AWS's us-east-1 famously takes down either a bunch of companies with it, or causes global outages on the regular.
AWS has a terrible, terrible user interface partly because it is partitioned by service and region on purpose to decrease the "blast radius" of a failure, which is a design decision made totally pointless by having a bunch of their most critical services in one region, which also happens to be their most flaky.
Nobody is winning any UX prize there. Azure, AWS, GCP... they are all terrible. Back then GCP for instance used to only work reliably on chromo-based browsers. Azure has that horrible overlay UI that abuses extended real estate that just doesn't work.
Its just a bad product. Just like windows, OneDrive, teams and basically everything Microsoft has pumped out in the past decade.
Microsoft is in the top 5 most valuable companies in the world. It's got azure that is a huge cloud provider. And yet it was utterly unable to present its answer in the AI race. Not even a bad model with a half baked harness. Nothing. And meanwhile they are trying to port NTFS to low powered FPGAs because insanity. Just let that sink in.
Check out hetzner ui (regardless if you like their services, i know some ppl have opions or experiences lol) BUT, their cloud ux/ui is fantasties for a cloud company!
I worked extensively with Hetzner and I love them! But it think they are in a different class than these other providers, mainly in terms of global presence so I didn't include them and wouldn't for instance recommend them to my current employer. But indeed the Hetzner console is great. The robot not so much, but it's serviceable.
One is caused by the other. Amazons engineers decided to split the interface in a “user hostile” manner with the stated purpose of increasing reliability… which didn’t materialise. The clunky UI did.
Or maybe you can provide a better explanation for why users had to “hunt” through hundreds(!) of product-region combinations to find that last lingering service they were getting billed $0.01 a month for?
This just doesn’t happen in GCP or Azure. You get a single pane of glass.
You need to understand history for this. It's because of the famous "Bezos API mandate memo" https://chrislaing.net/blog/the-memo/. It was 2002, nobody was doing anything close to that.
You could argue now that that's no excuse anymore given it's one of the most valuable companies in the world, but that would dismiss the fact they have other priorities than a complete UI overhaul for consistency, and that rewrites are very dangerous, for instance people are already used to the UX pitfalls in the console, it's the devil they know, and changing that will be upsetting to the vast majority of users.
So there you have it. You know what you are getting into, AWS is a behemoth and it's 2026. Don't use the console like it's 2010. Use IaC for any nontrivial work, otherwise you only have yourself to blame.
I understand how this came to pass (I didn't know it before so thanks for the insight!)
But as a customer I absolutely hate working with AWS tech. Their stuff is a mess and I feel like I shouldn't have to get my head around their idiosyncracies. I prefer Azure even though Microsoft is a terrible company to work with. I find the AWS people and attitude a lot nicer but their services are a mess. If I do something new I prefer using Azure despite having to work with Microsoft.
Microsoft is not a "trusted partner" wanting the best for you, they're always trying to screw you over in favour of selling some new crap to your boss. Always that stupid sales drive, whereas the people from AWS are very focused on building success together. But still, their tech is just so bad unless you spend all your days working with it and really become an expert on what they offer. That's not tech, just corporate servitude. And I've always avoid that position, I don't want my career tied to some big brand name. I don't want to be "the AWS expert" or "the MS expert".
But I have to say I hate cloud (and "the world according to big tech") in general, and it's one of the reasons I'm not really involved in server infrastructure anymore these days. I'll gladly automate but not with their tooling, I prefer something more open and not tied to specific vendors. But I rarely work with that now. So yeah when that happens I'm making a one-off unicorn and figuring out all the Infra as code stuff is not worth it.
I'm right there with you, don't get me wrong. Choosing a cloud provider is like choosing the lesser of many evils. We are, however, coming to a point where k8s is viable for most workloads, so it's less complex today to spin up a project with cloud mobility in mind than it was 10 years ago if you plan it right.
> It's like every service was designed by a totally different team.
Yes, by design.
Conceptually this improves velocity and reduces the blast radius of failure.
In practice, everything depends on IAM, S3, VPC, and EC2 directly or indirectly, so this doesn't help anywhere near as much as one would think.
Azure and GCP have a split control plane where there's a global register of resources, but the back-end implementations are split by team.
That way the users don't see Conway's Law manifest in the browser urls... as much. (You still do if you pay attention! In Azure the "provider type" is in the path instead of the host name.)
> Conceptually this improves velocity and reduces the blast radius of failure.
Hm yes but I hate working with it as a customer because it is so confusing. Everything works differently and there is a lot of overlap (several services exist that do the same thing). It seems like an amateurish patchwork.
