AWS sells an API. Serious users don't use the web console. Need to tend your cluster of 1000+ EC2 servers? The Web console will fail for that. The console fronts the API, just like the CLI tool.
AWS just builds the basic UI's to make it possible for people to do simple things. If you get deep into the weeds, you'll need to use the API directly, i.e. for installing an SSL cert on your CloudFront distribution, or launching a 2K node computing cluster.
If you don't like the UI, make your own and sell it to people. That has become a viable business model for various startups, or launch your own hosting company on top of EC2 like Heroku.
Why? I'm amazed people expect a light and airy, responsive, material designed enterprise control panel that is redesigned yearly. These are backend tools. The UI works and was (1) not meant to be sexy and (2) not meant to push sales.
AWS is in a race to the bottom, cutting prices all the time. Hiring 50 UX devs to rewrite their web interfaces doesn't comport with Jeff's lean vision.
The initial impression of a new AWS console is pretty overwhelming. I've stuck with DigitalOcean and CloudFlare over Amazon alternatives partly because every time I sign into AWS all I can think is "Heck. Which of these product names and acronyms matches the thing I came here to do?"
I will fully admit that when I started using AWS, it took me a while to learn Amazon's "language." Unfortunately Amazon does a bad job of distinguishing between their core offerings (e.g. S3, EC2, Route53, etc) and their very niche ones (e.g. EMR, Kinesis, SWF, etc), so new users are left scrambling to figure out what they need to know.
I understand their desire to create unique "products" that people can use in a conversation (e.g. "Have you considered Route53 for your DNS?"), but ultimately mixing common and niche things together and giving everything confusing names is likely doing Amazon more harm than good.
That all being said, Amazon are slowly improving. See this page[0]. They now have a list of their products and how they fit into different categories. But the console can still be a jumbled mess of different acronyms and made up words.
This is why I REALLY like the MS/Azure way of doing things.
"I need to host a web app" "Okay there's Azure Web Apps for that"
"I need to store lots of files" "There's Azure Storage/Blob Storage for that"
"I need a SQL Database" "There's Azure SQL for that"
"I need a VM" "There's Azure Virtual Machines for that"
"I need a Data Lake" "There's Azure Data Lake for that"
"I need a Data Lake" "There's Azure Data Lake for that"
"I need a Data Warehouse" "There's Azure Data Warehouse for that"
"I need a Cache" "There's Azure Redis Cache for that"
I could go on, but you get the picture. Cute names are not the way to go when you're offering dozens of services which may overlap with eachother somewhat. I can just scroll down a list of things MS offers on Azure and be able to easily pick out the things I need to use by their names alone.
"A massive, easily accessible data repository built on (relatively) inexpensive computer hardware for storing "big data". Unlike data marts, which are optimized for data analysis by storing only some attributes and dropping data below the level aggregation, a data lake is designed to retain all attributes, especially so when you do not yet know what the scope of data or its use will be."
The intended use is to be able to use things like Hadoop or other tabular text processing systems to glean information from enormous amounts of data, then once valuable insights are found, use the Data Lake source to process it into a form suitable for a data mart, or preferably, a data warehouse.
Do you really find the AWS console usable? I was shocked the first time I logged into that thing, I said to myself, "what the hell is that?". AWS is certainly one of the most complicated app available online, and i'm sure it is maintained by a lot of different teams but a serious designer didn't do the UX/UI. It feels SO clunky.
> Not that it matters, but I think they use GWT.
the problem is I think it's much more difficult to iterate with this kind of abstractions.
Netflix has long had bits of horrid UX. They just finally replaced the agggggggonizingly slow scroll left/right as you're browsing through the suggested content carousels.
An internal tool like Asgard doesn't have the same need a customer-facing tool like the AWS Console does to be user-friendly, either.
This used to be the case - new features usually launched API-only and console came later - but I think Amazon has woken up to the fact that many customers want to play with it easily before they go automating everything using the API.
Pretty app - Ehh, I could add this new feature but it would make my menu go off screen, maybe I will skip it and work on making the profile icon sparkle.
Function ugly app - Ehhh I could research better fonts, but sans serif will work - let's go code some new featues.
I agree it doesn't look great, but I assure you they have A/B tested the shit out of every page they have ever rendered. Aesthetics aside, I am sure there is a justifible reason they do everything in their UIs.
