15 ms·

Troubles with the AWS web console

359 points by curtis 7y ago

jrockway 7y ago
I am pretty sure the AWS business model is to get you to write your own code that interacts with the API so that when you think about switching to another provider, you realize that you're throwing away months of work and decide not to. They also make the API requests take so many parameters that are specific to your particular use case that nobody will ever be able to write a generic tool that does what you want. Ever run "awscli help" and find anything useful? Didn't think so. Write your own tool if you want help! Amazon is very much in that "we were here first so we'll do whatever we want" mentality. They can provide worse service for more money, and people love them. Nobody ever got fired for picking AWS!
- iforgotpassword 7y ago
  To an extent that makes sense, but I think Amazon is just generally bad at web design for reasons unknown to me. Their plain old shopping site has been horrible ever since, inconsistent and confusing, and here you can't even excuse this with diving people to an API. Maybe it's to keep people browsing for longer and get them to buy more but that's assuming it outweighs the frustration induced by it.
  - RonaldSchleifer 7y ago
    It’s interesting you mention the shopping site. I have found their site horrible ever since the beginning and only marginally better since done of their belabored efforts to polish some things. I feel like both WAS and the shopping UI/UX are dependent on an overarching common effect; your willingness to suffer in order to get the hit of addiction. On the shopping site it’s the relative speed and gratification of the purchase in addition to the Christmas like anticipation of package delivery, in AWS it’s the general, relatively best (note the intentional avoidance of “good”) in class overall outcome (a function that includes the universality of AWS in the industry); which both matter way more than everything else, even combined. Think of an Amazon shopping competitor that has a great site UX and actually makes good recommendations (no, Amazon, I do not need 20 more variations on lightbulbs I just bought), the site UX and recommendations, among other things; would surely have to cumulatively far exceed the perceive value placed on the immediacy of AMZ logistics operation that can have you the thing you lust after on the same day sometimes. I’m certain AMZ knows quite well, just as Google, FB, etc., they have a monopoly of Good Enough in core competencies to both maintain their monopoly and stave off or at least frustrate competitors through their monopolization of our minds. It’s a new type of monopoly, Mental Monopoly, suited for the Information Age abstracted from the physical world of goods. It’s why we suffer through Amz, Aws, as well as put up with google and YouTube and fb and endless scrolling through rubbish on Netflix … they have a grip on our lazy mind because they’re all Good Enough and there is no one that is enforcing comptmltition in a manner that is appropriate for thevtech industry.
    - AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
      I'm curious, could you point me at a shop that has a better UI? So far, all the other online shops I used so far (and that have a varied set of items) were either on par or much worse. Most of them were bog slow, search didn't work as expected, or some other aspect failed to work properly. Those that were on par were for specialised products.
      - zabhi 7y ago
        You can check https://www.flipkart.com/ https://www.flipkart.com/ or https://www.myntra.com/ https://www.myntra.com/. Both belong the the same group. They are fast to load and feel very lite, in spite of being very client heavy.
        AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
        Thank you! The first has sluggish loading pictures. But that's maybe because I'm not geographically within the target area. Both feel more modern than Amazon, yes. I didn't test the checkout page and billing/shipping mechanics.
      - jjeaff 7y ago
        Https://Walmart.com
        AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
        Thank you! This seems like it wants to show me too much at the same time. That makes loading assets slow. But it's more modern than Amazon's shop. Though I'm not sure if that is a good thing after comparing this and the examples in the sibling comment with Amazon's more pedestrian take.
    - abledon 7y ago
      Amazon aggressively A/B tests their shopping site -- if the UI was suboptimal, they wouldnt be showing it that way. so much information is crammed into one page. look at most sites in asia and it will be similar. It seems to me that your complaints _are_ what lots of other people actually want to see, (someone saying: yes amazon, please DO show me 20 variations on lightbulbs after i just bought some because Im a shopaholic, i dont do much research and I'm one of the millions of people who click on google ads _all the time_ because i dont know how to go find what i need, the site has to SHOW me what i need)
- mk89 7y ago
  > I am pretty sure the AWS business model is to get you to write your own code that interacts with the API so that when you think about switching to another provider, you realize that you're throwing away months of work and decide not to. Same applies to all other cloud providers. Typically, you solve this problem partially with tools like Terraform, etc. However, of course there is never a one-size-fits-all solution for such things. Vendor lock-in is an issue that many companies try to solve by adopting standard solutions, but that's it. Kubernetes for example is one of these solutions.
  - wikibob 7y ago
    While Terraform the tool can be used across cloud providers, Terraform configurations cannot. Each terraform file uses modules that are quite specific to the individual services provided by a given cloud. These cannot be simply swapped out without rewriting the config.
    - mk89 7y ago
      Unfortunately that's true. In general, that's something that should be known in advance when someone chooses a cloud provider. As I mentioned, there is no one-site-fits-all solution. :/ Vendor lock-in is a serious issue for some enterprise companies, and in such cases you could propose something like a hybrid cloud. It's an expensive effort that could save your butt in the future.
  - lidHanteyk 7y ago
    No, the same does not apply to all other cloud providers. Earlier this year, I had a moment where I wrote a Kubernetes definition for one public cloud provider, and then was able to reuse the definition on three other public clouds. Portability via Kubernetes and CNCF is real, AWS is lock-in. Also, do you really want to support Amazon's human-rights-abuse parade?
- peter_retief 7y ago
  That occured to me as well
pgt 7y ago
The Law of Better is Worse: User-friendly tools prevent skilled middlemen from monetizing their expertise, which stifles adoption of that tool. So on-sellable tools that are too easy-to-use, don't get on-sold. Some examples by contradiction: tax returns, AWS Dashboard, many programming languages.
- dammitfoo 7y ago
  > Some examples by contradiction: tax returns, AWS Dashboard, many programming languages. By programming languages, do you mean Rust?
  - the-dude 7y ago
    How about SQL
    - pgt 7y ago
      SQL gave business analysts a way to express relational set algebra. If SQL had launched with an (arguably superior) datalog syntax, I wonder if it would have been as popular. Probably not, so it does feel like a good example. If SQL was composable (i.e. not a concatenated string), it would employ far fewer API gluers.
  - pgt 7y ago
    Absolutely Rust and JavaScript. Rust would be a far better language if it used S-expressions and didn't try to reinvent a macro syntax. But then it would not be as popular. In this way Lisp suffers from having no syntax, although it's a slightly different argument. When you can't have flamewars about a language's syntax, fewer articles are written about it. So instead, people will argue about the encoding of the AST - the parentheses. Similarly, well-designed languages like Clojure, Haskell and Erlang have fewer questions on StackOverflow and older GitHub issues, so there are fewer flamewars about them (although monads are Haskell's saving grace here). The NPM crowd are quick to ask, "Is this project abandoned?" when it hasn't had any activity for a year. In Clojure country, we dislike using libraries that haven't been stable for at least five years. As Alan Kay put it, Computer Science is very much a pop culture. The phenomenon needs a good name, though. Perhaps the Moving Target Paradox, since developers are more likely to run after a moving target.
drchewbacca 7y ago
I hate AWS so much. I spent 3 hours trying to get a bucket to host a static single page of html and failed completely. I use amazon polly. I wanted to know how many characters I was using each month. I spent 2 hours searching through hundreds of pages and literally couldn't find that information. I thought of trying to start a little text to speech service for dyslexics to make it easy to use Polly but one of the main thing putting me off is having to get my arms mangled in the AWS machine. The whole thing is so totally maddening. I would love to be able to sit in on their meetings where they talk about usability, what do they say? Do they think everything is fine? Do they know it's totally broken and don't care? Are they unable to hire a UX designer? What is the problem?
- steve19 7y ago
  I completely agree. I feel stupid everything I try use AWS. I have a pile of credits in my account that I am not using because I cannot bear to try (and fail... Again). It's maddening and they clearly do not care.
  - mk89 7y ago
    What's your level of experience with ops/networking etc.? Because it all boils down to that. If you need a simpler service, maybe you could use digital ocean etc...
    - sho 7y ago
