That article pretty much describes every experience I have had with AWS. But worse was when I tried to use the free tier of Oracle Cloud to see what that is all about. Oh my god what a mess. I am not new to a lot of these things. I know how to configure TLS, boot a Linux or BSD box when a hard drive fails, how to set up proper subnets and firewalls, hell I have written network services using raw IP packets that I crafted directly in C. But figuring out how to work the Oracle Cloud UI was beyond me.

It almost feels like if you were not there to see these interfaces in their infancy and didn’t grow up with them then you will not get their current much more complex form.

Back in 2008 I worked for an organization that relied heavily on an IBM mainframe and employed a department of people who managed it and wrote software for it. The divide between those folks and those who grew up on Linux/BSD was so solid that if someone asked me to switch teams I honestly wouldn’t even know where to start learning. This is kind of what this feels like.

To be fair I have successfully deployed multiple things with AWS. But it is always by mostly using things like EC2, Route 53, S3, and sometimes CloudFront. Tried their app engine and container runner and went back to running Docker on a Linux VM as a saner solution.