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7 Vital AWS Concepts easily explained

Vaibhav Namburi on May 28, 2020

Let's face it, AWS can make you pull your hair out if you don't understand what's happening. Scratch that, that's programming in general. What I'...

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Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • May 28 '20 • Edited

My two concerns about AWS

Lock-in
Cost monitoring / budget setting

Rolf Streefkerk • May 29 '20

Lock-in,

this really depends, you can limit your lock in by using Docker based deployments. But even if you don't, there's always a form of lock in whatever solution you choose to use and there's always a cost to re-engineer the solution regardless of platform. So I believe the lock-in issue isn't that much of a deal, and especially not these days with virtualization and cloud agnostic deployment options available in the worst case.

Cost monitoring,
The tagging system in AWS is extremely important to use consistently such that you can more easily group your deployments and get pretty accurate day to day spend of those deployments. In cost explorer it's then a piece of cake to see which parts of your application incur what costs.
Then budget alerts are there to cover hard number value alerts.
If you're running a multi account setup, use organizations with consolidated billing. All your billing for all sub-accounts goes to one account. Again, the tagging system you've setup will help you sort out exactly what spend comes from where.
Really the tools are there.

Vaibhav Namburi • May 28 '20

Cost Monitoring is a really painful problem and trust me there's MANY people who have this issue!

There are some companies trying to fix it, but AWS is so cryptic in its spend sometimes it gets really hard to showcase

Lock-in, also fair, but thats the case with most cloud tools though and why they're valued at such high numbers, the LTV is off the chart

Dave • May 28 '20

As I'm predominantly a back end developer, with a life-long experience in Linux, I think you've grossly over-simplified the terms, but kudos on the attempt at least.

Noting what you list as your job title, please, for the love of everything holy tidy up the reference to "tunnelling" - when you say that, those of us with experience in Linux read "SSH tunnel", and that's categorically not what happens when you connect to an EC2. It's much closer to simply "SSHing" to an EC2 than it is "tunnelling."

Vaibhav Namburi • May 29 '20 • Edited

Hey Dave

Hahaha, I have, the target userbase for this article is definitely not people like you and me who have an nth layer understanding of how things operate, but rather for people who're just getting into space

"Noting what you list as your job title, please, for the love of everything holy tidy up the reference to "tunnelling"" - hahaha this made me laugh - love it!

It is simply SSHing, but to make it sound cooler I called it tunnelling 😂

Thanks for the feedback though, I'll update the point