[HN Gopher] Show HN: Vantage - An alternative AWS console focuse...
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Show HN: Vantage - An alternative AWS console focused on developer
experience
Author : StratusBen
Score : 112 points
Date : 2021-01-12 18:09 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vantage.sh)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vantage.sh)
| changxu wrote:
| I got a demo of Vantage recently and being able to build
| dashboards for each environment (eg dev, staging, prod) seems
| really useful
| yevpats wrote:
| Looks good, congrats! Open source alternative
| https://github.com/cloudquery/cloudquery
| neom wrote:
| This is awesome. Putting yet another tool you don't have
| control over in your toolchain seems to be causing headaches
| for a lot of developers with big applications these days.
| Relying on other peoples services is always a risk, great to
| see there are OSS alternatives.
| gagejustins wrote:
| At DigitalOcean (where I didn't overlap with Ben) we obviously
| thought a lot about how to improve the DX around interacting with
| cloud resources, both GUI-based and programmatically. Great to
| see someone taking that idea to its natural next step :)
| jensenbox wrote:
| I think there needs to be better pricing. I know pricing is hard
| but there should at least be a call to action if you have much a
| much bigger spend than what is on the pricing page.
| StratusBen wrote:
| This was a miss for me personally. We added a few more Q&A
| around this but aren't pushing any changes to the site until
| after launch now.
|
| The answer is essentially we have custom plans available and
| you just need to contact support@vantage.sh - we just want to
| understand your scale and use case. In some cases we aren't the
| right fit right now. For example, we spoke to a company with
| ~$20M in monthly AWS costs and told them we need to get back to
| them before we can realistically support them.
|
| We'll hopefully have this updated tomorrow. Thanks for this
| call-out.
| aynsof wrote:
| Congratulations on the launch. This looks fantastic!
|
| AWS's release cadence is absolutely crazy - I can barely keep up
| with all the new releases. Are you planning on supporting all AWS
| services? If so, how are you planning on keeping up?
| StratusBen wrote:
| Thanks so much!
|
| We are letting our users dictate what services we support. We
| can typically add support for a new AWS service in a few hours
| at best or ~2 days at worst.
|
| The nice thing about Vantage is that its essentially a
| personalized console just for you - so even if we add support
| for a bunch of AWS services you'll have a console just for what
| services you're using.
|
| Also at one point we hope to hire some more engineers to assist
| with development progress.
| bberenberg wrote:
| Am I understanding correctly that if I have over 500 a month in
| spend there is no free trial option?
|
| Also FYI the email verification hit my spam box on Gmail.
|
| Edit: Also is there any way to have multiple users on a Vantage
| account?
| StratusBen wrote:
| If you have over $500 per month of AWS spend, you are still
| free to use the product (no credit card required to get
| started) and everything will work but certain features will be
| restricted.
|
| For example, cost transparency reports will require an upgrade
| to use for spend over $500 per month. The specifics are
| detailed on our pricing page here: https://vantage.sh/pricing
|
| We are taking a look at what it would take to offer a free
| trial on our end in the future as well.
| bberenberg wrote:
| Makes a lot of sense. Theres an interesting item I noticed:
|
| -You limit based on spend
|
| -You don't support all AWS Services
|
| -As a result you don't see all of our spend
|
| -Which means you actually limit based on spend of supported
| services? (I think?)
| StratusBen wrote:
| That's correct.
|
| It also aligns our incentives with insuring we do as good a
| job as possible with appropriately representing your costs
| :)
| itisit wrote:
| In a sea of CMP options, what sets Vantage apart? Sincerely
| asking, as I cannot tell from the site's docs. And does Vantage
| leverage AWS Cost Anomaly Detection in any way?
| poletopole wrote:
| I was just thinking the other day whomever does this will be very
| rich. AWS' console is the worst.
| abarrettwilsdon wrote:
| I use Vantage and it's definitely a good product and all but the
| real value is every hour you don't have to spend using AWS
| directly.
|
| I would pay _so_ much money to never have to use Cloudwatch and
| AWS Cost Management again. Thankfully, I qualify for the vantage
| free tier for quite a while longer.
| acnewyork wrote:
| Congratulations on the launch. The cost estimation feature is
| awesome - very useful for people like me who are not very good at
| cleaning up resources. Also like the cross-region view without
| having to switch console regions.
|
| This looks promising - good luck!
| StratusBen wrote:
| Thanks!
| synunlimited wrote:
| Any thoughts on a self hosted version? (I didn't look too closely
| at all the marketing stuff if this is already addressed)
|
| Would be nice to put something like this up behind our own VPN
| auth etc
| StratusBen wrote:
| We have been asked about this a bunch, yup.
