Ask HN: Is the AWS console developers friendly? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is the AWS console developers friendly?

8 pointsCubeRoot2710 comments

I've been using AWS for nearly 10 years. Recently, I've noticed that developers often come to me with questions about basic operations, such as how to SSH into instances, configure security groups, and debug networking issues. Sometimes they also need guidance when trying to set up services like ECS or SES.

Any thoughts on this? Was the AWS console designed to serve infrastructure engineers or DevOps professionals? Is it normal for developers to struggle with it?

Thanks!

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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:

- Plutolang: https://github.com/pluto-lang/pluto

- Winglang: https://github.com/winglang/wing

- Nitric: https://github.com/nitrictech/nitric

AWS used to be simple. However, they added and added and added more stuff to it.

Maybe if you use AWS all the time, it makes sense. Howevet, as someone who was just an occasional user, it became far too confusing. I closed our account and found other solutions.

Thank you. Could you please share the other solutions you have found?

Also, the new stuff wasn't really unique. Some services are just a variation on others. So even using AWS, there are half a dozen ways to solve the same problem. It is just way too much.

While the console has so many components and it may actually be impractical to understand the entire console, AWS has fantastic documentation better than that of any cloud solution that I have used.

Everything I needed to know was just a few Google Searches away to the official AWS documentation. They are very well written specifically for standard tasks.

The support is also really good, it light years ahead of what you would get from another service like Google Cloud.

You don't have to understand the entire console. You just need to know a few components that will be useful for your situation.

The AWS Management Console aims to be user-friendly but may pose challenges for developers not well-versed in infrastructure concepts. It caters to a broad audience, including developers, infrastructure engineers, and DevOps professionals. While AWS has improved the user experience, developers may find certain operations less intuitive. Many organizations use infrastructure as code solutions like AWS CloudFormation or Terraform for complex tasks. AWS also promotes the use of the CLI and SDKs for a more programmatic approach.

The console exposes the underlying infrastructure pretty well. These developers might not know how the actual service they are using works in detail, which is fine, but the console won't help with that.

AWS has the some services that supposedly are easy to use like Lightsail but I don't have experience with them.

If I were to build the server myself I can setup my own ssh keys, ports.. etc on my linux machine. Whereas in AWS I find my self spending a whole day figuring out how to write aws roles for each resources, where to click to get somewhere... etc. So no. AWS is not developers friendly.

Using the console is an anti-pattern.

It's simpler than Azure and GCP

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