      Technically you're right of course but I think you miss the broader point. AWS is ludicrously complicated and overkill for most startups, like a corner store implementing SAP. The problem is it's the gold standard for "cloud" and choosing anything else (apart from GCS, perhaps) attracts the need for justifications and, ultimately, unwelcome accountability. "Nobody ever got fired for [choosing AWS]". I'd personally love it if AWS implemented a digital ocean-like "basic" interface which, realistically, covers 90% of startups' needs. Simple is good. If needed, they can switch over to "Fortune 500 mode" later.
      - 7y ago
kristiandupont 7y ago
It seems to me that there is a quite profitable business case in a thin abstraction over AWS/Azure/Google App Engine (or whatever it's called now). There are lots of services like Zeit Now and Heroku that supply a complex abstraction to the point where it feels like an entirely different product. What I would want is something that allows me to host docker images/K8s on one of the big three (I guess others as well) and lets me to use configuration as code to the extent possible, but with UI/command line/API helpers that create a uniform abstraction so that can easily switch.
- mk89 7y ago
  Indeed! That's exactly the point. AWS or other cloud providers are hard to use because they are about managing a data center - that you can replicate across different regions (so, multiple data centers). That's it. People confuse that with a VPS, where you start your vm and everything works out of the box. If you need abstractions, use Heroku and that's it, you don't have to know how DNS works, or which subnet to choose for your VMs etc.
- tomhoward 7y ago
  This is what Cloudkick [1] was setting out to do when they were funded by YC back in early 2009. But they were acquired by Rackspace [2] less than 2 years later, the product was discontinued, and nothing seems to have filled the void ever since. Seems like that kind of service is more necessary now than ever. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cloudkick https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cloudkick [2] https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/rackspace-buys-server-management-platform-cloudkick/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/rackspace-buys-server-mana...
- ris 7y ago
  That's the last thing AWS wants you to be able to do, actually use the cloud like a commodity. Hence their quarterly announcements of increasingly weird and wonderful marginally "added value" services which never quite behave like anything else and where you'd have a hard time mapping the functionality onto an abstracted interface.
- ris 7y ago
mnm1 7y ago
People pay for an awful product. What incentive do they have to improve? None. It's not just aws. All Amazon products are this way. Two day shipping comes a week later if it comes at all. Products are cheap knockoffs that break and when you return them they close your account. Aws is aws: you know you're getting ripped off but someone else is paying the bill and aws has convinced them that the service is worth it. It's not but it'll take a week to migrate away to another provider and we can't afford that. Never mind that we're losing an hour each day in productivity. Perception is everything and perception is on their side.
slovenlyrobot 7y ago
Since starting to use Google Cloud for bits and pieces I've come to appreciate the AWS UI approach much more than previously. All those little spartan pockets of UI means nothing gets overengineered, the tools feel more like a quick Intranet web app (and generally load as quickly!) than anything else Meanwhile over in GCloud, almost /any/ operation whatsoever will spam you with an endless series of progress meters, meaningless notification popups, laptop CPU fans on, 3-4 second delays to refresh the page (because most of their pages lack a refresh button), etc., and the experience is uniform regardless of whatever tool you're using. The uniform design itself was clearly done by a UI design team with little experience of the workflows involved during a typical day. For example, requiring 2 clicks and at least one (two?) slow RPCs to edit some detail of a VM, with the first click involving the instance name with any 'show details' button completely absent from the primary actions bar along the top. The right-hand properties bar in GCloud is also AFAIK 100% useless. I've yet to see any subsection that made heavy use of it Underengineering beats massive overengineering? Something like that. Either way, the GCloud UI definitely pushes me to AWS for quick tasks when a choice is available, because the GCloud UI is the antithesis of quick
- heliodor 7y ago
  Just because something is better does not make it good.
- Legogris 7y ago
  Wow, I have the complete opposite experience. Monitoring, metrics graphs and logs are just miles ahead in Google IMO. It's so much easier for getting visibility. Do you really prefer Cloudwatch to Stackdriver? How about having a Lambda being triggered both on SNS messages and HTTP requests (setting up a proxy) and having that Lambda deployed with a CD pipeline - compared to doing the same with Cloud Functions? But I guess it also really boils down to which products you make the most use how, how and your scale. Clearly we have different preferences. I guess I am not seeing the bad parts you do because 1) Apart from DNS and some IAM, most infra changes are done from Terraform or CLI and 2) I have pretty high-end workstation.
  - 7y ago
empath75 7y ago
Don’t use the console. Nobody who uses aws professionally spends any amount of time in it. They have apis and cloud formation use that.
- scarface74 7y ago
  I wouldn’t go that far. I use a combination of the console, Cloud Formation, the CLI, and Python scripts for dev ops/infrastructure type work and Python, JavaScript/Node and C# for development.
jacobr 7y ago
If you think you are in such a strong position that you can keep customers even with the level of inconsistency of the AWS UI, siloed microfrontends might be something to consider. Otherwise it’s probably not such a good idea.
nickjj 7y ago
On the other hand, their CLI tool is very good. I wrote some video training material 3 years ago that goes over setting up an ECS cluster and I decided to use the CLI for just about everything. We interact with a number of resources (S3, load balancers, EC2, ECS, ECR, RDS, Elasticache, etc.) and other than a single flag to login to ECR it all works the same today. I'm happy I chose not to use the web console. The only time I used the web console was for creating IAM roles and I've had to make a bunch of updates since the UI changes pretty often. It would have been a disaster if I used it for everything.
- llimllib 7y ago
  Their CLI manages to completely lock up my up to date MacBook Pro when simply downloading files and has very strange and conflicting choices of parameters. It is comprehensive, but I wouldn’t call it good
  - acdha 7y ago
    I won’t defend their CLI arguments other than noting that they usually closely follow the also poorly-named APIs[1], but locking up is highly unusual — do you have something like AV software or other quasi-malware which might be interfering with normal I/O? We’ve used it for many millions of files over the years and that’s never been an issue on macOS or Linux. 1. AWS needs a Chief Consistency Officer who can block shipping until you cleanup the prototype slop
    - llimllib 7y ago
      Doing an ‘aws s3 sync ...’ on a directory with large files causes 100% CPU usage
      - acdha 7y ago
        How would you compare hashes without calculating them? Any operating system more advanced than Windows 95 shouldn’t “lock up” with a CPU-bound task.
Legogris 7y ago
It's just so fragmented. Some parts are actually almost great (Lambda) while others are downright awful. Batch is the worst, and it's been like this for years. As soon as you go over a couple of hundred jobs per day, it becomes unmanageable quickly. You still have to do some trickery with the CLI too. Let's say I want to get all logs from failed Batch jobs in the past day? This involves: * Listing the Jobs (possibly paginated) * Parsing out the log stream names from JSON (oh, and separate logs for separate attempts) * Iterate through log streams and query Cloudwatch (each paginated) * Parse JSON I am sure we're all writing half-baked wrappers for our individual use-cases, I am surprised no one's published something generally useful for stuff like this. Whereas with Kubernetes, that's all a single call with kubectl... Don't get me wrong, we wouldn't be on AWS if it didn't make sense and they have been pushing development forward a lot. But it's unfortunately fragmented. The only way to stay sane here is to use Terraform. That way you can stay out of it at least for creation and modification of resources and will have an easier time should you want to migrate. EDIT: Another great example from Batch: Let's say you have a job that you want to run again, either a retry or changing some parameters. AWS Console: * Find job in question (annoying pagination through client-side pagination where refresh puts you back on page 1). * Click Clone Job * Perform any changes. (Changing certain fields will reset the command, so make sure you stash that away prior to changing) * Click Submit * Job ends up in FAILED state with an ArgumentError because commands can not be over a certain length. Turns out that the UI will split arguments up, sometimes more than doubling the length of a string, and there's nothing you can do about it except resort to CLI or split it up into smaller jobs if you have that option. CLI: * Get job details * Parse JSON and reconstruct job creation command * Post It baffles me how container fields and parameters differ from what you can GET and what you can POST; you really need to parse the job down, and reconstruct the create job request. I completely understand that it will be like this when services launch. But it's been years now.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
adreamingsoul 7y ago
