| eng...
| richrichardsson wrote:
| > VPC Create your own VPCs within AWS
|
| Not particularly helpful if you have no idea what a VPC is! Of
| course it takes 2 seconds to search this for yourself, but still.
| wartijn_ wrote:
| Isn't VPC a wel known term? I guess the author just included
| that definition to make the list complete.
| jaytaph wrote:
| I've updated it to "virtual private network" instead.
| kube-system wrote:
| You're never going to please everyone, but I think that
| might be confused with a VPN.
|
| Amazon simply describes it as a "virtual network"
| 013a wrote:
| > Lightsail: Amazon's hosting provider (vps, dns, storage)
|
| Doesn't feel like accurate description for Lightsail, nor a
| useful one. Maybe something like "simplified deployment and
| billing for some AWS resources, including VPS, databases, DNS,
| and load balancers"
|
| (listing "storage" as something Lightsail does is kind of weird;
| of course, it does instance-attached block storage, you couldn't
| have a VPS without that. critically, it has no S3-like blob
| storage product, and I think that's what most people would
| associate the general word "storage" with, but maybe I'm wrong
| about that).
| flurdy wrote:
| Sometimes I feel it is easier described by saying what its main
| competitor is.
|
| Lightsail is basically AWS' version of Heroku and App Engine.
|
| (i.e. a PAAS)
|
| I wish Google would also do this. Many times on GCP's website
| or at Google Next you try to decipher what the product is that
| they are talking about, then you realise "ah, it is their
| version of S3, CloudFormation etc". If they just had said that
| at the start...
|
| Of course, no company will do this, unfortunately.
| rubber_duck wrote:
| I've seen companies post feature comparison charts listing
| competitors, they are very useful when switching from a
| different provider or discovering what the product does in
| terms of established player
| 013a wrote:
| Though, you risk the nuances of the comparison being lost.
|
| Lightsail is not comparable to Heroku or App Engine. Its
| comparable to Linode or Digital Ocean. Its not a PaaS; its a
| simplified VPS provider.
|
| Heroku and App Engine operate at the application layer, with
| limited direct access to the underlying operating system.
| lost_name wrote:
| Your statement made me wonder if someone else had done this,
| and sure enough I found something --
| https://www.cloudcomparisontool.com/
|
| Look for "Object Storange" for instance and in the row will
| be links to all the competing services, so you could pretty
| easily do this to learn about competitors through the one you
| know... At least for the big players.
| itsmeamario wrote:
| Isn't this wrong? At Google's Storage options, it says
| Google doesn't have Backup or Disaster Recovery options.
|
| As long as I know, aren't those types into Cloud Storage -
| nearline and coldline object storage types?
| andarleen wrote:
| basically, AWS is an ESB sold for parts. understanding this, is
| the first step in building a competing service.
| ak39 wrote:
| Excellent! We need this for esoterically named Javascript
| frameworks too.
| v8engine wrote:
| Reminded me of these similar threads I read a while earlier:
|
| Azure:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190321175020/https://www.exped...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442597
|
| AWS: https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286
| jaytaph wrote:
| I figured somebody has done this before. I purposely did not
| look for it to keep my findings unbiased. It was fun clicking
| on random services and tweak with it until figuring out what it
| was for and how to use it (and actually see some results)
| philipodonnell wrote:
| Any update to the Azure list anyone has seen? 2017 is a long
| time ago.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| New Azure services tend to have names like "Cognitive
| Services Speech" or "Cognitive Services Image Recognition" or
| "Azure Stateful Functions"... There's not a lot to riff on.
| dynamite-ready wrote:
| Would love to see an update to the Azure list.
| barry27 wrote:
| "AWS DeepComposer Computer generated music. It's as horrible as
| it sounds."
|
| it's so true. go to aws and find this deep mind composer. play
| twinkle twinkle little star. press 'generate composition'. now
| play it again. wtaf.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-05-26 23:00 UTC)