My experience as well; I had to become really intimate with aws over the years because I noticed more and more that consultants we hire (we don’t need fulltime) for aws or other cloud setups, pull wool over your eyes by throwing out terms (you generally wouldn’t know outside these setups), saying the word ‘security’ a lot and showing extremely complex deployment charts which look great but contain many things you didn’t know you needed and probably do not need. I cannot count the times I found 1000-10000$/month of unneeded stuff at clients in these setups. First it was just ec2 (‘in the beginning’) which was more expensive than our vps/baremetal setups, but that price jumped up for only marginally more complex setups and so I decided to learn it all and see what was happening. Almost never justified in my experience.
A lot of effort is put into the customer experience, however often it's by the feature devs. So it's good once you grok it. But obtuse to start and not good across products.
It really needs some love from a higher level thinker who's not steeped in the solution, but in the problem. Presumably this is a PM but there's just not a lot of good ones in the org to be frank. They're almost not worth consulting.
Same for devops in general and often, programming too. A few smart, cunning personal-life-optimizers drove this and a vast majority of innocent workers profit from this system. Personally, I profit from this and I am very scared the people that pay us eventually realize how easy everything could be.
As someone who has worked within AWS, and also used AWS as a customer at multiple companies, I totally understand that sentiment. But I wouldn't want to solve some of the problems myself, rather than using their services.
> But I wouldn't want to solve some of the problems myself, rather than using their services.
Sure, but vanilla setups should be trivial and optimised for cost. That is not to their or their consultants’ benefit.
I mean, whenever I asked someone ‘how do I do this in aws’, they tell me ‘oh that is a bog standard blah setup, very Simple’. So if that is simple, why is it so hard to set up as a novice (with 20 years of rack server bare metal hosting experience). I had to learn everything about aws in order to figure out that all experts saying things are ‘simple’ were still not providing optimal solutions for my vanille, and for decades unchanged across many different applications, hosting wishes. If you don’t know literally everything about aws and hired a consultant or a team to set it up, you are probably (massively) overpaying. And often, as I see at clients, for vanilla stuff that should be 1 click setup. But yes, I guess tool providers should provide this on top, not aws itself.
