So I’ve had the chance to try the Amazon Web Services today. Nothing fancy, just the CDN (Cloudfront), the Certificate Manager, and the Web Firewall.
I’m basically testing how to accelerate and protect a website using the AWS infrastructure.

The reason that prompted me to write this post is how unfriendly the AWS management site is:

1. A few times I had to redo the creation of some record just because it didn’t show up in the list the first time, even after refreshing the list and the page a couple of times. Eventually I’d end up with duplicates.
2. When creating a service record, there are many options to select, and they’re all listed verbatim on a single page. These options belong to different categories, but they’re all just there in one place. This is annoying because when a single setting needs to be changed one has to go through a long list to find what they’re looking for.
3. The changes take a good amount of time to propagate and take effect (5+ minutes). This, in comparison to Cloudflare, a service that I already use (proudly and happily), is pretty annoying, especially that there aren’t always indicators to show the status of the operation.
4. Some pages had annoying bugs and wouldn’t let me work with them. They just flip to another page as soon as they load.
5. Some pages open to an empty list, even though I’ve just added a service there a few minutes ago. It takes an eagle eye to see that there’s a combo-box at the far corner of the page to select the region, and then the services of that region will appear. It doesn’t default to a region that has services, and it doesn’t keep its last selected value when the page is visited again.
6. The way things are linked together, without proper inline help or documentation is annoying. I’m not a newbie, but I still had to dig around to understand how things work and how different services get linked together.

It is a shame for such a famous service provider to cause me to decide to write a post about my negative experience.

Overall, so far I wouldn’t recommend using AWS. And while I don’t have alternative offerings recommendations, the world-wide-web is wide enough to host many other options. But one thing that I know is that AWS won’t be my first choice.