These comments are fascinating to me. I was responsible for designing, leading, and building the frontend for an AWS service. One of the challenges was with obtaining useful feedback from a diverse range of people. During the product definition phase, the majority of the feedback, input, and feature priority was for customers who were planning to dedicate a large budget towards using said service. I often felt that stakeholder decisions sacrified usability for feasibility. Regardless, it was the responsibility of my service team to seek and obtain feedback, input, and data points that could help us inform our decisions. But from what I witnessed, it only went as far as to validate our exisiting concepts and user personas of how people use AWS services. Going beyond that was seen as unnecessary. The universal thinking within AWS is that people will ultimately use the API/CLI/SDK. So, investment into the console is on a case by case basis. Some services have dedicated engineers or teams to focus on the console, but most don’t. I’m proud of what I built. I hope that my UI decisions and focus on usability are benefiting the customers of that service that I helped build. A little known fact, in the AWS console exists a feedback tool (look in the footer) that will send feedback straight to the service team. I encourage you to submit your thoughts, ideas, and feedback through that tool. There are people and service teams who value that feedback.
- scarface74 7y ago
  The only part of the console that I absolutely hate is dealing with the Parameter Store. But I hate everything else about the parameter store too so there is that. CodePipeline is pretty bad too. There is no way you can create a cross account code pipeline from the console.
  - baseballMan 7y ago
    CloudWatch log filters are pretty bad too. I basically just use ctrl + f now in cw logs to find what I'm looking for.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Oh yeah. They are horrible. I agree completely. For C#, I use Serilog for logging to both a Cloudwatch sink and a ElasticSearch sink. Before I’ve used a Mongo sink.
underwater 7y ago
The example I ran I to the other day was so typical of AWS. I was trying to set a monthly budget for my account but the "Continue" button was greyed out. After staring at every field for a long, long time (and attempting to undisable the button through the dev tools) I realised that the value of "80" in the percent usage trigger field was not in fact a pre-populated value, but a value in the "placeholder" field. I needed to manually enter a value (and chose to enter "80"). This is not just bad UX, this is the territory of never even bothering to sit down with someone to see how they might use the product. Amazon love to tout their focus on the customer and amazing leadership principles, but they sure produce some mediocre experiences.
ses1984 7y ago
Why on earth are would you need to click around the ECR console that much?
ppod 7y ago
I'm a solo academic researcher user and there's one thing even simpler than this that i can't stand: there is no way to check which EC2 resources are running all at once. You have to click on every single region in turn to see what is actually running. If you've had multiple types running across regions, trying shut everything down without closing the account is a real pain. I am not the only person with this problem: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42086712/how-to-see-all-running-amazon-ec2-instances-across-all-regions https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42086712/how-to-see-all-...
- draugadrotten 7y ago
  https://gist.github.com/junaidk/433345da5bf8e580680d9109792d3169 https://gist.github.com/junaidk/433345da5bf8e580680d9109792d...
- journalctl 7y ago
  Out of curiosity, why are you running multiple EC2 instances across more than two regions?
  - ppod 7y ago
    Honestly, because when I started I didn't understand AWS very well, which was my fault. But it definitely ended up costing me more money than I expected.
40four 7y ago
I've never liked the web console much either. Never found it very intuitive, or easy to use. But, once you navigate the maze, & learn where the few things you need are, it does get the job done. And to be fair it is fast. Not sure why, but for some reason I like clicking around in the web app, so makes me wish it was a better experience. In contrast, compare this to the Digital Ocean web console. It has beautiful design that is nice to look at. It's un-complicated & clutter free. Overall a very pleasurable web app, I've always been inpressed with their UX. But as people have pointed out, it seems Amazon expects us to use the CLI & APIs, and the web console is not a priority. So maybe I'll start moving in that direction with my AWS services.
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
The only thing worse is the GCP web console.
- ernsheong 7y ago
  Not sure how you came to this conclusion. GCP by far has the better UI, even AWS engineers acknowledge this.
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    I came to this conclusion after using GCP and AWS both for extended periods of time across multiple jobs, and just noticing that AWS solved my problems in a better way.
k__ 7y ago
My favorite is that every service asks you if you really want to delete but CloudFormation.
besus 7y ago
The AWS console is a thousand times better than the nightmare one in Azure.
KaiserPro 7y ago
I know many people will disagree, but I really miss the VMware fat windows client. (vsphere 5, before they ruined it with the weird flash hybrid that didn't work properly) That, was a paragon of design reliability and speed compared to the AWS console. What annoys me the most is the sheer weight of each page. If you have to context change, its multiple seconds before the page is useable. A classic example is lambda. I click on the function, page reloads (no problem) 1-2 seconds later the page is fully rendered, I can _then_ click on the monitoring tab, another couple of seconds, and then I can jump to the latest log, in cloudwatch. Cloudwatch can get fucked. Everything about it is half arsed. Search? all of the speed of splunk, combined with its reliability, but none of the usefulness. The standard answer is "you should use Cloudformation" I do, it too is distilled shart. (anything to do with ECS can cause a 3 hour, uninterruptible hang, followed by another timeout as it tries to roll back.) It also lazy evaluates the acutal CF, which means that parameter validation happens 5 minute in. Good fucking job there kids. What I really want is a QT app in the style of the VMware fat client (you know with an inbuilt remote EC2 console, that'd be great...) that talks to AWS. The GUI is desgined by the same team, and is _tested_ before a release by actual QAs who have the power to block things until the change is released.
- kristianpaul 7y ago
  You know that nothing stops you from using aws apis and making you own UI right?
  - doliveira 7y ago
    Yeah because AWS is free and we don't have any right to complain.
  - omni 7y ago
    In many cases AWS's absurd rate limits would make it hard to build a functional UI even if we wanted to. I imagine this is one major reason why list views and filtering/searching them is a disaster in every major AWS service.
    - 7y ago
aytekin 7y ago
Here is a startup idea for grabbing: Make a better interface for AWS/Google Cloud. Since their APIs covers everything this should be possible. Be the first UXaaS. A killer feature: a server by server breakdown of Google Cloud expenses. It is impossible to understand what you are paying for on Google Cloud. They lump everything together in an incredibly confusing bill.
- ernsheong 7y ago
  Hmm sounds like you're missing out on the Billing > Reports or Billing > Cost breakdown sections of GCP Console's Billing section. In Reports it does exactly what you want when you group by SKU in the Filters Incidentally a UI startup for AWS/Google Cloud is an incredibly bad idea. You're just a sitting duck waiting to be killed, and also you have no full control over the API.
- whitepoplar 7y ago
  I think that's why DigitalOcean is winning so much these days.
  - Can_Not 7y ago
    Imagine if DO had lambda.
- alephnan 7y ago
  I tried, but many APIs accessible to these front end are not publicly available. For example, listing API keys for a given project. By the way, how much would you be willing to pay for such a UI?
noneeeed 7y ago
The three things that annoy me the most about the console: 1) state management/sync is frequently terrible. E.g you are looking at a page with some health indicator and a log view. The last entry in the log is some variation of "transitioned from busted to not busted", but the state indicator doesn't update until you refresh. 2) if you have multiple tabs open at a time (pretty common use case) there is a good chance it will suddenly decide that you have to reload the page for some reason, often when you are in the middle of something 3) live updating. Why the hell do I have to sit there hitting refresh on so many of the views to get up to date data? I've often sat there waiting for something to finish, only to realise it's been done for a while but the page has not updated. This seems closely related to (1). I find the overall design of the console fine, generally the UI is manageable, but the actual implementation is a steaming pile.
- mdaniel 7y ago
  > 2) if you have multiple tabs open at a time (pretty common use case) there is a good chance it will suddenly decide that you have to reload the page for some reason, often when you are in the middle of something I so strongly agree with that observation, and have repeatedly and often submitted feedback through their in-page feedback mechanism about please, I'm begging you, never involuntarily reload my page. That's why @adreamingsoul (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20903229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20903229) saying "send us complaints, we read your feedback" is like spitting into the wind for me I thought your "multiple tabs" was also going to mention that they have _exactly the same browser title_, no matter what subsection you have open. So, if one EC2 tab is looking at volumes, and another at instances, and another at autoscaling groups, well, too bad for you because you're just going to have to click on them all or have a good memory/tab-management scheme I kind of figure the console doesn't get any engineering love because of what other people in here have said: they want you to use the APIs
