The Computer/Software/Marketing Help Thread

Anyone in here work in AWS much? I’ve been a Google Cloud nerd for about a decade (fuck) and at this point if I have an idea I can pretty much make anything work in GCP. I’m trying to do something relatively simple in AWS today and I’m about to punch myself to death. It’s infuriatingly complicated for literally no reason. Make things easy FFS.

you feel? man i much prefer AWS cloud over Azure or GCP. i guess it’s what you get used to. what bit is giving you pains or just everything in general?

I just don’t understand why they make you manage so much of the granular shit in your infrastructure. I’m trying to set up an elastic beanstalk service so I can run server-side GTM in AWS. Basically just run a docker container.

Apparently, elastic beanstalk is supposed to be the easiest way to deploy stuff. It claims that it handles all the VPC/Load Balancing/Routing etc for you. But what it really does, is just give you a half-documented terraform resource where only a fraction of the configuration can be done via resource attributes, and then you have to manually set every single setting separately in its own separate settings block. After figuring out what those settings are supposed to look like or if they even exist.

So you have to configure a VPC, your AZs, public and private subnets in each AZ, your EB application, EB Version, EB Environment, the EC2 configuration settings for each environment, environment variables for each environment, your LB health checks, ports protocols etc, the EC2 role, autoscaling min and max etc etc etc anyway.

What’s the point using a declarative IaC tool, you might as well just build it all yourself! haha

Doing this in GCP you just chuck a docker image into cloud run, spin up your ALB and update your DNS and it’s done. Maybe I’ve architected it wrong in AWS (entirely possible), but in GCP you just pick a serverless tool that is compatible as a backend for the ALB and you’re golden.

And it’s got such a stupid name too. Elastic Beanstalk wtf

Sorry I’ve needed to rant about this all day and this has been my first chance lol

Also, it’s totally random whether you need to refer to a resource by it’s ARN or ID or tag or name. PICK ONE

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ah i see what you’re saying. yeah to an extent AWS does give some option-paralysis.

what about fargate -

Yeah I did look at that. I thought I’d follow a guide (written by a digital/tagging person, not a cloud person) that recommended using beanstalk, just because it was the only guide available for my exact use-case. Maybe I should pivot to serverless and figure out how to translate that guide so it works in fargate.

Thanks, I literally have nobody at work to talk to about this apart from Copilot and stackoverflow haha

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stackoverflow is basically how i have done my job for a decade or more :smiley:

Fargate is a way better option if you need to run a docker container.

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Thanks for this, you too @nazoreth!

Managed to get this up and running in Fargate now. Should have done that from the start!

Container works but health checks are failing… I’ve borked my VPC somehow but that should be easy enough to fix.

Fargate is pretty cool. Cloud Run is still the boss though.

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Yeah I think the issue with AWS is that it has almost too many services / options and it’s ever changing on a daily basis. Whenever I want to do anything now I have to Google it and find the most recent results. Glad you sorted it though

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General question to the AWS users here - did you bother with the certs? A couple of ex-colleagues did well via the solution architect cert route before covid hit.

Been using AWS for about 6 years myself and I just haven’t bothered, but I seem to have a bit more free time at the moment so should really. Need to keep myself in employment for what feels like another 20 years :rofl:

i didn’t bother with certs. in a way i wish i had except for what i just said to snurply snurple. it changes SO fast and keeping up with it is almost a full time job in itself. if i had done certs in my last job they’d all be out of date and worthless already. shit if i had done a cert a year ago it’d probably be out of date and worthless now

having said that, i fully recommend tech certification. i did a degree in computer science and if i was a recruiter i would discount those and hire people with specialised certifications every time

AWS has a wide range of training and certification but i’d probably go with a basic one and then go for architect. they’re not hard or massively time consuming

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Yeah my path is Foundation (optional now), Solution Arch then Data Engineer. Then poss ML and Security as per the AWS path, but data science is a poss branch off.

I have my MCSE in data management and analytics (SQL 2016) which was more useful to me personally than my employer and filled in some gaps around areas that I’d not had hands on with in work.

I’m a fucking IT dinosaur these days :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Non-AWS answer, data/ML person. I did a bunch of technical certs early on in my career (azure then Google) and probably tripled my salary over the next 5 years or so. But only through project experience I was able to get from having the certs.

If it were for money reasons I wouldn’t bother doing it now but I still maintain my certs because I’m a consultant and it’s usually required to for tech partnerships.

But I’ll probably do the training for AWS version of the GCP ones I have purely for learning when to use what. Might not bother with the exams though.

Edit - reply meant for @Mike

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For me it is more personal interest and I can’t see myself really changing from being a DBA in the short term, but who knows. When I left Big Bank XYZ 6 years back I was thinking I’d like to do things like migrations from on prem into cloud/hybrid as a contractor, but ended up a permie again - then challenges with my son came along so career took a back seat.

Might just get them for ze shits and ze giggleeessss :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Im trying to make a DVD for my skate vid.

Previously I’ve always used DVD Studio pro but that no longer exists.
FCPX lets you create your own DVDs but from what I’ve seen and tried it looks like I can only create a holding page with a play button.

I want to create a classic DVD screen with menus/extras etc.

Can anyone recommend a way to do this or if you can do it via any of the adobe suite?

Is ChatGPT down for anyone else?

Keep getting a “Hmm…something seems to have gone wrong” error message when I ask it anything today.

First Slap, now this!

(Sorry, I’m waiting for something to run!)

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Adobe discontinued their DVD software about 15 years ago. I pirated a copy a while ago but it was riddled with errors since it didn’t play ball too well with modern Windows. I made a basic DVD with this not long ago, couldn’t do anything fancy but it had enough functionality and I could make custom buttons in photoshop and import them in.

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I logged out and back in and we’re working again now! Nearly had to think for myself for a second there! :sweat_smile:

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