
Tell HN: $13K Sales for “The Good Parts of AWS” on Launch Day - DVassallo
Hi HN<p>I&#x27;m an ex-AWS employee, now working for myself. Together with a friend of mine (who also recently left Amazon) we tried an experiment and put almost everything we know about AWS in one short digital book. We launched the book yesterday (xmas day) and it sold over $13K already: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;dvassallo&#x2F;status&#x2F;1210352939539161088<p>This is the first time I got paid for something I wrote, so I&#x27;m still very new to this. But I&#x27;m happy to share what I learned so far, so please feel free to ask me anything.<p>And here&#x27;s a discount link for the book if you&#x27;d like to check it out: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gum.co&#x2F;aws-good-parts&#x2F;hn
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JMTQp8lwXL
At a conceptual level, I support this, but there should be no need for a
cottage industry to explain how to use AWS. The UI is a nightmare. I have to
open my browser's element inspector to see full docker image names in ECR.
That's atrocious for a product that brings in billions. Clearly the UI's
deficiencies "don't matter" to AWS' success, but they could try a smidge
harder to make user's lives easier. But they likely won't, since it's
business, and many of us using AWS aren't doing so by individual choice. But
next time, when I am the decision maker, ...remember that, Amazon. People
(individual contributors) do occasionally ascend upwards in technology
organizations, and they _will_ know what it's like to use your technology, and
it will absolutely influence decision making.

~~~
reggegg
For any proper use the AWS console is nothing more than a brochure of what you
could be doing.

If you want to use their services properly, read the documentation for the
ones you have chosen and use proper tooling that provides repeatability (for
the lack of a better word), provided by AWS themselves or by a third party.

~~~
Eikon
The thing is, even “proper tooling” is a nightmare.

Tons of consistency issues in APIs, poor documentation, boto3 is atrocious
where services names are passed as strings and why not use ‘ _args’, ‘_
*kwargs’ so you don’t know how to use the method by looking at the signature.

I had to implement s3 presigned URLs generation as we had no access to SDKs,
the documentation is littered across their website, you literally have to go
through dozens of pages to compile enough information.

Their quota system is borderline frightening, there is so much individual
limitations that you may really never know if some limit is not gonna blow up
in production.

Not to mention their voluntarily incomprehensible pricing. You may brankrupt
your company just doing a few API calls and anyway, I generally found the
overall quality of their products so poor that their premium just kills it.

Every time I know I’ll need to use one of their service, I prepare for the
pain.

~~~
ldoughty
I generally support most things AWS does, but agree with you here. Though
documentation you get a handle on fairly quick... Nearly all SDKs follow the
same pattern. Still room for improvement. The lack of easy helpers (like for
signing setup and validation) got us too.

Kinda to the other replies point though: does anyone do it better?

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webpaymentsguy
>does anyone do it better?

Not currently, sadly, imo.

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duxup
Is this a good book for dipping your toes into AWS?

I'm mostly a front end developer and have used Google's cloud services and
others for my personal apps and experiments.

... but always found AWSs multitude of services and administration interfaces
daunting.

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DVassallo
Yes, definitely. The first part is very high level. It’s our opinionated
perspective of the most important AWS products and how we think about them
(which is not exactly how Amazon describes them). The second part is more
technical and focused on developers who want to set up an AWS environment and
understand what’s going on.

And if what you find doesn't match what you're expecting, just reply to the
email and you'll get a full refund – no questions asked.

~~~
duxup
Thanks!

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liamcardenas
Best of luck with launch. I had pre-ordered the book and am exited to dive in.

For what it’s worth, following you on twitter gave me a great window into your
skillset and experience which prompted me to by the book.

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scottybo
Congratulations! I've been working with AWS for over 5 years now and I still
feel like I have to reach for a tutorial every time I go to use IAM

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quickthrower2
What was the marketing? Was it because of the contacts you had through working
at aws spreading the word?

I can imagine this selling a lot more as so many businesses are using aws and
spending a lot of money on that too.

Maybe the next step is a top selling udemy or Udacity etc. course.

~~~
DVassallo
Almost all on Twitter. (But got some sales from this too now :))

I've been active on Twitter for the last 10 months, since I left my job. I've
been documenting what I'm doing and my professional story as it happens.
Gradually built a following of 13K, and they helped me spread the word when I
launched this.

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nicksantamaria
_The Good Parts_

 _..._

 _CloudFormation_

Really? I mean, I get you want to recommend an infrastructure as code tool,
but I really wouldn't consider it in the category of "[features] which you
almost never need to consider alternatives."

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ldoughty
I've used Ansible on AWS for 2 years to build out over 50,000 servers, to set
up the vpc architecture, control IAM roles, nearly everything.

Ansible kept breaking. A minor patch on v2.5.x destroyed my VPC links, 2.6
broke my IAM, at one step I had to have an intern set log group expiration on
200 log group across several accounts because ansible doesn't support log
group going from "undefined" expiration to any value.

I started with ansible because the the server modules are good... But I'm
leaving them (for aws components) because there's just no quality control on
the releases. I was tired of multiple sprints a year getting side tracked by a
tool meant to help.

Now our DevOps team uses SAM templates, a superset/tool on CloudFormation.
We've had 0 outages or sidetracks over the last year due to a SAM/CF bug, and
we now have access to be features that came out in the last 18 months that
ansible still doesn't support.

I don't suggest CloudFormation as a solution if you co-exist in multiple
clouds, but I also reject the common belief among managers that teraform and
ansible are the "god tools". Or team was almost forced onto teraform because a
manager was convinced by a Hashicorp marketing guy that you could take a
complex about setup from one cloud to another in 4-6 weeks using their product
because the modules are cross-cloud. Right...

Anyway, Ansible is still our server control platform (though we are moving
more serverless), but cloud formation is what we use to build the entire
accounts supporting ecosystem

~~~
digianarchist
Ansible is awful to use with AWS. So many modules are "community" written with
nowhere near the feature parity of Terraform [0] and are full of bugs [1].

[0] -
[https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.3/s3_bucket_module.html](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.3/s3_bucket_module.html)

[1] -
[https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/47945](https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/47945)

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shivawu
Great job! How long did you spend on writing the book?

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DVassallo
Started in October, spending about 1 day a week. Then we did a big push over
the last 10 days.

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shivawu
Thanks for replying!

Another question is, what motivated you to start this effort in the first
place? And why do you think it's useful. I haven't read the book, so not
really sure

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DVassallo
Mostly an experiment. I wanted to get a concrete idea about whether it's
possible to make a living producing digital products like these (and whether I
could do it :)). I don't have that answer yet (too early), but now I have some
evidence that something like this can sell.

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hazz99
Bought this on my phone and downloaded the PDF but didn't create an account -
assumed it'd remember my email. How can I download it again on my laptop?

~~~
DVassallo
The email receipt should have a download link. If you didn't get the receipt,
email me and I'll resend it to you.

~~~
hazz99
Fantastic!

Great resource. As someone who's used AWS before but always felt lost, this is
great. The writing feels like I'm talking to a colleague sharing their
experience, which makes it super approachable.

There was a repeating element of "x is a bit like y" (e.g. DynamoDB is like a
super-durable data structure", which I found to be a really useful / easy way
to think about each service.

~~~
DVassallo
Thank you! I'm very glad to hear that, because that was the intention.

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terrycody
Good parts series, one of the best, congratulations man!

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superasn
I think you'll get more sales if you offer a sample chapter or two for trial.

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DVassallo
Will do. Thanks.

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Hamzii
Good

