UI/UX is definitely not their strong suit and CloudWatch is one of the worst offenders. I really hope they aquire a company to deliver a completely revamped observability platform in the same vein as where Stackdriver is headed. They really seem to stuggle building things in house that have a great user experience.
That being said, they excel at building things that are scalable, reliable and secure, and while you may only see that as 10% of the features, for a lot of ppl that is 80-90%, especially if data is involved. They do tend to improve their products over time as well and for better or worse I am sure a lot of those resourcing decisions are driven by data/revenue rather than how crappy the product is.
At the end of the day this allows others to continue to compete with them, which is a good thing.
A big part of that was because until recently Frontend Engineers were second class citizens at Amazon. It became easier and easier to work for a year here then move to Facebook/Google and a variety of unicorns and get a huge pay raise.
Amazon moves incredibly fast when it comes to products and incredibly slow when it comes to employee growth. They are treating it like a lightbulb moment, but several of the people involved in this have been working on it for a decade.
Reality is, they didn't want to pay FEE's big money because they weren't worth it, and now the company is starving for good UX and they want to pretend they invented a solution to the problem by creating a role that's existed at Google for more than 10 years.
Previously Amazon separated frontend focused engineers (WDE's) and software engineers (SDE's) but the former had a lower payscale than the latter. The end result, every single time, is that great FEE's would simply work at Amazon for 1-2 years and move to Google or Facebook where they were paid considerably more.
Amazon finally rectified it by introducing the FEE role, which has the same pay scale as SDE's. Perhaps more importantly, the WDE role terminated at WDE III and even that was incredibly difficult to achieve.
Being the worst is not as bad as people think. McDonalds has the worst burgers and Taco Bell the worst tacos, yet both massively successful operations.
I doubt McDs has the worst burgers but I get your point. The pros of McDs, you go anywhere in the world, you can expect reasonable quality, the familiarity of the brand/ products at reasonable prices. They won't be the best or the worst but do the job.
> They are absolutely the worst burgers in the world.
That is just your opinion, I love McD burgers. I can also guarantee that in a line up of 5 burgers you wont be able to figure out which one is from McD with blindfold on.
They're revamping some of the console pages, like RDS and ActiveMQ with a new design language, but I think their official stance is that no one in their right might should be using the console at scale anyway. The console itself uses the APIs, so anyone doing anything respectable should just use the APIs. The console is really a second class citizen, and I assume the designers who work on it are as well.
I don't want to have to learn to interface with a bunch of arcane APIs or terminal interfaces to string together a proof of concept on a cloud provider. In my experience Azure was by far the easiest (and most costly) to get off the ground and something built with.
I mean, we've all got a limited amount of time to learn and try new things... being very hard to get some simple SaaS endpoints setup from AWS is often an exercise in frustration. And while I appreciate all the detailed IAM and Firewall options, on Azure (by comparison), if I have the correct security token, I can generally connect over a secure connection from anywhere in the world to pretty much any of their services without friction.
And if I'm going to have to learn a bunch of crap, I'd just assume learn a little more and roll my own on Linode or DO, or any number of much less expensive compute options.
That being said, they excel at building things that are scalable, reliable and secure, and while you may only see that as 10% of the features, for a lot of ppl that is 80-90%, especially if data is involved. They do tend to improve their products over time as well and for better or worse I am sure a lot of those resourcing decisions are driven by data/revenue rather than how crappy the product is.
At the end of the day this allows others to continue to compete with them, which is a good thing.