I understand it has benefits to have different teams working on different services but those teams should still be aligned in terms of UX and basic concepts.
With the difference that best practices in Azure SQL have always been to store your own copies of backups and run the database in some HA/GEO-redundancy mode that blocks deletion.
Which sounds great, except that Azure SQL -- like many cloud services -- was carefully designed to be a tarpit into which you can import your data, but can't get your data back out.
For example, for at least a few years its "external" backups were simply the bacpac export function, which wasn't transactionally consistent and had all sorts of fun limits.
Hourly or even more frequently is commonplace because transaction log backups are relatively cheap to take and keep, especially in the era of blob storage. In the olden days, tape drives couldn't keep up this level of backup schedule because they're bad at frequent stop-starts and interleaving a bunch of unrelated transaction logs would make recovery very slow. This just isn't an issue any more and anybody competent is backing up multiple times per day.
In a large enterprise if you task a front end team with solving a performance issue that is caused by the back end, invariably they’ll hack together some workaround… in the front end.
People only ever solve problems in the areas they have control over, whether that’s where the root cause is or not.
This is the "safety" messaging that OpenAI and Anthropic keep harping on and on, and on about, while whistling a merry tune as they turn around and sell AI to the US military and worse, to the tune of $billions/year already.
The "and worse" needs elaboration, because fundamentally the single biggest cash cow for AI vendors will be (and maybe already is) implementing a dystopian future where everything we say, type, or do will not just be recorded but also: read, analysed, and cross-correlated by unfeeling heartless machines tasked with keeping us in line.
I'm not being paranoid, President Biden said as much, but only in reference to China. If you think only China has motivation to use AI to keep a lid on dissent, I have a bridge to sell you. And if you think the Land Of The Free(tm) will never abuse AI in this manner, well... I have some bad news. You may want to sit down.
Here in Australia, the cyberpunk dystopia is already starting to be rolled out. A customer of ours asked their IT team to hook up a variety of HR-related information sources to their new AI system tasked with making recommendations for hiring, promotion, and demotion.
Yeah, AI-enabled surveillance capitalism is likely to be every bit as bad as what people imagine China is doing with their social credit scores.
And the scary thing is that you can probably easily sell it to Democratic voters if you track racism scores for people, so you can filter people out of your dating pool or job/rental applications. Most people don't care about privacy as a fundamental right, and they'll roll over and compromise if you give them a way to track what they hate. You just need to make sure it is "bipartisan" and it'll be wildly popular.
I just tested their online demo with a challenging photo of a snowboarder in dark clothing in front of a dark forest. The low contrast makes it difficult to distinguish their black helmet against the shadowed trees immediately behind and around it.
Dinov3 segmented this perfectly, as good as a human might, TIPSv2 cut the head off and marked it with the same PCA values as the forest. Similarly, TIPSv2 "split" the snow in the foreground into two different PCA values despite it being visually (and physically) contiguous and not significantly distinct.
I have a crippling guilt about not keeping my apartment as spotlessly clean as my parents did theirs, to the point that I end up procrastinating, which just makes it worse.
The trick to overcoming this is not to aim for "clean" but for "cleaner than before".
Just keep chipping away at it, whether it is a messy codebase or a messy kitchen.
I use it for cleaning all the time. Whenever I have dishes, I always give myself permission to do as little as I want knowing that one clean dish is better than nothing. Most often I end up doing them all.
The other saying I say is "completion not perfection". That helps me in yard work especially. I'm not going for the cover shot of "Better Homes and Gardens", I just need the lawn to be cut.
> "we believe advances in programming language theory and database systems have opened a path that wasn’t available before"
Which is tantamount to waving one's hands about and saying there's "New magic!(tm)"
... while standing next to a pile of discarded old magic that didn't work out.
This blog post says nothing about what makes Cambra's approach unique and likely to succeed; it is just a list of (valid) complaints about the status quo.
I'm guessing they want to build a "cathedral" instead of the current "bazaar" of components, perhaps like Heroku or Terraform, but "better"? I wish them luck! They're going to need it...
> businesses are going to have issues down the line.
The AI agents coding up everything in parallel is just the latest iteration of a series of fads. Previously it was "outsource everything to low-cost Indian developers". Before that, it was "visual drag & drop rapid development". Before that, it was 4GL. Etc, etc...
Turns out that coding is more like a proof of understanding by the humans responsible.
AWS's us-east-1 famously takes down either a bunch of companies with it, or causes global outages on the regular.
AWS has a terrible, terrible user interface partly because it is partitioned by service and region on purpose to decrease the "blast radius" of a failure, which is a design decision made totally pointless by having a bunch of their most critical services in one region, which also happens to be their most flaky.
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