  - noneeeed 7y ago
    It can be incredibly annoying when doing something like updating a cloudformation stack. I might open RDS in another tab to grab a snapshot ID or EC2 to check a sec group, and when I switch back to my half updated CF parameters the damn page forces a reload and loses the setting I've entered. I can't work out what it is they are doing that nesessitates these reloads
fortran77 7y ago
The console works, but the real power is in the API. The PowerShell API works extremely well and I write scripts for everything I need to do. On the Python side, "boto" works well, too.
dandigangi 7y ago
This is the specific one I never quite understood: * Order column by X * Type search into input * Column order drops * Can no longer apply ordering when search input is there 100% understand that larger companies will not typically, or at least shouldn't, be directly manipulating infra via the web console but there is 1000s of customers that use web for small business. It's a valid customer to think about it! ps I logged into Reddit so to add to that thread. Felt this in my soul.
gfodor 7y ago
Reading these threads make me realize I am either a victim of Stockholm syndrome or most developers are way more picky than me. I’ve never gotten frustrated at the aws console, though I have noticed some of the rough edges. I guess at this stage in my career I’ve internalized muddling through stuff without letting it bother me. The only exception to this probably is when I open the door and peek through to the latest insanity in JavaScript land, which I find impenetrable. (I’m looking at you, redux/saga/whatever)
alexnewman 7y ago
try azure
jayess 7y ago
It's been a few days but I'm still trying to figure out how to share access to the billing console with one of my organization's members. It's just baffling in every sense.
surfsvammel 7y ago
I have nothing against the AWS UI. I haven’t used it much, but it has never been a problem to me. It must be increasingly difficult to build an UI for a console like that, there are so many different users, use cases, services and perspectives.
Cpoll 7y ago
Search in the UI is my particular bane. Sometimes it works great (searching for EC2 instances). Sometimes you need to construct restricted search queries (slightly aided by a slow dropdown auto-complete) that look like `Name: Begins With: /blah/` (ParameterStore). Sometimes search is client-side, and only searches the page you're currently on (ECR, I think? I can't remember what does this). I think in this case it's sometimes form just following the limited functionality of the API. I have a _lot_ of scripts that are just ways to extract data quicker than I can in the UI.
- Schweigi 7y ago
  The search is definitely one of the biggest pain points when using the UI. I can only hope someone makes an executive decision and forces every service team to offer a proper search (more than prefix, same page search). I assume the bad search functionality happens because the service teams don’t really use their own service with more than some demo resources.
- __david__ 7y ago
  IoT is one of those client side searches. And worse, it's an endless scrolling page, so to do the search proper you have to repeatedly scroll down until you've loaded all the data (20 or more pages on our infra), then scroll back to the top and search. It's so bad I don't even know what to say—it's like no one ever tried to use it.
cookieswumchorr 7y ago
Maybe what the world really needs is a FOSS Framework that implements all the features on a swarm of VPS/Hardware servers? It's really disturbing to see the web reduced to a handful of giant cloud providers who also happen to suck at doing their job
deboflo 7y ago
Then you haven’t tried the Google Cloud consoles.
SilasX 7y ago
One of my pet peeves about it (might have since been fixed) is that AWS will gladly walk you through the wizard to set up an EC2 server, and only at the very end say “oh you don’t have permission to do that lol”. I compared it to a bartender who immediately recognizes that you’re underage but offers you alcoholic drinks, gives you samples, asks about preferences, counts out your change, and only after all of that stops you from drinking it. http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2016/02/some-of-my-geeky-tech-jokes-with.html http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2016/02/some-of-my-geeky-t...
peter_retief 7y ago
Well I am glad I am not the only one who struggles to understand what is going on with AWS. Everyone is all over the place with cryptic howto's. I think I may have even "lost" a running container at some point. Google cloud also seems to be out to confuse people, maybe its a strategy to stop users from escaping :)
nickthemagicman 7y ago
There seems to be a huge need for a boto3/django(or something) user interface that you could run locally to interface with AWS.
- bob33 7y ago
  You should give Commandeer https://getcommandeer.com https://getcommandeer.com a try. It is a Desktop UI just for this.
  - nickthemagicman 7y ago
    Thank you! This is amazing. I want to contribute to this!
    - bob33 7y ago
      So, the main app is not opensource. We are in Beta mode, but do plan on having it be paid for, but most likely, free for developers, but a charge for companies to use the teams aspect. The other part we are doing is that we are open sourcing the Terraform, Serverless, and other templates. We have a plan to then enable the usage of them within the app. So you could just apply a serverless template to your environment, and immediately be setup with let's say an SQS queue, tied to a lambda. That repo is located here https://github.com/commandeer/open https://github.com/commandeer/open . Happy to chat more about it, as we are very excited about this and are working day and night on it.
lukev 7y ago
I don't find the console that frustrating, or when it is, I understand why. UIs are hard. What I do find frustrating is how much of the docs are written in a console-first way. In most cases, the straightforward definitions of resources, attributes and the relationships between them are tucked away (or not present at all) in favor of "click this, then click that" style. I am convinced that the best way to understand a cloud service is to understand its internal data model and semantics, but this is too often hidden behind procedural instructions.
benburleson 7y ago
AWS still needs to prioritize 100% CloudFormation support as a deliverable for new features. Remove the need to use the console.
- k__ 7y ago
  Yes, CodeCommit support is laughable
andreineculau 7y ago
3 years ago i had some vague hope that things do improve although i am not aware of the bugfixes so i started tracking the bugs as GitHub issues Soon after i gave up. Too many silly bugs, and no fixes. Reference: https://github.com/andreineculau/fl-aws https://github.com/andreineculau/fl-aws
mattbillenstein 7y ago
I use the web console fairly sparingly - iam, billing, browsing around s3 from time to time, etc. It's good enough - way better than it used to be, and better than the firefox extension that I started with. This is probably not a popular way of doing it, but I write python to orchestrate the provisioning steps of a VM with specific roles, routes, etc in a VPC (with public/private subnets in multiple AZs) and then I use other tools for config-management and deploy. I'm using few of AWS's services, it helps me do multi-cloud (another python script doing the same thing on another cloud), and it helps me keep my local dev environments in parity with production even on MacOS. I do use S3 and route53 globally - they're simple enough to use using boto. IMO if infra is now code, you should probably write code to manage infra...
miguelmota 7y ago
AWS has great APIs and SDKs and most of the time I use AWS services through the command line and not so much though the web interface. Even though AWS web interface has it's flaws, it's still 10 times better than Azure's web UI.
Trisell 7y ago
I’ve been working at a company where I have had to fight with the infrastructure team because they see no reason why I would need programmatic cress to do anything on the cli or with the sdk. The reason why. They don’t use it so why would I?
noncoml 7y ago
The problem with AWS teams in general is their arrogance. I dread having to deal with them. They are destroying Amazon’s reputation. Don’t want to bother you with specific examples, but every interaction I had with them was dreadful. I think this attitude gets reflected in their console design.
- omni 7y ago
  I'll share my frustrating experience with them just for fun https://github.com/boto/boto/pull/3093 https://github.com/boto/boto/pull/3093
captn3m0 7y ago
Surprised nobody has mentioned AWS's official (but no longer updated) GUI client: ElasticWolf[0]. It is very much not-maintained but it does have some benefits. My understanding is that AWS hasn't officially closed it because of US-Gov accessibility guidelines. Are there any other similar clients? [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/tools/aws-elasticwolf-client-console/ https://aws.amazon.com/tools/aws-elasticwolf-client-console/
sakopov 7y ago
I jokingly say that Amazon should have a couple of sessions at re:Invent where they talk about the things they fixed in Console. I generally find that I no longer mind most AWS UI quirks, but some things are really annoying like the broken Parameter Store search which has been broken for years or CloudWatch search which flat out doesn't work at times. I really believe there is a business opportunity here. I think you could pick a general use-case for AWS, like serverless, and build an intuitive UI around AWS offerings typically utilized by the serverless stack.

