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Idea: A Simpler AWS

1 points by akrai ↗ HN
I’ve been working a lot with AWS, and increasingly feel it’s excessively complicated and overbloated for a vast majority of use cases. Is it a good idea to make a simpler version of AWS with only simple CRUD functionality, authentication, and a few other essential, easy-to-use features?

4 comments

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kjksf
It already exist.

Heroku, Meteor, Firebase, Lambda Functions, Google Cloud Run and I'm sure there are others that I can't name off the top of my head.

cyborch
Someone did that already. It’s called DigitalOcean :)
zdmc
DigitalOcean is no longer a simpler AWS; it may have been at one time, but no longer. If you check community voting, they have ignored moving toward a serverless model, and this is where the Cloud is moving. With each passing day, they become less like AWS (or the other 2 of Big 3 Cloud Providers: Azure and GCP) and more like a traditional VM host company.

I even tried to run their “Managed” K8s cluster, and it was far more difficult than AWS EMR or Azure HDInsight (never tried Google’s equivalent). No way to run scripts when cluster is initialized (apart from using something like Helm; doable but not simpler than AWS), no easy way to choose preconfigured environment (i.e., Spark or Hadoop). D.O. basically provides a simple interface to spin up a VM. Their command line client isn’t any simpler than aws-cli or Azure “az” which also has simple features like integrating well with PowerShell and OAuth2 client login from terminal. Even Spaces was no simpler, than S3 or Azure Blob Storage