
AWS Re:Invent Presentations - jeffbarr
https://aws.amazon.com/events/events-content/?awsf.filter-series=*all&awsm.page-cards=1
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fnord77
Can anyone point out some of the good ones?

Just about every presentation I went to this year at re:invent was not
particularly good. They lacked depth and just seemed to be saying "just use
this aws product" and you'll be all set.

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arminiusreturns
This is one of my main problems with the AWS everything advocates. I'm ok with
using AWS mostly for a few key things like infrastructure, but I want my
tooling to be independent and able to adapt to other situations. For
example,why should I ever use CloudFormation over Ansible or Terraform when it
lacks many features and can't be applied to other providers?

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scarface74
Well, then you get the worse of both worlds. Why use AWS at all if you’re not
using their managed services? You’re spending more on raw resources and just
as much on maintenance.

As far as Terraform, there is nothing portable about it. Each of its
provisioners are cloud specific.

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arminiusreturns
> Why use AWS at all if you’re not using their managed services?

Is this a serious question? I can value the infrastructure the AWS provides,
such as regions and availability zones, while not wanting to get tied into
their other services including the managed services for reasons such as
business requirements for cloud agnosticism, which is for example one reason I
tend to use HAproxy instead of ELB even on stuff on AWS. With CI/CD pipelines
applied to infrastructure and a move towards no-ops, the maintenance costs of
self-managed infra is reducing more and more.

I understand for some shops with a lack of personnel or knowledge to
accomplish that self management may want to buy into a holisitic solution, but
I think it's awfully intellectually disingenuous to not recognize the
potential value of _not_ buying into a holistic solution in _certain
situations_.

Also, common, 'cloud specific'? So if I want to spin up my stack on Google or
some other platform, I just have to rewrite a few lines of some .tf files. If
I want to do that and I'm tied to CloudFormation.... I'm sol...

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scarface74
Really? You would go as far as managing your own load balancers instead of
using a managed, highly available ELB from AWS?

Have you tried using Terraform across providers? It’s far more than just “a
few lines of codes”. If you just want cross region availability and still
manage things yourself, there are much cheaper ways than AWS.

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arminiusreturns
Yes I would, there are some cases where the featureset is better. Also, it
really is just a few lines of code. If you separate out IAC-code and
configuration code even if you are running through say a jenkins pipeline it's
not much trouble to change a few .tf files around to get the same result on a
different provider... You act like writing terraform is hard or convoluted and
I don't understand where you are coming from on that.

[https://github.com/terraform-providers](https://github.com/terraform-
providers)

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scarface74
Do you get the cross AZ redundancy? and you’re managing more servers and
probably spending more than just using an ELB. What about the HA from the
target servers? If you were using a load balancer + autoscaling group with a
min/max of 2. If your server went down or your entire AZ went down,
autoscaling would bring another one up. If the server or AZ went down running
your load balancer, it would also be redundant?

One of our web servers crashed in the middle of the night once. I got an alert
saying it crashed and that another one was brought up. I turned over, went
back to sleep and investigated the next morning. If the “server” running an
ELB crashed, I wouldn’t have to care.

Do you really think that you’re going to be changing providers Willy nilly
once you reach any type of scale?

It’s just like all of the bushy tailed “architects” who use the repository
pattern just in case one day their CTO on a whim decides to move their six
figure a year Oracle installation to Postgres.

What business value is being added by going through all of the trouble of
staying “cloud agnostic” compared to the lack of HA and maintenance.

Btw, we also don’t have to manage Jenkins servers. We have a cloud formation
template with parameters and quick create link that a developer can click on
to create a CodeBuild project anytime they want to create a new build project.
They specify the Github link that triggers the job. You then specify your
build steps as a list of bash (Linux) or Powershell (Windows) commands in a
yaml file.

We could also do the same with CodePipeline - create a CF template that
creates Code Pipeline jobs on the fly, but we do use OctopusDeploy for
deployments.

CodeBuild runs Docker containers to run builds. Again no servers to manage but
I believe by default it can run 50 builds simultaneously. If a build job needs
custom tooling or a custom version of a runtime, the developer can build a
custom Docker container to run the build.

You’re doing more work just in the eventuality that you may want to rip out
your entire infrastructure and you’re paying more for the privilege.

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arminiusreturns
You've obviously fully bought into AWS and don't want to hear anything to the
contrary. That's fine if it works for you, but you aren't interested in honest
conversation, so I'm done here.

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scarface74
It’s not about “fully buying into AWS”. I would say the same about Azure or
GCP - well not GCP I wouldn’t trust Google for any infrastructure. If you have
a static workload and the staff to handle infrastructure, AWS may not be worth
it. Use a colo or a cheaper service like Linode. Everything I use managed
services for I’ve done on prem.

I’m saying that it is just as much a waste of money and time to use _any_
cloud provider just to duplicate what you could do at a colo.

I would say the same thing about spending extra money for Oracle or SQL
Server. Why spend extra on a commercial solution and not take advantage of it.
You wouldn’t use Excel just to create CSV files.

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arminiusreturns
I come from places where that have self-managed on-prem datacenters, with
self-managed CPU/GPU clusters, and using CloudFormation for internal
infrastructure simple is a non-starter, but with some stuff in AWS, why would
we do half CF and half terraform? Do it in tf et al for both. Yes I have
occasionally used ELB/EFS in front of HAproxy for some of the reasons
mentioned, because I recognize some situations where the value-add is worth
the tradeoff.

The entire point of my post is that lock-in to AWS can be bad in certain
situations, which I have tried to clarify multiple times now and you have
ignored every time. I'm not saying it's bad in all situations, just that it
can be bad in some. Your extreme defensiveness seems strange to me for that
reason.

I look at it like datacenter design. You don't have just one isp. You have
multiple ISP lines incoming, often in different forms
(aerial/underground/wisp) so that you are never too dependent on one thing.
Your metaphorical datacenter may have a OC-3840, and that may be a big feature
for you, but you should at least admit to yourself and customers not having
other ISP lines might be a weakness, despite the awesomeness of the 3840..

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gamegoblin
I found a lot of videos of the actual presentations on the AWS Events youtube
channel here
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdoadna9HFHsxXWhafhNvKw/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdoadna9HFHsxXWhafhNvKw/videos)
. Would've been nice if they were linked on OP's page.

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RocketSyntax
reinvent was a total waste of time. i didn't know that you had to reserve a
seat in every single session you wanted to attend. didn't get into any.