|
| It isn't something we're going to get done in the near term but
| if you'd like to discuss, I'd be happy to chat about it. Feel
| free to email me at ben@vantage.sh
| trestenhortz wrote:
| That's a mammoth task to take on.
|
| Which AWS services do you cover?
| scheub wrote:
| They have a page for this on their docs:
| https://docs.vantage.sh/supported_services/
| dazzeloid wrote:
| Within 30 seconds of signing up for Vantage I discovered an old
| unused EC2 instance I was still paying $17/month for. This made
| me realize how weirdly hard it is to see a usable cost breakdown
| by resource on AWS...converted :)
| StratusBen wrote:
| This brought such a smile to my face. Thank you for sharing and
| happy we could help.
|
| A lot Vantage users have the use-case of using Vantage purely
| for "insurance" of things going awry like this.
| stunt wrote:
| Everything that AWS offers comes with lots of caveats. I'm happy
| that good competition from Azure is forcing AWS to simplify some
| of of their services and make things a bit more straightforward.
| jdmcd wrote:
| We've been using Vantage for a few months now and it's a really
| great layer on top of the AWS console. I particularly like the
| correlation of the metrics right in the dashboard - makes light-
| weight DevOps real easy.
| msoliman wrote:
| This is a godsend. We're running multiple accounts and different
| regions on AWS, and I believe Vantage will be phenomenal. Excited
| to use it.
| foreigner wrote:
| I've always wondered why AWS doesn't just open source their
| console. it's such a usability disaster and there's so many
| developers that would love to contribute improvements to it.
| Wouldn't that make financial sense to Amazon?
| londons_explore wrote:
| Does the dashboard use non-public APIs?
| chippiewill wrote:
| From Amazon's perspective being unable to easily see what
| resources you have in your account might be a feature, not a
| bug.
| itisit wrote:
| AWS Cost Explorer easily reveals all resources in an account:
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-cost-
| explorer...
| StratusBen wrote:
| Hi HN,
|
| Vantage is an alternative to the AWS console focused on developer
| experience and cost transparency. My background is in public
| cloud where I was the product lead for DigitalOcean's Droplet
| product and at AWS on the container services product management
| team. Our team is 100% bootstrapped with two technical co-
| founders and a designer.
|
| Vantage is ReadOnly by default and is meant to work alongside
| your existing automation tools. We aim to help address two
| problems: (1) navigate and organize resources across multiple AWS
| services, regions and accounts in an intuitively designed
| experience and (2) show where your costs are coming from in a
| simple manner. Some of our users have described us as "Mint.com
| for AWS accounts."
|
| In the future we are looking at automated recommendations to save
| you money, help identify orphaned resources and get into
| deployment of applications. In addition, we look to add support
| to other public cloud providers. For example imagine seeing your
| bandwidth usage on S3 and being able to automate a Cloudflare
| integration. Or see your Heroku and AWS resources in one place
| and get comparisons across providers.
|
| This post represents our first official "launch" and we are eager
| to collect feedback. Please have mercy :)
|
| Feel free to contact me directly at ben@vantage.sh if I can be
| helpful to you in your infrastructure journey.
| adwww wrote:
| Congrats on the product launch, looks a neat UI.
|
| AWS easily has the worst UX of the three major clouds I've
| used. From that perspective my favourite by far is GCP.
|
| Do you forsee supporting other cloud vendors? I guess there is
| a lot less demand for others, in terms both of number of users,
| and also Google and Microsoft UIs are a bit less awful to start
| with...
| StratusBen wrote:
| Thank you! Great question. We are planning on supporting GCP,
| Azure, DigitalOcean and Heroku in the future and have users
| who have actively been requesting support for all of them.
|
| Additionally - I think we can build a truly objective cloud
| console that shouldn't be relegated to just public cloud
| provider services.
|
| For example: Why can't scale.ai sit alongside ML offerings
| from AWS and GCP? Why can't Cloudflare see S3 egress and have
| Vantage facilitate an integration? Why can't you auto-
| replicate an environment from Heroku or DigitalOcean to
| AWS/GCP/Azure? These are some ideas we have going forward.
|
| Currently we have multi-account support for AWS and have been
| thoughtful with our architecture to quickly add other
| providers going forward so stay tuned :)
| lawnchair wrote:
| Looks nice! Surprised something like this hasn't come out
| sooner. The AWS UI is a hot mess. Good luck.
| raylad wrote:
| How does it handle credentials?
|
| What's the potential for Vantage being hacked and the hackers
| gaining admin access to your users' AWS accounts?