359 points by curtis 7y ago

I am pretty sure the AWS business model is to get you to write your own code that interacts with the API so that when you think about switching to another provider, you realize that you're throwing away months of work and decide not to. They also make the API requests take so many parameters that are specific to your particular use case that nobody will ever be able to write a generic tool that does what you want. Ever run "awscli help" and find anything useful? Didn't think so. Write your own tool if you want help! Amazon is very much in that "we were here first so we'll do whatever we want" mentality. They can provide worse service for more money, and people love them. Nobody ever got fired for picking AWS!

iforgotpassword 7y ago
To an extent that makes sense, but I think Amazon is just generally bad at web design for reasons unknown to me. Their plain old shopping site has been horrible ever since, inconsistent and confusing, and here you can't even excuse this with diving people to an API. Maybe it's to keep people browsing for longer and get them to buy more but that's assuming it outweighs the frustration induced by it.
- RonaldSchleifer 7y ago
  It’s interesting you mention the shopping site. I have found their site horrible ever since the beginning and only marginally better since done of their belabored efforts to polish some things. I feel like both WAS and the shopping UI/UX are dependent on an overarching common effect; your willingness to suffer in order to get the hit of addiction. On the shopping site it’s the relative speed and gratification of the purchase in addition to the Christmas like anticipation of package delivery, in AWS it’s the general, relatively best (note the intentional avoidance of “good”) in class overall outcome (a function that includes the universality of AWS in the industry); which both matter way more than everything else, even combined. Think of an Amazon shopping competitor that has a great site UX and actually makes good recommendations (no, Amazon, I do not need 20 more variations on lightbulbs I just bought), the site UX and recommendations, among other things; would surely have to cumulatively far exceed the perceive value placed on the immediacy of AMZ logistics operation that can have you the thing you lust after on the same day sometimes. I’m certain AMZ knows quite well, just as Google, FB, etc., they have a monopoly of Good Enough in core competencies to both maintain their monopoly and stave off or at least frustrate competitors through their monopolization of our minds. It’s a new type of monopoly, Mental Monopoly, suited for the Information Age abstracted from the physical world of goods. It’s why we suffer through Amz, Aws, as well as put up with google and YouTube and fb and endless scrolling through rubbish on Netflix … they have a grip on our lazy mind because they’re all Good Enough and there is no one that is enforcing comptmltition in a manner that is appropriate for thevtech industry.
  - AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
    I'm curious, could you point me at a shop that has a better UI? So far, all the other online shops I used so far (and that have a varied set of items) were either on par or much worse. Most of them were bog slow, search didn't work as expected, or some other aspect failed to work properly. Those that were on par were for specialised products.
    - zabhi 7y ago
      You can check https://www.flipkart.com/ https://www.flipkart.com/ or https://www.myntra.com/ https://www.myntra.com/. Both belong the the same group. They are fast to load and feel very lite, in spite of being very client heavy.
      - AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
        Thank you! The first has sluggish loading pictures. But that's maybe because I'm not geographically within the target area. Both feel more modern than Amazon, yes. I didn't test the checkout page and billing/shipping mechanics.
    - jjeaff 7y ago
      Https://Walmart.com
      - AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
        Thank you! This seems like it wants to show me too much at the same time. That makes loading assets slow. But it's more modern than Amazon's shop. Though I'm not sure if that is a good thing after comparing this and the examples in the sibling comment with Amazon's more pedestrian take.
  - abledon 7y ago
    Amazon aggressively A/B tests their shopping site -- if the UI was suboptimal, they wouldnt be showing it that way. so much information is crammed into one page. look at most sites in asia and it will be similar. It seems to me that your complaints _are_ what lots of other people actually want to see, (someone saying: yes amazon, please DO show me 20 variations on lightbulbs after i just bought some because Im a shopaholic, i dont do much research and I'm one of the millions of people who click on google ads _all the time_ because i dont know how to go find what i need, the site has to SHOW me what i need)
mk89 7y ago
> I am pretty sure the AWS business model is to get you to write your own code that interacts with the API so that when you think about switching to another provider, you realize that you're throwing away months of work and decide not to. Same applies to all other cloud providers. Typically, you solve this problem partially with tools like Terraform, etc. However, of course there is never a one-size-fits-all solution for such things. Vendor lock-in is an issue that many companies try to solve by adopting standard solutions, but that's it. Kubernetes for example is one of these solutions.
- wikibob 7y ago
  While Terraform the tool can be used across cloud providers, Terraform configurations cannot. Each terraform file uses modules that are quite specific to the individual services provided by a given cloud. These cannot be simply swapped out without rewriting the config.
  - mk89 7y ago
    Unfortunately that's true. In general, that's something that should be known in advance when someone chooses a cloud provider. As I mentioned, there is no one-site-fits-all solution. :/ Vendor lock-in is a serious issue for some enterprise companies, and in such cases you could propose something like a hybrid cloud. It's an expensive effort that could save your butt in the future.
- lidHanteyk 7y ago
  No, the same does not apply to all other cloud providers. Earlier this year, I had a moment where I wrote a Kubernetes definition for one public cloud provider, and then was able to reuse the definition on three other public clouds. Portability via Kubernetes and CNCF is real, AWS is lock-in. Also, do you really want to support Amazon's human-rights-abuse parade?
peter_retief 7y ago
That occured to me as well

pgt 7y ago

The Law of Better is Worse: User-friendly tools prevent skilled middlemen from monetizing their expertise, which stifles adoption of that tool. So on-sellable tools that are too easy-to-use, don't get on-sold. Some examples by contradiction: tax returns, AWS Dashboard, many programming languages.

dammitfoo 7y ago
> Some examples by contradiction: tax returns, AWS Dashboard, many programming languages. By programming languages, do you mean Rust?
- the-dude 7y ago
  How about SQL
  - pgt 7y ago
    SQL gave business analysts a way to express relational set algebra. If SQL had launched with an (arguably superior) datalog syntax, I wonder if it would have been as popular. Probably not, so it does feel like a good example. If SQL was composable (i.e. not a concatenated string), it would employ far fewer API gluers.
- pgt 7y ago
  Absolutely Rust and JavaScript. Rust would be a far better language if it used S-expressions and didn't try to reinvent a macro syntax. But then it would not be as popular. In this way Lisp suffers from having no syntax, although it's a slightly different argument. When you can't have flamewars about a language's syntax, fewer articles are written about it. So instead, people will argue about the encoding of the AST - the parentheses. Similarly, well-designed languages like Clojure, Haskell and Erlang have fewer questions on StackOverflow and older GitHub issues, so there are fewer flamewars about them (although monads are Haskell's saving grace here). The NPM crowd are quick to ask, "Is this project abandoned?" when it hasn't had any activity for a year. In Clojure country, we dislike using libraries that haven't been stable for at least five years. As Alan Kay put it, Computer Science is very much a pop culture. The phenomenon needs a good name, though. Perhaps the Moving Target Paradox, since developers are more likely to run after a moving target.

drchewbacca 7y ago

I hate AWS so much. I spent 3 hours trying to get a bucket to host a static single page of html and failed completely. I use amazon polly. I wanted to know how many characters I was using each month. I spent 2 hours searching through hundreds of pages and literally couldn't find that information. I thought of trying to start a little text to speech service for dyslexics to make it easy to use Polly but one of the main thing putting me off is having to get my arms mangled in the AWS machine. The whole thing is so totally maddening. I would love to be able to sit in on their meetings where they talk about usability, what do they say? Do they think everything is fine? Do they know it's totally broken and don't care? Are they unable to hire a UX designer? What is the problem?

