As a seasoned AWS developer, I love this feature. However, I wonder how the increasing complexity of AWS affects new devs as they try to grok the offered services. AWS typically does a pretty good job hiding advanced features from beginners, but I wonder how long they can do that.
Are you seriously suggesting that someone who wants to use AWS should go and read all the documentation and watch all the official videos available? That would take literally years. It's huge.
It also doesn't solve the problem. If the user makes a mistake they still lose a ton of money.
It's a really interesting problem. It's getting too big and too scary for a new developer to jump in and try AWS services, which means new devs will move on to newer services with better UX. I wonder if this sort of problem is one of the few existential threats AWS could actually face. Its possible it could end up as the Oracle or Salesforce of cloud services, very successful in enterprise but definitely not a good thing to have on your resume if you want to join a startup...
In my opinion, AWS can be challenging for developers who are not familiar with cloud. The main issue is that it's not very user-friendly to fully utilize all the features of AWS through the Management Console alone. Here are some specific challenges:
1. Constantly switching between different components can cause frequent context switches, making it harder to work efficiently.
2. AWS offers a wide range of capabilities, and developers may struggle with figuring out how to effectively combine them in real-world scenarios.
3. There are many concepts and security restrictions within AWS, such as IAM, which adds complexity to the learning curve.
To make the most of what AWS has to offer, developers need to invest time in studying extensive documentation and even learn Infrastructure as Code. Unfortunately, this can slow down the implementation of innovative ideas.
Fortunately, there are a few new tools that can help address these problems. For instance:
AWS is lean so they build what's easy for them to build, not what should exist. You can gauge how hard a feature is by how long it took them to implement it.
No - I wish they'd release fully baked features before starting new ones - i.e. there'd be nothing to halt. I realize it's not that simple, but, generally speaking - I do not see near the level of readiness/polish/documentation out of existing features as exists on AWS.
That depends on what level of knowledge you are based on. The UX of AWS offers even leading experienced admins and developers some surprising stumbling blocks.
How is this so complicated? I shudder to think of the amount of developer hours wasted by the weirdness and complexity of AWS. Really wish they would prioritize usability and developer experience.
Ah, so now the developers will service the AWS instances from your end which means they can work less on delivering new features... also left out of the equation quite often :)
The AWS horror stories never cease to amaze me. It's like we're banging our heads against the wall expecting a different outcome each time. What's more frustrating, the AWS zealots are quite happy to tell you how you're doing it wrong. It's the users fault for misusing the service. The reality is, AWS was built for a specific purpose and demographic of user. It's now complexity and scale makes it unusable for newer devs. I'd argue, we need a completely new experience for the next generation.
When I read the announcement this morning, it occurred to me that the reason I like AWS so much, and what separates them from other cloud offerings, is that they're doing stuff dev teams actually want and can use (not impenetrably complex tech we could use with some vendor consultancy). Import features like this are trivial for AWS to implement - but will be a step change for some customers.
Last generation vendors saying 'anyone can do what AWS are doing' is just crap. You can't buy the enthusiasm these guys have - and its not just one individual - if you talk to anyone from AWS (and they're often around nights/weekends to talk about stuff) they are in a different lane to the competition or vendors that should be the competition.
Huh. One of the biggest 'drawbacks' of using AWS as a production platform is that making your development environment look like production is hard.
Having to deploy to test is cumbersome and having a cost associated with each test can definitely introduce some sort of 'stress' and encourage people to not test incrementally.
I wonder if this changes that.
Having services like S3, Lambda and SQS available locally sounds super interesting.
I will definitely keep an eye on this.
One other thing I would like to see is CloudFront, which can be very hard to start with due to its opaqueness.
Having to wait 20+ minutes between configuration changes is very demotivating.
Does this take away the need for customers to develop their own tooling to interact with various AWS services? It's hard to understand what this is doing.
This plays so well with the theory of AWS taking a slice of all web activity. They are commoditising more and more complex tasks and enabling huge number of engineers to bootstrap their idea with amazing tech from day 1. A huge jump from S3/EC2 to this. Commendable.
Amazon seem to have a disadvantage here though. This kind of tool is aimed at non-developers who want to glue stuff together. With Zapier, they register an account and get stuck in – straightforward. With AWS, they register an account and are instantly overwhelmed with a million different things. AWS is too big and unfocused for the target market. I've seen developers hit a wall once they get on board AWS because it's just too much to deal with. You think the AWS dashboard is any friendlier to non-developers?
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