Love hate Amazon web services #awssummitsg

After years of not having to deal with AWS except for my pet projects , I decided to visit the AWS Summit in Singapore. Its right here, I thought great time to join and learn some Lambda as well as Lumberyard/gamelift. Suffice to say, I was disappointed all together at the future of Amazon Web services in general.

The backstory is where I stand now and this person captures it completely http://openmymind.net/Why-I-Dislike-ec2/    . tl:dr AWS is VERY expensive and it gets a lot more expensive every year and you don’t even see it.

I considered the fact that microservices like Lambda are great way to move forward. Unfortunately AWS is getting on a high horse right now. Great ideas but …

AWS is over, in my opinion. The hype, the love, the innovation…it’s old. It’s just that in Asia things are slow as a wooden raft. I see all the marketing hype picking up and over 2000 strong crowd showed up in undermanned exhibitor booths of the same 8 year old tech. underwhelming is an understatement.

What’s the right now?

Well, AWS has taught everyone in the Computer and Software Architecture world a lot of things and it’s still a great starting point. Like signing up with that 5$ web hosting provider to put a php page up. It’s getting less complex and massively multi-tenanted. It’s a great business challenge solved. There will always be space for PB scale data and number crunching challenges to solve. Thats always going to be AWS.

What CTO’s should look into is how to take this shared web hosting with awesome (although locked-in API) and abstract it away. Implement the same in private clouds , dedicated hardware  that is built on open standards. OpenStack & Cloudstack had the right idea years ago. I want to use the Dedicated managed or unmanaged solution with bare metal performance and the same “designed-for-failure” architecture as AWS.

If I refer back to my work with Razer Synapse and for years before that, I have always avoided vendor lock in to as far as possible. By abstracting layers of the code and making them stateless, independent of underlying platform. For e.g. S3 was written with wrapper class that can do FileStore, ObejctStore via Ceph or 3rd parties  or S3. Provider and IaaS independent. There was no elastic beanstalk but a combination of Python Fabric and Shell scripting.

I had used DynamoDB in 2011-12 early days before it was  GA. It was great, limited but great. I found I was just as happy if not happier with CouchDB and Redis on a multihomed setup with failover.

Still love AWS and by no means this is a rant or simply because I work for a competitor. Personally I believe we are complimentary. If the approach of today is anything to go by, then we have our work cut out and AWS is going to be left behind despite being pioneers.

I am going to start writing again, mostly rants against fat tech but alternatives to AWS/IaaS/Paas and the likes.

P.S. I couldn’t join the developer breakout for the lamba and stuff I wanted to give a whirl. I decided not to because the event people were being extremely Kafkaesque and difficult with their rules and “maybe”. You need to que and wait, maybe you can join, maybe you can’t, if you go out you maybe can’t come back in… But there are videos uploaded later “The Hell!, why didnt you guys just say so before I decided to take a day off and come down” . So I walked out extremely pissed.