steve19 7y ago
I completely agree. I feel stupid everything I try use AWS. I have a pile of credits in my account that I am not using because I cannot bear to try (and fail... Again). It's maddening and they clearly do not care.
- mk89 7y ago
  What's your level of experience with ops/networking etc.? Because it all boils down to that. If you need a simpler service, maybe you could use digital ocean etc...
  - sho 7y ago
    Technically you're right of course but I think you miss the broader point. AWS is ludicrously complicated and overkill for most startups, like a corner store implementing SAP. The problem is it's the gold standard for "cloud" and choosing anything else (apart from GCS, perhaps) attracts the need for justifications and, ultimately, unwelcome accountability. "Nobody ever got fired for [choosing AWS]". I'd personally love it if AWS implemented a digital ocean-like "basic" interface which, realistically, covers 90% of startups' needs. Simple is good. If needed, they can switch over to "Fortune 500 mode" later.
    - 7y ago

kristiandupont 7y ago

It seems to me that there is a quite profitable business case in a thin abstraction over AWS/Azure/Google App Engine (or whatever it's called now). There are lots of services like Zeit Now and Heroku that supply a complex abstraction to the point where it feels like an entirely different product. What I would want is something that allows me to host docker images/K8s on one of the big three (I guess others as well) and lets me to use configuration as code to the extent possible, but with UI/command line/API helpers that create a uniform abstraction so that can easily switch.

mk89 7y ago
Indeed! That's exactly the point. AWS or other cloud providers are hard to use because they are about managing a data center - that you can replicate across different regions (so, multiple data centers). That's it. People confuse that with a VPS, where you start your vm and everything works out of the box. If you need abstractions, use Heroku and that's it, you don't have to know how DNS works, or which subnet to choose for your VMs etc.
tomhoward 7y ago
This is what Cloudkick [1] was setting out to do when they were funded by YC back in early 2009. But they were acquired by Rackspace [2] less than 2 years later, the product was discontinued, and nothing seems to have filled the void ever since. Seems like that kind of service is more necessary now than ever. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cloudkick https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cloudkick [2] https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/rackspace-buys-server-management-platform-cloudkick/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/rackspace-buys-server-mana...
ris 7y ago
That's the last thing AWS wants you to be able to do, actually use the cloud like a commodity. Hence their quarterly announcements of increasingly weird and wonderful marginally "added value" services which never quite behave like anything else and where you'd have a hard time mapping the functionality onto an abstracted interface.
ris 7y ago

mnm1 7y ago

People pay for an awful product. What incentive do they have to improve? None. It's not just aws. All Amazon products are this way. Two day shipping comes a week later if it comes at all. Products are cheap knockoffs that break and when you return them they close your account. Aws is aws: you know you're getting ripped off but someone else is paying the bill and aws has convinced them that the service is worth it. It's not but it'll take a week to migrate away to another provider and we can't afford that. Never mind that we're losing an hour each day in productivity. Perception is everything and perception is on their side.

slovenlyrobot 7y ago

Since starting to use Google Cloud for bits and pieces I've come to appreciate the AWS UI approach much more than previously. All those little spartan pockets of UI means nothing gets overengineered, the tools feel more like a quick Intranet web app (and generally load as quickly!) than anything else Meanwhile over in GCloud, almost /any/ operation whatsoever will spam you with an endless series of progress meters, meaningless notification popups, laptop CPU fans on, 3-4 second delays to refresh the page (because most of their pages lack a refresh button), etc., and the experience is uniform regardless of whatever tool you're using. The uniform design itself was clearly done by a UI design team with little experience of the workflows involved during a typical day. For example, requiring 2 clicks and at least one (two?) slow RPCs to edit some detail of a VM, with the first click involving the instance name with any 'show details' button completely absent from the primary actions bar along the top. The right-hand properties bar in GCloud is also AFAIK 100% useless. I've yet to see any subsection that made heavy use of it Underengineering beats massive overengineering? Something like that. Either way, the GCloud UI definitely pushes me to AWS for quick tasks when a choice is available, because the GCloud UI is the antithesis of quick

heliodor 7y ago
Just because something is better does not make it good.
Legogris 7y ago
Wow, I have the complete opposite experience. Monitoring, metrics graphs and logs are just miles ahead in Google IMO. It's so much easier for getting visibility. Do you really prefer Cloudwatch to Stackdriver? How about having a Lambda being triggered both on SNS messages and HTTP requests (setting up a proxy) and having that Lambda deployed with a CD pipeline - compared to doing the same with Cloud Functions? But I guess it also really boils down to which products you make the most use how, how and your scale. Clearly we have different preferences. I guess I am not seeing the bad parts you do because 1) Apart from DNS and some IAM, most infra changes are done from Terraform or CLI and 2) I have pretty high-end workstation.
- 7y ago

empath75 7y ago

Don’t use the console. Nobody who uses aws professionally spends any amount of time in it. They have apis and cloud formation use that.

scarface74 7y ago
I wouldn’t go that far. I use a combination of the console, Cloud Formation, the CLI, and Python scripts for dev ops/infrastructure type work and Python, JavaScript/Node and C# for development.

jacobr 7y ago

If you think you are in such a strong position that you can keep customers even with the level of inconsistency of the AWS UI, siloed microfrontends might be something to consider. Otherwise it’s probably not such a good idea.

nickjj 7y ago

On the other hand, their CLI tool is very good. I wrote some video training material 3 years ago that goes over setting up an ECS cluster and I decided to use the CLI for just about everything. We interact with a number of resources (S3, load balancers, EC2, ECS, ECR, RDS, Elasticache, etc.) and other than a single flag to login to ECR it all works the same today. I'm happy I chose not to use the web console. The only time I used the web console was for creating IAM roles and I've had to make a bunch of updates since the UI changes pretty often. It would have been a disaster if I used it for everything.

llimllib 7y ago
Their CLI manages to completely lock up my up to date MacBook Pro when simply downloading files and has very strange and conflicting choices of parameters. It is comprehensive, but I wouldn’t call it good
- acdha 7y ago
  I won’t defend their CLI arguments other than noting that they usually closely follow the also poorly-named APIs[1], but locking up is highly unusual — do you have something like AV software or other quasi-malware which might be interfering with normal I/O? We’ve used it for many millions of files over the years and that’s never been an issue on macOS or Linux. 1. AWS needs a Chief Consistency Officer who can block shipping until you cleanup the prototype slop
  - llimllib 7y ago
    Doing an ‘aws s3 sync ...’ on a directory with large files causes 100% CPU usage
    - acdha 7y ago
      How would you compare hashes without calculating them? Any operating system more advanced than Windows 95 shouldn’t “lock up” with a CPU-bound task.

Legogris 7y ago

It's just so fragmented. Some parts are actually almost great (Lambda) while others are downright awful. Batch is the worst, and it's been like this for years. As soon as you go over a couple of hundred jobs per day, it becomes unmanageable quickly. You still have to do some trickery with the CLI too. Let's say I want to get all logs from failed Batch jobs in the past day? This involves: * Listing the Jobs (possibly paginated) * Parsing out the log stream names from JSON (oh, and separate logs for separate attempts) * Iterate through log streams and query Cloudwatch (each paginated) * Parse JSON I am sure we're all writing half-baked wrappers for our individual use-cases, I am surprised no one's published something generally useful for stuff like this. Whereas with Kubernetes, that's all a single call with kubectl... Don't get me wrong, we wouldn't be on AWS if it didn't make sense and they have been pushing development forward a lot. But it's unfortunately fragmented. The only way to stay sane here is to use Terraform. That way you can stay out of it at least for creation and modification of resources and will have an easier time should you want to migrate. EDIT: Another great example from Batch: Let's say you have a job that you want to run again, either a retry or changing some parameters. AWS Console: * Find job in question (annoying pagination through client-side pagination where refresh puts you back on page 1). * Click Clone Job * Perform any changes. (Changing certain fields will reset the command, so make sure you stash that away prior to changing) * Click Submit * Job ends up in FAILED state with an ArgumentError because commands can not be over a certain length. Turns out that the UI will split arguments up, sometimes more than doubling the length of a string, and there's nothing you can do about it except resort to CLI or split it up into smaller jobs if you have that option. CLI: * Get job details * Parse JSON and reconstruct job creation command * Post It baffles me how container fields and parameters differ from what you can GET and what you can POST; you really need to parse the job down, and reconstruct the create job request. I completely understand that it will be like this when services launch. But it's been years now.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

adreamingsoul 7y ago

These comments are fascinating to me. I was responsible for designing, leading, and building the frontend for an AWS service. One of the challenges was with obtaining useful feedback from a diverse range of people. During the product definition phase, the majority of the feedback, input, and feature priority was for customers who were planning to dedicate a large budget towards using said service. I often felt that stakeholder decisions sacrified usability for feasibility. Regardless, it was the responsibility of my service team to seek and obtain feedback, input, and data points that could help us inform our decisions. But from what I witnessed, it only went as far as to validate our exisiting concepts and user personas of how people use AWS services. Going beyond that was seen as unnecessary. The universal thinking within AWS is that people will ultimately use the API/CLI/SDK. So, investment into the console is on a case by case basis. Some services have dedicated engineers or teams to focus on the console, but most don’t. I’m proud of what I built. I hope that my UI decisions and focus on usability are benefiting the customers of that service that I helped build. A little known fact, in the AWS console exists a feedback tool (look in the footer) that will send feedback straight to the service team. I encourage you to submit your thoughts, ideas, and feedback through that tool. There are people and service teams who value that feedback.

