Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers

Re:Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers by scarface74 on Sunday December 02, 2018 @02:58PM (#18584193)

Another issue I have with AWS is that they simply provide too many ways to do the same thing. I want to run a container. Should I use ElasticBeanstalk? ECS? Fargate? EC2 with Docker? I've been using AWS for years, so I get the subtle differences, but some users just want to click a button and be done with it, which is where third-parties can excel.

Or pay overpriced “Implementation Consultants”. I have no sympathy for people who don’t take the time to learn the subtleties of the platform they choose to use.

On the other hand, I’ll gladly charge them a nice hourly rate to help them.

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Re:Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers by maxxxxx on Sunday December 02, 2018 @03:04PM (#18584235)

In a lot of companies you simply don't get the time to study things. I am right now working on porting a project to the cloud that was previously supported (and fucked up) by our IT department but it's hard to do it right. Ths director has declared that AWS is best and there is a lot of pressure to show something soon or the move to cloud may get cancelled.

There is no way to get something really that way but getting away from IT is already worth it even if the result is still not very good.

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Re:Amazon's cloud business is competing with its own customers by scarface74 on Sunday December 02, 2018 @03:23PM (#18584339)

I feel your pain. I was the dev lead at a company and responsible for a decently complex new green field project. They decided to “move to the cloud” at the time I didn’t know anything about AWS and the “consultants” that were brought in only knew networking and the best they could help us do is a “lift and shift”. I was neither given the time to research, given good consultants that knew anything about the development and Devops portions of AWS or given the access to a dev account to experiment and do proof of concepts.

So so did everything like I would do on prem with a bunch of VMs.

I asked them to set up a dev, qa, uat, and production subnet. All with multiple VMs.

I used 7 VMs for Hashicorp’s Consul, 7 for Nomad, and 7 for Mongo. (1 for each non production environment and a cluster of 3 for production.) I also used Fabio. Between all of that I had my configuration key/value store, service discovery, job scheduling (Nomad), and data store. I also had build boxes for Team Foundation Server (or whatever MS is calling thier hosted TFS version these days with local agents.)

It wasn’t until after I was getting ready to leave the company that I realized how dumb this setup was for an AWS hosted solution. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have done too much differently today for a self hosted solution.

I left the company, self demoted to an individual contributor role at a smaller company that was “cloud native” and I spent the next year learning AWS inside and out and taking advantage of reimbursements for certifications.

I’m still at the company now, but when and if so do decide to leave, I’m. It going back to being an architect for a company. Consulting is way more lucrative.

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