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Comment by upon_drumhead | Hacker News Reader

I once had high hopes Amazon would be able to build a real GitHub competitor. It's a real shame Amazon doesn't seem to be able to build anything that reaches beyond their walled garden.

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Hope unjustified.

AWS can build low level solutions -- EC2, EBS, S3. High level stuff is garbage.

Everyone's and I mean everyone's high level stuff is garbage. Remember when Lotus Notes was the peak. The only thing constant is change etc.

Amazon has a uniquely large spread, in that case.

I use S3, EC2, Route 53, and RDS. That's more or less it. I advise others to do likewise. Not the same set, mind you, but the same mindset.

GitHub is good, yes? And Excel? And Notion? And Datadog?

Lots of companies with excellent user friendly products.

GCP is good in that regard too, minus IAM.

> GCP is good in that regard too, minus IAM.

Care to elaborate why? IMO, GCP's IAM is years ahead of say AWS.

I second that. It's honestly simple. You assign roles (bundling of individual API call permissions) to cloud identities to resources.

I don't think GCP IAM is approachable to the degree that it's other services are. (Better than AWS? Sure.)

A hundreds different "Admin" roles, a bunch of OAuth client stuff, other weird settings.

It's a fundamentally hard problem, but I don't think GCP solved it in an approachable/user-friendly way, which is the topic.

User friendliness is not AWS moat. Anything that is facing a larger audience other than those that have regular access to their tooling (either cli or UI) is far from being ready for large adoption.

I've tried all of these tools over the last few years as part of vendor due diligence and none of them impressed me. Code Deploy is probably the best of the bunch and it's really just a very opinionated deployment tool that only works on specific use cases well.

CodePipeline is another good example of just horrible user experience. You need a lot of hours of training to figure out all the different permissions required to get it all to work. It is a mess.

I use GitHub Codespaces now for much of my deployment automation.

Codebuild is also a real pain.

Permissions are the bane of my AWS experience. Once you figure them out it's simple, but finding what you need in their docs is difficult.

They did: https://codecatalyst.aws/

I never NOT thought that CodeCommit and CodePipeline were box checks for strategic AWS customers

Can you describe more of what you mean

A lot of cloud providers release hastily built and generally cruddy services whose sole purpose in life is to satisfy the question "does your cloud have X" when customers are doing does-it-tick-the-box comparisons across clouds.

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