| StratusBen wrote:
| The provided CloudFormation stack creates a Cross Account IAM
| Role with a list of read only permissions. We don't accept
| access keys or secrets.
|
| - A permissions overview is here (most aren't used for now).
| This list was made from the AWS-managed IAM policy of
| "ReadOnlyAccess" but whittled down to remove things like our
| ability to read from S3 Buckets or Databases:
| https://docs.vantage.sh/permissions/
|
| - The latest CloudFormation stack is here: https://vantage-
| public.s3.amazonaws.com/x-account-role-creat...
|
| As for security, we are leveraging best practices learned
| from our time at AWS and DigitalOcean. Every person on our
| team has spent time at a public cloud provider and applying
| what we've learned there to Vantage. We've also been in
| contact with certain AWS employees to ensure we have proper
| setups.
| dastbe wrote:
| for what its worth, there is a much better scoped
| ViewOnlyAccess managed policy that makes a much better
| distinction about what is reasonable read-only access
| (ecs:listClusters) and not reasonable read-only access
| (dynamodb:Query)
| StratusBen wrote:
| That's good feedback. Customers can also give us a Cross
| Account IAM role with whatever permissions they'd like
| and Vantage _should_ work accordingly in a gracefully
| degraded fashion.
|
| For example: If you only want to give us access to EC2,
| things should theoretically work.
|
| To use a custom cross account IAM role all you need to do
| is email support@vantage.sh and we can help out with some
| other configuration details to get it going.
| philsnow wrote:
| I'm so refreshed to see this designed this way. I assumed
| that they would be asking for an API key or equivalent,
| because I don't know anything about the product team or the
| company and this bad behavior is so bog-standard.
|
| I beg you to blog heavily about this approach, especially
| if you find success with it / it doesn't provide a very
| negative user experience. See if you can get featured on
| enterpriseready.io or something.
| StratusBen wrote:
| Hey, thanks for that comment and I'm glad folks are
| noticing our approach. We are happy to blog about it.
| We've had a tremendous amount of success with it.
|
| Security is a top concern of ours and this was really the
| only option for what we are doing.
| trestenhortz wrote:
| How does this work? Do you have servers that connect to AWS using
| my credentials?
| StratusBen wrote:
| We wrote up a quick overview of how Vantage works here:
| https://docs.vantage.sh/connecting/
|
| tl;dr: The Vantage application (hosted on AWS) interacts with
| your AWS account through something called a Cross Account IAM
| role that defaults to read only permissions.
| VectorLock wrote:
| Although this is a nice little simplified view into your AWS
| account I think calling it an "alternative AWS console" is
| misleading because you can't actually do anything with it, use it
| to make changes, etc.
| StratusBen wrote:
| It's a fair call out and something we've struggled with in
| messaging at this stage of the company. It's hard to keep
| messaging simple but also be succinct with what we are
| providing. We will be iterating on this over time.
|
| That being said - we are slowly adding management actions and I
| do believe we will be compatible with a number of AWS services
| in due time. For example, you can manage Route 53 record sets
| directly from Vantage. We wrote a post up on it here:
| https://medium.com/@bensign/raising-the-bar-for-the-route53-...
| OutsmartDan wrote:
| Crazy how you need a tool that reads another tool to figure out
| how much you're spending for the original tool.
|
| I'm sure there was a purpose for how the AWS console was
| originally built, but if someone spent this much time for an
| alternative, there's a clear problem in its original conception.
| dastbe wrote:
| finally getting to see a demo of this, and all I have to say is
| freakin' boom
| grinich wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
| k__ wrote:
| I was a bit whelmed when I used it.
|
| I expeced an alternative to the AWS console, but got a monitoring
| dashboard. Didn't seem like I could do much with it besides
| looking at my resources.
| StratusBen wrote:
| Out of curiosity - what else would you like to do? We're always
| open to feedback. The only write actions we have are around
| Route 53 detailed here but we're adding more soon:
| https://medium.com/@bensign/raising-the-bar-for-the-route53-...
| k__ wrote:
| I guess, I would like to do what I can do with the actual AWS
| console. Provision and update my resources. Otherwise it's,
| like I said, only another monitoring dashboard.
|
| I mean, that isn't bad, it's probably doing a good job at
| that. But I guess, I simply expected more interactivity from
| an AWS console replacement, haha
| random5634 wrote:
| Isn't it supposed to be read only for security - that's at
| least a big benefit in my book. Ideally without dynamodb
| query permission either. etc
| k__ wrote:
| Sure, totally understand that. It's just not what I think
| about when I read AWS console replacement.
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