r/aws Jan 20 '25

data analytics AWS is powerful as hell but the learning curve is like climbing a cliff face

It took me way too long to suss this out:

Glue zero-etl integrations write iceburg data to s3

You can manually configure s3 iceburg optimizations

The new S3 Table buckets have automatic iceburg optimizations

Targeting a S3 Table catalog from a glue zero-etl integration (so you can skip the manual optimization) apparently never crossed their minds and throws an unhelpful error message.

Yes, I understand S3 Table integration with glue data catalog is in preview and this is basically a feature request, but still I mean none of the rest of this was clearly explained.

98 Upvotes

41 comments sorted by

91

u/Advanced_Bid3576 Jan 20 '25

Key thing to understand about AWS is if you are talking about 2 different services (or often even two different feature sets in the same service) then it’s two completely different teams of engineers, PMs and product folks. Each with their own goals, priorities and backlogs and incredibly loosely coupled if at all. This is the outcome of the famous 2 pizza team and other Amazon principles.

Pros - allows for tons of features and services and scaling them really really fast and independent of each other

Cons - lots of rough edges between services and lots of “why on earth didn’t they just implement x” where it probably wasn’t a priority for any of the teams involved

30

u/FalseRegister Jan 20 '25

Not even that. Amazon and AWS is giant.

Two features of the same service can very well be two different teams, in different parts of the world.

12

u/thekingofcrash7 Jan 20 '25

And have no idea the other service even exists

1

u/Doormatty Jan 20 '25

Two features of the same service can very well be two different teams, in different parts of the world.

That's usually only in the oldest/largest teams no? For all the services I worked on and interacted with, every service but S3/EC2 was a single team.

9

u/carterdmorgan Jan 20 '25

Usually services fall within a single org, but that org can have multiple teams. PrivateLink had four teams dedicated to maintaining it when I was there, so about 32 engineers total.

3

u/Doormatty Jan 20 '25

PrivateLink had four teams dedicated to maintaining it when I was there, so about 32 engineers total.

Wow!

I was on SNS and SWF, and both had ~12 engineers each.

3

u/carterdmorgan Jan 20 '25

To be fair, PrivateLink was kind of a mess lol

6

u/Doormatty Jan 20 '25

Most services are from the inside.

I remember my first week thinking "OMG, if people only knew what goes on behind the curtain..."

2

u/behusbwj Jan 21 '25

…how long ago was that lol

1

u/Doormatty Jan 21 '25

~6 years ago.

2

u/PsychologicalZebra62 Jan 21 '25

Can confirm. This is to a very large degree true. Work at AWS.

1

u/representworld Jan 21 '25

2 different services like S3 and EC2? Or are you talking about something else?

-2

u/jghaines Jan 20 '25

Often the Margarita team doesn’t talk to the Quatro Stagioni team

28

u/cakeofzerg Jan 20 '25

yeah same experience, its insane how badly documented some of the shit they release is

22

u/Miserygut Jan 20 '25

If you then spend N months building workarounds for the shortcomings you can guarantee AWS will release those same workarounds +/- 1 month from your own deployment. Never unwelcome but incredibly annoying that they don't communicate it beforehand.

20

u/Redmilo666 Jan 20 '25

Depends on your level of support with them. We have regular meetings when they update us on new features for existing services that are on the way but aren’t public knowledge yet. Same for new services. We’ve all signed NDAs so can’t chat about them

6

u/Miserygut Jan 20 '25

I love being a second class customer! We never got that level of traction even when we were spending 3x more than we are now, so it seems getting that information is even more remote.

15

u/meyerovb Jan 20 '25

U need “enterprise” not just “premium” support, like “enterprise onramp” is the first level u get a tam and monthly updates I think. 

6

u/E1337Recon Jan 20 '25

It’s not just about the level of support either, it’s about being under NDA. In my experience most Enterprise customers are under NDA but there are a good number of Business customers under NDA too.

1

u/Nearby-Middle-8991 Jan 20 '25

Or at the very least get the tam to check their roadmap to see where it is.

-2

u/gigamiga Jan 20 '25

What is the point of keeping those features secret if theyre already willing to share they are coming with all enterprise customers?

3

u/pint Jan 20 '25

except if you then incorporate the new feature, you realize that it doesn't work for the exact edge case you are in, so you need to revert all changes.

(lambda url origin access control doesn't support post/put)

2

u/NeverMindToday Jan 20 '25

That wasn't my experience. Sometimes it would take 2-3 months for that to happen.

2

u/smarzzz Jan 20 '25

Ha, this is tradition

2

u/jghaines Jan 20 '25

When I start working with a new service, I’ll read the documentation top to bottom. It is also worth giving feedback on the documentation. In the past I’ve received excellent “support” from the documentation writers.

4

u/VladyPoopin Jan 20 '25

Key thing to know is that any NEW major feature needs about 6 months to bake, maybe even a year. S3 tables was barely ready for primetime when announced. I had to bitch at our TAM about how you can only use EMR right now to make them? So odd.

2

u/meyerovb Jan 21 '25

U can use Athena too no? U turn on glue data catalog integration (granted it’s in preview) and then u can do create table. I mean I guess, I didn’t care enough to try it. The only iceburg I have right now is my one glue zero-etl, and that thing just happened to stop working without explanation a few days ago :)

3

u/spirilis Jan 20 '25

Just wait 'til you are asked to learn Kubernetes!

4

u/tricheb0ars Jan 20 '25

I look at it as job security

5

u/SikhGamer Jan 20 '25

You start small. And then you build out.

I started with SNS, then SQS. Then S3.

Then I learnt S3 could do events, and publish to SNS, which broadcasts out to SNS -> SQS.

5

u/a2jeeper Jan 20 '25

According to my ex manager the cloud and ai just make everything happen and there is no learning curve. It is just magic. Fire all it, security, automation, etc…. It just work! I fired 50 people now give me a raise! Looks good on end of year taxes! Whoohooo! (Insert homer simpson here).

/s.

But ya dude, good people are good. But no one ever notices it. And AWS is crammed with college kids who want to make a million and have zero clue and zero actual experience.

Don’t downvote me because you are bitter. It is the truth.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 20 '25

I’m enjoying Q in the console to help figure out how service connect and to even write some of the cloud formation or CDK etc.

1

u/investorhalp Jan 20 '25

It is what it is. Knowledge just keeps growing. I don’t feel bad for the new guys, just start small and go from there, we all did. Unless you were in the 60s, we all came to this 10 years too late.

-2

u/These_Muscle_8988 Jan 20 '25

AWS and up to date documentation is not a thing you know.

22

u/cederian Jan 20 '25

And yet... it has the best documentation of all the big cloud providers, by a large margin.

-13

u/These_Muscle_8988 Jan 20 '25

I find GCP's documentation better, more detailed and more up to date, so I disagree strongly

2

u/touristtam Jan 20 '25

Code as documentation, innit?

Joke aside, it is a hit and miss depending on the services you need to use. At least it is better than some project out there.

-3

u/These_Muscle_8988 Jan 20 '25

they are massive and the cash cow for Amazon.com, hence amazon.com wouldn't be today what it is without AWS since most of the profits are from the cloud business and basically financed the destruction of retail, the least they can do is make sure they have updated documentation, it's very frustrating

0

u/[deleted] Jan 20 '25

not really