scarface74 7y ago
The only part of the console that I absolutely hate is dealing with the Parameter Store. But I hate everything else about the parameter store too so there is that. CodePipeline is pretty bad too. There is no way you can create a cross account code pipeline from the console.
- baseballMan 7y ago
  CloudWatch log filters are pretty bad too. I basically just use ctrl + f now in cw logs to find what I'm looking for.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Oh yeah. They are horrible. I agree completely. For C#, I use Serilog for logging to both a Cloudwatch sink and a ElasticSearch sink. Before I’ve used a Mongo sink.

underwater 7y ago

The example I ran I to the other day was so typical of AWS. I was trying to set a monthly budget for my account but the "Continue" button was greyed out. After staring at every field for a long, long time (and attempting to undisable the button through the dev tools) I realised that the value of "80" in the percent usage trigger field was not in fact a pre-populated value, but a value in the "placeholder" field. I needed to manually enter a value (and chose to enter "80"). This is not just bad UX, this is the territory of never even bothering to sit down with someone to see how they might use the product. Amazon love to tout their focus on the customer and amazing leadership principles, but they sure produce some mediocre experiences.

ses1984 7y ago

Why on earth are would you need to click around the ECR console that much?

ppod 7y ago

I'm a solo academic researcher user and there's one thing even simpler than this that i can't stand: there is no way to check which EC2 resources are running all at once. You have to click on every single region in turn to see what is actually running. If you've had multiple types running across regions, trying shut everything down without closing the account is a real pain. I am not the only person with this problem: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42086712/how-to-see-all-running-amazon-ec2-instances-across-all-regions https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42086712/how-to-see-all-...

draugadrotten 7y ago
https://gist.github.com/junaidk/433345da5bf8e580680d9109792d3169 https://gist.github.com/junaidk/433345da5bf8e580680d9109792d...
journalctl 7y ago
Out of curiosity, why are you running multiple EC2 instances across more than two regions?
- ppod 7y ago
  Honestly, because when I started I didn't understand AWS very well, which was my fault. But it definitely ended up costing me more money than I expected.

40four 7y ago

I've never liked the web console much either. Never found it very intuitive, or easy to use. But, once you navigate the maze, & learn where the few things you need are, it does get the job done. And to be fair it is fast. Not sure why, but for some reason I like clicking around in the web app, so makes me wish it was a better experience. In contrast, compare this to the Digital Ocean web console. It has beautiful design that is nice to look at. It's un-complicated & clutter free. Overall a very pleasurable web app, I've always been inpressed with their UX. But as people have pointed out, it seems Amazon expects us to use the CLI & APIs, and the web console is not a priority. So maybe I'll start moving in that direction with my AWS services.

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

The only thing worse is the GCP web console.

ernsheong 7y ago
Not sure how you came to this conclusion. GCP by far has the better UI, even AWS engineers acknowledge this.
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  I came to this conclusion after using GCP and AWS both for extended periods of time across multiple jobs, and just noticing that AWS solved my problems in a better way.

k__ 7y ago

My favorite is that every service asks you if you really want to delete but CloudFormation.

besus 7y ago

The AWS console is a thousand times better than the nightmare one in Azure.

KaiserPro 7y ago

I know many people will disagree, but I really miss the VMware fat windows client. (vsphere 5, before they ruined it with the weird flash hybrid that didn't work properly) That, was a paragon of design reliability and speed compared to the AWS console. What annoys me the most is the sheer weight of each page. If you have to context change, its multiple seconds before the page is useable. A classic example is lambda. I click on the function, page reloads (no problem) 1-2 seconds later the page is fully rendered, I can _then_ click on the monitoring tab, another couple of seconds, and then I can jump to the latest log, in cloudwatch. Cloudwatch can get fucked. Everything about it is half arsed. Search? all of the speed of splunk, combined with its reliability, but none of the usefulness. The standard answer is "you should use Cloudformation" I do, it too is distilled shart. (anything to do with ECS can cause a 3 hour, uninterruptible hang, followed by another timeout as it tries to roll back.) It also lazy evaluates the acutal CF, which means that parameter validation happens 5 minute in. Good fucking job there kids. What I really want is a QT app in the style of the VMware fat client (you know with an inbuilt remote EC2 console, that'd be great...) that talks to AWS. The GUI is desgined by the same team, and is _tested_ before a release by actual QAs who have the power to block things until the change is released.

kristianpaul 7y ago
You know that nothing stops you from using aws apis and making you own UI right?
- doliveira 7y ago
  Yeah because AWS is free and we don't have any right to complain.
- omni 7y ago
  In many cases AWS's absurd rate limits would make it hard to build a functional UI even if we wanted to. I imagine this is one major reason why list views and filtering/searching them is a disaster in every major AWS service.
  - 7y ago

aytekin 7y ago

Here is a startup idea for grabbing: Make a better interface for AWS/Google Cloud. Since their APIs covers everything this should be possible. Be the first UXaaS. A killer feature: a server by server breakdown of Google Cloud expenses. It is impossible to understand what you are paying for on Google Cloud. They lump everything together in an incredibly confusing bill.

ernsheong 7y ago
Hmm sounds like you're missing out on the Billing > Reports or Billing > Cost breakdown sections of GCP Console's Billing section. In Reports it does exactly what you want when you group by SKU in the Filters Incidentally a UI startup for AWS/Google Cloud is an incredibly bad idea. You're just a sitting duck waiting to be killed, and also you have no full control over the API.
whitepoplar 7y ago
I think that's why DigitalOcean is winning so much these days.
- Can_Not 7y ago
  Imagine if DO had lambda.
alephnan 7y ago
I tried, but many APIs accessible to these front end are not publicly available. For example, listing API keys for a given project. By the way, how much would you be willing to pay for such a UI?

noneeeed 7y ago

The three things that annoy me the most about the console: 1) state management/sync is frequently terrible. E.g you are looking at a page with some health indicator and a log view. The last entry in the log is some variation of "transitioned from busted to not busted", but the state indicator doesn't update until you refresh. 2) if you have multiple tabs open at a time (pretty common use case) there is a good chance it will suddenly decide that you have to reload the page for some reason, often when you are in the middle of something 3) live updating. Why the hell do I have to sit there hitting refresh on so many of the views to get up to date data? I've often sat there waiting for something to finish, only to realise it's been done for a while but the page has not updated. This seems closely related to (1). I find the overall design of the console fine, generally the UI is manageable, but the actual implementation is a steaming pile.

