I started today with the plan of trying Amazon's ECS service for easy container management and orchestration.
Within the first 5 minutes I decided I didn't like it. The Docker Cloud gui "simplifies" the process of orchestration and management but it still at least gave you the option to upload/paste your stack configuration file:
Where as when I go to create a stack on ECS I'm immediately greeted with so many text input boxes:
This really reminds me of the time I tried Amazon's user authentication as a per/use service, called Amazon Cognito.
Don't make the mistake of thinking because EC2 and S3 are good that every service offered by Amazon is quality. I tried setting up this aws-mobile-react-sample which ties together several AWS services:
I did get the app working and it was cool but I just found the settings for Amazon Cognito seemed limiting, and navigating around the GUI to make changes felt like it took forever. Hard to remember everything because its been a few months but here are a few points:
- Found multi-factor authentication hard to configure with email/phone/social as options.
- They had a confirmation email to authenticate users but couldn't find a way to customize the template
- Social login support was bad
I mean don't get me wrong there are a lot of really cool things about Amazon Cognito. The reason it seems so bad is because Firebase Authentication is so much better.
With Firebase everything just worked, I didn't have to go through 10 pages of generic looking input boxes with bad user experience. Definitely would recommend checking out Firebase for free services for apps and websites. The free-tier for small projects is pretty generous as well.
Anyways that is one option I looked at which I'm deciding against. Most likely I'll spend the rest of the day playing around with Docker Swarm.