Can someone with experience tell me a little bit about the dashboard AWS provides to clients and why it would be worth paying for an additional service to manage the cloud?
> Can someone with experience tell me a little bit about the dashboard AWS provides to clients and why it would be worth paying for an additional service to manage the cloud?
It's really, really complicated. That's partly because I don't think Amazon is particularly good at UI, but largely because AWS lets you do so much. They have taken things that have traditionally been sold together and split them all apart (IP addresses, compute, storage). Heck, they even sell elastic network interfaces now! Also, AWS was largely designed to be controlled through APIs (and that's how the heavyweight customers use it), so there's not much incentive to make the UI good.
But most customers don't need that level of control, yet they're using AWS to run their apps anyways, probably because they have the most market recognition. Now they have to deal with the complexity but without reaping the benefits, which is rather unpleasant. Hence the need for additional services to help them manage it all.
I think you make a great point about the AWS brand. I notice a lot of startups using it because everyone else does, not because they have shopped around to find the best fit for their company.
Using the standard/dominant solution is not a bad way of making a choice in a market that is still uncertain and not stable. When there is so much uncertainty, it is not about which cloud provider is going to give me more performance or capacity per dollar, but which one is going to be around a couple of years from now or going to evolve to meet your needs. AWS just keeps churning out new services and functionality while everybody else tends to be stuck on basic starting/stopping/resizing VMs functionality
The AWS dashboard is a great tool if you're a cloud engineer; it's technical but necessarily so.
As the CTO of OpDemand, I can tell you first-hand that users are willing to pay for a simplified and streamlined AWS management process. Our users want a Heroku-like experience, but they don't want to give up control of their underlying infrastructure.
With that in mind, we focus on tight GitHub integration, a sleek UI (backbone.js/socket.io) and providing a toolbar with 5 dead-simple actions: start, stop, deploy, clone and destroy. We charge for our tool because we save AWS users time and money.