mdaniel 7y ago
> 2) if you have multiple tabs open at a time (pretty common use case) there is a good chance it will suddenly decide that you have to reload the page for some reason, often when you are in the middle of something I so strongly agree with that observation, and have repeatedly and often submitted feedback through their in-page feedback mechanism about please, I'm begging you, never involuntarily reload my page. That's why @adreamingsoul (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20903229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20903229) saying "send us complaints, we read your feedback" is like spitting into the wind for me I thought your "multiple tabs" was also going to mention that they have _exactly the same browser title_, no matter what subsection you have open. So, if one EC2 tab is looking at volumes, and another at instances, and another at autoscaling groups, well, too bad for you because you're just going to have to click on them all or have a good memory/tab-management scheme I kind of figure the console doesn't get any engineering love because of what other people in here have said: they want you to use the APIs
- noneeeed 7y ago
  It can be incredibly annoying when doing something like updating a cloudformation stack. I might open RDS in another tab to grab a snapshot ID or EC2 to check a sec group, and when I switch back to my half updated CF parameters the damn page forces a reload and loses the setting I've entered. I can't work out what it is they are doing that nesessitates these reloads

fortran77 7y ago

The console works, but the real power is in the API. The PowerShell API works extremely well and I write scripts for everything I need to do. On the Python side, "boto" works well, too.

dandigangi 7y ago

This is the specific one I never quite understood: * Order column by X * Type search into input * Column order drops * Can no longer apply ordering when search input is there 100% understand that larger companies will not typically, or at least shouldn't, be directly manipulating infra via the web console but there is 1000s of customers that use web for small business. It's a valid customer to think about it! ps I logged into Reddit so to add to that thread. Felt this in my soul.

gfodor 7y ago

Reading these threads make me realize I am either a victim of Stockholm syndrome or most developers are way more picky than me. I’ve never gotten frustrated at the aws console, though I have noticed some of the rough edges. I guess at this stage in my career I’ve internalized muddling through stuff without letting it bother me. The only exception to this probably is when I open the door and peek through to the latest insanity in JavaScript land, which I find impenetrable. (I’m looking at you, redux/saga/whatever)

alexnewman 7y ago

try azure

jayess 7y ago

It's been a few days but I'm still trying to figure out how to share access to the billing console with one of my organization's members. It's just baffling in every sense.

surfsvammel 7y ago

I have nothing against the AWS UI. I haven’t used it much, but it has never been a problem to me. It must be increasingly difficult to build an UI for a console like that, there are so many different users, use cases, services and perspectives.

Cpoll 7y ago

Search in the UI is my particular bane. Sometimes it works great (searching for EC2 instances). Sometimes you need to construct restricted search queries (slightly aided by a slow dropdown auto-complete) that look like `Name: Begins With: /blah/` (ParameterStore). Sometimes search is client-side, and only searches the page you're currently on (ECR, I think? I can't remember what does this). I think in this case it's sometimes form just following the limited functionality of the API. I have a _lot_ of scripts that are just ways to extract data quicker than I can in the UI.

Schweigi 7y ago
The search is definitely one of the biggest pain points when using the UI. I can only hope someone makes an executive decision and forces every service team to offer a proper search (more than prefix, same page search). I assume the bad search functionality happens because the service teams don’t really use their own service with more than some demo resources.
__david__ 7y ago
IoT is one of those client side searches. And worse, it's an endless scrolling page, so to do the search proper you have to repeatedly scroll down until you've loaded all the data (20 or more pages on our infra), then scroll back to the top and search. It's so bad I don't even know what to say—it's like no one ever tried to use it.

cookieswumchorr 7y ago

Maybe what the world really needs is a FOSS Framework that implements all the features on a swarm of VPS/Hardware servers? It's really disturbing to see the web reduced to a handful of giant cloud providers who also happen to suck at doing their job

deboflo 7y ago

Then you haven’t tried the Google Cloud consoles.

SilasX 7y ago

One of my pet peeves about it (might have since been fixed) is that AWS will gladly walk you through the wizard to set up an EC2 server, and only at the very end say “oh you don’t have permission to do that lol”. I compared it to a bartender who immediately recognizes that you’re underage but offers you alcoholic drinks, gives you samples, asks about preferences, counts out your change, and only after all of that stops you from drinking it. http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2016/02/some-of-my-geeky-tech-jokes-with.html http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2016/02/some-of-my-geeky-t...

peter_retief 7y ago

Well I am glad I am not the only one who struggles to understand what is going on with AWS. Everyone is all over the place with cryptic howto's. I think I may have even "lost" a running container at some point. Google cloud also seems to be out to confuse people, maybe its a strategy to stop users from escaping :)

nickthemagicman 7y ago

There seems to be a huge need for a boto3/django(or something) user interface that you could run locally to interface with AWS.

bob33 7y ago
You should give Commandeer https://getcommandeer.com https://getcommandeer.com a try. It is a Desktop UI just for this.
- nickthemagicman 7y ago
  Thank you! This is amazing. I want to contribute to this!
  - bob33 7y ago
    So, the main app is not opensource. We are in Beta mode, but do plan on having it be paid for, but most likely, free for developers, but a charge for companies to use the teams aspect. The other part we are doing is that we are open sourcing the Terraform, Serverless, and other templates. We have a plan to then enable the usage of them within the app. So you could just apply a serverless template to your environment, and immediately be setup with let's say an SQS queue, tied to a lambda. That repo is located here https://github.com/commandeer/open https://github.com/commandeer/open . Happy to chat more about it, as we are very excited about this and are working day and night on it.

lukev 7y ago

I don't find the console that frustrating, or when it is, I understand why. UIs are hard. What I do find frustrating is how much of the docs are written in a console-first way. In most cases, the straightforward definitions of resources, attributes and the relationships between them are tucked away (or not present at all) in favor of "click this, then click that" style. I am convinced that the best way to understand a cloud service is to understand its internal data model and semantics, but this is too often hidden behind procedural instructions.

benburleson 7y ago

AWS still needs to prioritize 100% CloudFormation support as a deliverable for new features. Remove the need to use the console.

k__ 7y ago
Yes, CodeCommit support is laughable

andreineculau 7y ago

3 years ago i had some vague hope that things do improve although i am not aware of the bugfixes so i started tracking the bugs as GitHub issues Soon after i gave up. Too many silly bugs, and no fixes. Reference: https://github.com/andreineculau/fl-aws https://github.com/andreineculau/fl-aws

mattbillenstein 7y ago

I use the web console fairly sparingly - iam, billing, browsing around s3 from time to time, etc. It's good enough - way better than it used to be, and better than the firefox extension that I started with. This is probably not a popular way of doing it, but I write python to orchestrate the provisioning steps of a VM with specific roles, routes, etc in a VPC (with public/private subnets in multiple AZs) and then I use other tools for config-management and deploy. I'm using few of AWS's services, it helps me do multi-cloud (another python script doing the same thing on another cloud), and it helps me keep my local dev environments in parity with production even on MacOS. I do use S3 and route53 globally - they're simple enough to use using boto. IMO if infra is now code, you should probably write code to manage infra...

miguelmota 7y ago

AWS has great APIs and SDKs and most of the time I use AWS services through the command line and not so much though the web interface. Even though AWS web interface has it's flaws, it's still 10 times better than Azure's web UI.

Trisell 7y ago

I’ve been working at a company where I have had to fight with the infrastructure team because they see no reason why I would need programmatic cress to do anything on the cli or with the sdk. The reason why. They don’t use it so why would I?

noncoml 7y ago

The problem with AWS teams in general is their arrogance. I dread having to deal with them. They are destroying Amazon’s reputation. Don’t want to bother you with specific examples, but every interaction I had with them was dreadful. I think this attitude gets reflected in their console design.

omni 7y ago
I'll share my frustrating experience with them just for fun https://github.com/boto/boto/pull/3093 https://github.com/boto/boto/pull/3093

captn3m0 7y ago

Surprised nobody has mentioned AWS's official (but no longer updated) GUI client: ElasticWolf[0]. It is very much not-maintained but it does have some benefits. My understanding is that AWS hasn't officially closed it because of US-Gov accessibility guidelines. Are there any other similar clients? [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/tools/aws-elasticwolf-client-console/ https://aws.amazon.com/tools/aws-elasticwolf-client-console/

sakopov 7y ago

I jokingly say that Amazon should have a couple of sessions at re:Invent where they talk about the things they fixed in Console. I generally find that I no longer mind most AWS UI quirks, but some things are really annoying like the broken Parameter Store search which has been broken for years or CloudWatch search which flat out doesn't work at times. I really believe there is a business opportunity here. I think you could pick a general use-case for AWS, like serverless, and build an intuitive UI around AWS offerings typically utilized by the serverless stack.